To hear the words her lover spoke, and pledged me there her troth;

And true is the word of New England.

When September brought the golden-rod, and maples burned like fire,

And bluer than in August rose the village smoke and higher,

And large and red among the stacks the ripened pumpkins shone,

One hour, in which to say farewell, was left to us alone;

And sweet are the lanes of New England.

We loved each other truly! hard, hard it was to part;

But my ring was on her finger, and her hair lay next my heart.

'Tis but a year, my darling," I said; "in one short year,

When our western home is ready, I shall seek my Katie here;"

And brave is the hope of New England.

I went to gain a home for her, and in the Golden State

With head and hand I planned and toiled, and early worked and late;

But luck was all against me, and sickness on me lay,

And ere I got my strength again 't was many a weary day;

And long are the thoughts of New England. And many a day, and many a month, and thrice the rolling year,

I bravely strove, and still the goal seemed never yet more near.

My Katie's letters told me that she kept her promise true,

But now, for very hopelessness, my own to her were few;

And stern is the pride of New England.

But still she trusted in me, though sick with hope deferred;

No more among the village choir her voice was sweetest heard;

For when the wild northeaster of the fourth long winter blew,

So thin her frame with pining, the cold wind pierced her through;

And chill are the blasts of New England.

At last my fortunes bettered, on the far Pacific shore,

And I thought to see old Windham and my patient love once more;

When a kinsman's letter reached me: "Come at

boyhood's home,

And the old cliffs seemed to mock me that I had

not sooner come;

And gray are the rocks of New England.

I could not think 't was Katie, who sat before me there, Reading her Bible

in her chair.

't was my gift and pillowed

A ring, with all my letters, lay on a little stand, She could no longer wear it, so frail her poor, white hand!

But strong is the love of New England.

Her hair had lost its tangle and was parted off her brow;

She used to be a joyous girl, but seemed an angel now,

Heaven's darling, mine no longer; yet in her hazel eyes

The same dear love-light glistened, as she soothed my bitter cries;

And pure is the faith of New England.

A month I watched her dying, pale, pale as any

rose

That drops its petals one by one and sweetens as it goes.

My life was darkened when at last her large eyes closed in death,

And I heard my own name whispered as she drew. her parting breath;

Still, still was the heart of New England.

It was a woful funeral the coming Sabbath-day; We bore her to the barren hill on which the graveyard lay;

And when the narrow grave was filled, and what we might was done,

Of all the stricken group around I was the loneliest one;

And drear are the hills of New England.

I gazed upon the stunted pines, the bleak November sky,

And knew that buried deep with her my heart henceforth would lie;

And waking in the solemn nights my thoughts still thither go

To Katie, lying in her grave beneath the winter

snow;

And cold are the snows of New England.

**THE DOORSTEP.

The conference-meeting through at last,
We boys around the vestry waited
To see the girls come tripping past

Like snow-birds willing to be mated.
Not braver he that leaps the wall
By level musket-flashes litten,
Than I, who stepped before them all
Who longed to see me get the mitten.
But no, she blushed and took my arm!
We let the old folks have the highway,
And started toward the Maple Farm
Along a kind of lovers' by-way.

I can't remember what we said,
'Twas nothing worth a song or story;
Yet that rude path by which we sped
Seemed all transformed and in a glory.
The snow was crisp beneath our feet,
The moon was full, the fields were gleaming;

By hood and tippet sheltered sweet,

Her face with youth and health was beaming.

The little hand outside her muff,

O sculptor, if you could but mould it!

So lightly touched my jacket-cuff,

To keep it warm I had to hold it.

To have her with me there alone,

'T was love and fear and triumph blended. At last we reached the foot-worn stone Where that delicious journey ended. The old folks, too, were almost home;

Her dimpled hand the latches fingered, We heard the voices nearer come,

Yet on the doorstep still we lingered.

She shook her ringlets from her hood
And with a Thank you, Ned," dissembled,
But yet I knew she understood

With what a daring wish I trembled.

A cloud passed kindly overhead,

The moon was slyly peeping through it, Yet hid its face, as if it said,

Come, now or never! do it! do it!"

My lips till then had only known

The kiss of mother and of sister, But somehow, full upon her own

Sweet, rosy, darling mouth, — I kissed her!
Perhaps 't was boyish love, yet still,-
O listless woman, weary lover!-

To feel once more that fresh, wild thrill
I'd give, but who can live youth over?

