For it was as wavy and golden,
And as many changes took,
As the shadows of sun-gilt ripples
On the yellow bed of a brook.

To what can I liken her smiling
Upon me, her kneeling lover,

How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids,
And dimpled her wholly over,

Till her outstretched hands smiled also,

And I almost seemed to see

The very heart of her mother

Sending sun through her veins to me!

She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth, And it hardly seemed a day,

When a troop of wandering angels

Stole my little daughter away; Or perhaps those heavenly Zincali

But loosed the hampering strings, And when they had opened her cage-door, My little bird used her wings.

But they left in her stead a changeling,

A little angel child,

That seems like her bud in full blossom,
And smiles as she never smiled:

When I wake in the morning, I see it
Where she always used to lie,

And I feel as weak as a violet
Alone 'neath the awful sky;

As weak, yet as trustful also;
For the whole year long I see

All the wonders of faithful Nature
Still worked for the love of me;

Winds wander, and dews drip earthward,
Rain falls, suns rise and set,

Earth whirls, and all but to prosper

A poor little violet.

This child is not mine as the first was,

I cannot sing it to rest,

I cannot lift it up fatherly

And bliss it upon my breast;

Yet it lies in my little one's cradle
And sits in my little one's chair,

And the light of the heaven she 's gone to
Transfigures its golden hair.

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE.

WHAT visionary tints the year puts on,
When falling leaves falter through motionless air
Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone!
How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,

As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills

The bowl between me and those distant hills,

And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

No more the landscape holds its wealth apart,

Making me poorer in my poverty,

But mingles with my senses and my heart;

My own projected spirit seems to me

In her own reverie the world to steep;

"T is she that waves to sympathetic sleep, Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill and trec.

How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees,
Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms,
Each into each, the hazy distances!

The softened season all the landscape charms;
Those hills, my native village that embay,

In waves of dreamier purple roll

away,

And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms.

Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee

Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves;

The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye

Of Boaz as the maiden's glow went by,

So tremble and seem remote all things the sense re

ceives.

The cock's shrill trump, that tells of scattered corn, Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates,