SHE CAME AND WENT.

As a twig trembles, which a bird
Lights on to sing, then leaves unbent,
So is my memory thrilled and stirred ;-
I only know she came and went.

As clasps some lake, by gusts unriven,
The blue dome's measureless content,
So my soul held that moment's heaven ;—
I only know she came and went.

As, at one bound, our swift spring heaps
The orchards full of bloom and scent,
So clove her May my wintry sleeps;-
I only know she came and went.

An angel stood and met my gaze,
Through the low doorway of my tent;
The tent is struck, the vision stays;—
I only know she came and went.

O, when the room grows slowly dim,
And life's last oil is nearly spent,
One gush of light these eyes will brim,
Only to think she came and went.

THE CHANGELING.

I HAD a little daughter,
And she was given to me
To lead me gently backward
To the Heavenly Father's knee,
That I, by the force of nature,
Might in some dim wise divine
The depth of his infinite patience
To this wayward soul of mine.

I know not how others saw her,
But to me she was wholly fair,

And the light of the heaven she came from
Still lingered and gleamed in her hair;
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 Zingari
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.

THE PIONEER.

WHAT man would live coffined with brick and stone,

Imprisoned from the influences of air,

And cramped with selfish land-marks everywhere,

When all before him stretches, furrowless and lone, The unmapped prairie none can fence or own?

What man would read and read the selfsame faces,

And, like the marbles which the windmill grinds,

Rub smooth forever with the same smooth

minds,

This year retracing last year's, every year's, dull

traces,

When there are woods and un-man-stifled

places?

What man o'er one old thought would pore and

pore,

Shut like a book between its covers thin For every fool to leave his dog's-ears in, When solitude is his, and God for evermore, Just for the opening of a paltry door?

What man would watch life's oozy element
Creep Letheward forever, when he might
Down some great river drift beyond men's
sight,

To where the undethroned forest's royal tent
Broods with its hush o'er half a continent?

What man with men would push and altercate, Piecing out crooked means for crooked ends, When he can have the skies and woods for friends,

Snatch back the rudder of his undismantled fate, And in himself be ruler, church, and state?

Cast leaves and feathers rot in last year's nest, The winged brood, flown thence, new dwellings plan;

The serf of his own Past is not a man ;

To change and change is life, to move and never rest;

Not what we are, but what we hope, is best.

The wild, free woods make no man halt or blind;

Cities rob men of eyes and hands and feet, Patching one whole of many incomplete; The general preys upon the individual mind, And each alone is helpless as the wind.

Each man is some man's servant; every soul
Is by some other's presence quite discrowned;
Each owes the next through all the imperfect
round,

Yet not with mutual help; each man is his own goal,

And the whole earth must stop to pay his toll.

Here, life the undiminished man demands;

New faculties stretch out to meet new wants;

What Nature asks, that Nature also grants; Here man is lord, not drudge, of eyes and feet and

hands,

And to his life is knit with hourly bands.