**THE DUKE'S EXEQUY.
Arras, A.D. 1404.

Clothed in sable, crowned with gold,
All his wars and councils ended,
Philip lay, surnamed the Bold:
Passing-bell his quittance tolled,
And the chant of priests ascended.

Mailéd knights and archers stand, Thronging in the church of Arras; Nevermore at his command

Shall they scour the Netherland, Nevermore the outlaws harass;

Naught is left of his array Save a barren territory;

Forty years of generous sway Sped his princely hoards away, Bartered all his gold for glory.

Forth steps Flemish Margaret then, Striding toward the silent ashes;

And the eyes of arméd men
Fill with startled wonder, when
On the bier her girdle clashes!

Swift she drew it from her waist,
And the purse and keys it carried
On the ducal coffin placed;
Then with proud demeanor faced
Sword and shield of him she married.

"No encumbrance of the dead Must the living clog forever;

From thy debts and dues," she said, "From the liens of thy bed, We this day our line dissever.

"From thy hand we gain release, Know all present by this token!

Let the dead repose in peace,

Let the claims upon us cease

When the ties that bound are broken.

“Philip, we have loved thee long, But, in years of future splendor, Burgundy shall count among Bravest deeds of tale and song This, our widowhood's surrender." Back the stately Duchess turned, While the priests and friars chanted, And the swinging incense burned: Thus by feudal rite was earned Greatness for a race undaunted.

** WHAT THE WINDS BRING.

Which is the Wind that brings the cold?
The North Wind, Freddy, and all the snow;
And the sheep will scamper into the fold
When the North begins to blow.

Which is the Wind that brings the heat?

The South Wind, Katy; and corn will grow, And peaches redden for you to eat,

When the South begins to blow.
Which is the Wind that brings the rain?

The East Wind, Arty; and farmers know
That cows come shivering up the lane
When the East begins to blow.

Which is the Wind that brings the flowers?
The West Wind, Bessy; and soft and low
The birdies sing in the summer hours
When the West begins to blow.

THE author of one of the most valuable contributions to political philosophy made in this generation, is a native and resident of Montrose, Pennsylvania. He was born November 19, 1833. His father, Silvanus Sandford Mulford, is a descendant of William Mulford, who emigrated from England to Southampton, Long Island, in 1643.

Elisha received his preparatory education at Cortland Academy in Homer, New York, and entered Yale College, from which he was graduated in 1855. The year following he gave to the study of the law, in the office of his uncle, Hon. William Jessup. He then became

a student of theology in New York and at Andover, and his education was continued in Germany, at Berlin and Heidelberg. This broad culture gave him a comprehensive view of politics and philosophy, and grounded his thoughts in the Catholic theology of the church.

In 1870, he published The Nation: the Foundations of Civil Order and Political Life in the United States. A "Students' Edition" appeared two years later. This work has been described by the Boston Advertiser as "not unworthy to be named with the Politics, The Republic, the Philosophic des Rechts, and the Spirit of Laws." Mr. J. Eliot Cabot, in Old and New, has also justly represented it as corresponding in the main with the idea of Aristotle and Hegel, but "a more adequate representation than before of the meaning and functions of the State."

Mr. Mulford received in 1872 the degree of LL. D., from Yale College. In the winter of the same year, he gave a course of lectures on "The Relations of Politics and Jurisprudence," before the Law School of Columbia College.

** GEORGE ARNOLD,

A NATIVE and journalist of New York city, was born June 24, 1834, and died at the age of thirty-one, at Strawberry Farms, in Monmouth county, New Jersey, November 9, 1865, His parents removed to Alton, in Illinois, when he was three years old, and there he lived twelve years. He never attended school, but was educated at home by his parents. The latter settled at Strawberry Farms in 1849, and there the young poet was brought in contact with the reformatory doctrines of the Fourierites, with which, however, he manifested little practical sympathy. At the age of eighteen, he began to study the art of painting; but he soon abandoned the pursuit as not the fittest for him, and became an excellent art-critic.

His literary career," states his friend and biographer, Mr. William Winter, "extended over a period of about twelve years. In the course of that time he wrote, with equal fluency and versatility, stories, sketches, essays, poems, comic and satirical verses, criticisms of books and of pictures, editorial articles, jokes, and pointed paragraphs, everything, in short, for which there is a demand in the literary magazines of the country, and in New York journalism." He contributed a series of "McArone papers" to Vanity Fair and other journals,

from 1860 to 1865.

