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I checked him while he spoke, yet could he speak,

Alas! I would not check.

For reasons not to love him once I sought,

And wearied all my thought

To vex myself and him; I now would give
My love, could he but live

Who lately lived for me, and, when he found
"Twas vain, in holy ground

He hid his face amid the shades of death!
I waste for him my breath

Who wasted his for me; but mine returns,
And this lone bosom burns

With stifling heat, heaving it up in sleep,

And waking me to weep

Tears that had melted his soft heart; for years

Wept he as bitter tears!

"Merciful God!" such was his latest prayer,

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I BADE thee stay. Too well I know
The fault was mine, mine only:

I dared not think upon the past,
All desolate and lonely.

I feared in memory's silent air
Too sadly to regret thee,
Feared in the night of my despair
I could not all forget thee.

Yet go, ah, go! Those pleading eyes, Those low, sweet tones, appealing From heart to heart; ah, dare I trust That passionate revealing?

For ah, those keen and pleading eyes
Evoke too keen a sorrow,

A pang that will not pass away
With thy wild vows to-morrow.

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A long half-hour in the twilight leaves

Of the shrubbery: she, with coquettish face,
And dainty arms in their flowing sleeves,
A dream of satins and love and lace.
In the splendor there of her queenly smile,

And I kept the glove so dainty and small,
That I stole as she sipped her lemonade,
Till I packed it away I think with all

Of those traps I lost in our Northern raid.

But I never can list to that waltz divine,

With its golden measure of joy and pain,
But it brings like the flavor of some old wine
To my heart the warmth of the past again.
A short flirtation- that's all, you know,

Some faded flowers, a silken tress,
The letters I burned up years ago,

295

When I heard from her last in the Wilderness.

I suppose, could she see I am maimed and old,
She would soften the scorn that was changed
to hate,

When I chose the bars of the gray and gold,
And followed the South to its bitter fate.
But here's to the lads of the Northern blue,
And here's to the boys of the Southern gray,
And I would that the Northern star but knew
How the Southern cross is borne to-day.

Song.

L. C. STRONG.

I WENT to her who loveth me no more,

And prayed her bear with me, if so she might; For I had found day after day too sore,

And tears that would not cease night after night.

Through her two bright eyes I could see the glow And so I prayed her, weeping, that she bore

Of cathedral windows, as up the aisle
We marched to a music's ebb and flow.

All in a dream of Commencement eve!
I remember I awkwardly buttoned a glove
On the dainty arm in its flowing sleeve,

With a broken sentence of hope and love.
But the diamonds that flashed in her wavy hair,
And the beauty that shone in her faultless face,
Are all I recall as I struggled there,

A poor brown fly in a web of lace.

Yet a laughing, coquettish face I see,

As the moonlight falls on the pavement gray,

I can hear her laugh in the melody

Of the waltz's music across the way.

To let me be with her a little; yea,

To soothe myself a little with her sight,
Who loved me once, ah! many a night and day.

Then she who loveth me no more, maybe
She pitied somewhat: and I took a chain
To bind myself to her, and her to me;

Yea, so that I might call her mine again.
Lo! she forbade me not; but I and she
Fettered her fair limbs, and her neck more fair,
Chained the fair wasted white of love's domain,
And put gold fetters on her golden hair.

Oh! the vain joy it is to see her lie

Beside me once again; beyond release,
Her hair, her hand, her body, till she die,

All mine, for me to do with as I please!

For, after all, I find no chain whereby
To chain her heart to love me as before,
Nor fetter for her lips, to make them cease
From saying still she loveth me no more.
ARTHUR W. E. O'SHAUGHNESSY.

The Dream.

I.

OUR life is twofold: sleep hath its own world-
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality;

And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts;
They take a weight from off our waking toils;
They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;

Was crowned with a peculiar diadem
Of trees, in circular array-so fixed,
Not by the sport of nature, but of man.
These two, a maiden and a youth, were there
Gazing - the one on all that was beneath;
Fair as herself-but the boy gazed on her;
And both were young, and one was beautiful;
And both were young-yet not alike in youth.
As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge,
The maid was on the eve of womanhood;
The boy had fewer summers; but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him; he had looked
Upon it till it could not pass away;

He had no breath, no being, but in hers;
She was his voice; he did not speak to her,
But trembled on her words; she was his sight,
For his eye followed hers, and saw with hers,
Which colored all his objects; he had ceased
To live within himself; she was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all; upon a tone,

They pass like spirits of the past, they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
They make us what we were not-what they Unknowing of its cause of agony.

A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously, his heart

will;

They shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows. Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? What are they?
Creations of the mind?-the mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision, which I dreamed
Perchance in sleep; for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.

II.

I saw two beings in the hues of youth
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green and of mild declivity; the last,
As 'twere the cape, of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape, and the wave
Of woods and cornfields, and the abodes of men
Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke
Arising from such rustic roofs; the hill

But she in these fond feelings had no share:
Her sighs were not for him; to her he was
Even as a brother, but no more; 'twas much;
For brotherless she was, save in the name
Her infant friendship had bestowed on him,
Herself the solitary scion left

Of a time-honored race. It was a name
Which pleased him, and yet pleased him not—and
why?

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