Two posthumous volumes of his poems were edited by Mr. Winter: Drift: a Sea-Shore Idyl, and Other Poems, 1866; and Poems, Grave and Gay, 1867. These pieces are marked by a simplicity of thought and treatment, and reveal a spirit keenly sympathetic to an ideal beauty and refinement, such as Drift, My Love, Cui Bono? The Golden Fish, Jubilate, In the Dark, and an Autobiography

***DRIFT; A SEA-SHORE IDYL,

I.

I wearied once of inland fields and hills,

Of low-lying meadows and of sluggish streams,

Creeping beneath the trees that summer-heats
Had parched to dusty dryness; and a dream
Of fresh, cool breezes and of salty waves,
Of azure skies o'erarching azure seas,
Of tangled seaweed from unfathomed deeps,
Came over me: and so I left the hills,
To sojourn through the riper summer months,
Upon the shore.
So near the breakers that their misty foam
There, in a lonely house,
So near the breakers that their misty foam
Whitely enwrapped it when the storm raged high,
Yet not all idly: when the morn was fair,
I let my summer-days pass idly by.
And soft winds bore strange odors from the sea
Through open casements, oftentimes I wrote—
Weaving brief rhymes, disjointed, and, perhaps,
Too simple for the lovers of great poems.

A ship went sailing from the shore,
And vanished in the gleaming west,
Where purple clouds a lining bore
Of gold and amethyst.

Poised in the air, a sea-gull flashed

His white wings in the sun's last ray;
A moment hung, then downward dashed,
To revel in the spray.

The fishers drew their long nets in
With careful eye and steady hand,
Till olive back and silvery fin

Strewed all the tawny sand.
Again I trod the shore; again

The sea-gull circled high in air;
Again the sturdy fishermen

Drew in their nets with care.
The sunset's gold and amethyst
Shone fairly, as I paced the shore,
But back from out the gleaming west
The ship came nevermore!

II.

After the first days, goodly company
Came to the lonely house beside the sea :
Bright eyes and tresses, voices of young girls,
Made joy within those somewhat mouldy halls;
And a piano, that had long stood mute
In the old parlor, on the landward side,
Grew musical and merry to the touch
Of jewelled fingers.

And thus our time

What rare days were those,
When my chief duty was to write a song,
Grew weary of my last!
As often as the brown-eyed Marian
Passed, smoothly as a river-current flows.
Music and reading, strolling on the beach,
Gathering colored pebble-stones and sbells,
And sea-weed from the rocks beyond the bar,
Were all our pastime.

A flood of sunlight through a rift
Between two mounds of yellow sand;
Three sea-gulls on a bit of drift
Slow surging inward toward the land;
An old dumb beacon, all awry,
With drabbled sea-weed round its feet;
A star-like sail against the sky,
Where sapphire heaven and ocean meet
This, with the waters swirling o'er

A shifting stretch of sand and shell,
Will make, for him who loves the shore,
A picture that may please him well.

III.

Ere the sun went down

We mostly loved to linger by the sea,
Where, seated on some wave-worn slab of stone,
We watched the furrowed waves that rose and fell,
Chasing each other down the beaten strand;
But when the shadows lengthened toward the east,
And the red glory of the sunset shone
Upon the light-house, and the fading sails,
The yellow sand-hills with their sickly grass
And inland-leaning cedars, we returned
To the old parlor; and, as dusk came on,
Sang to each other till the moon rode high.

The light-house keeper's daughter,-
Her hair is golden as the sand;
Her eyes are blue as summer-seas
That melt into the land.

Her brow and neck are whiter
Than sea-foam flying on the wind,
Her mouth is rosy as the shells
That strew the coast of Ind.
The winds caress her ringlets

That down her neck in clusters stray,
And frothy waves flow tenderly
About her feet in play.

I love this simple maiden,

She grows upon me more and more,
And

ask the moon who 't was that kissed, Last night, upon the shore!

Of marvels told by ancient mariners,

The Maelstrom, and the heaven-dropped waterspouts,

Or sadder tales, of wrecks far out at sea,
Of missing vessels, and of sailors drowned.

The river down to the ocean flows

By reedy flats and marshes bare;
And the leafless poplars stand in rows

Like ghostly sentinels watching there.
An osprey sails, with wings spread wide,
Down-slanting from his even flight,
To a sedgy spot, where the falling tide
Has left some kind of drift in sight.
A blackened mass, by the tide left bare,
In the tangled weeds and the slimy mud.
The osprey shrieks as he settles there,
And a deathly horror chills my blood!

V.

So passed the summer, and we had our fill
Of lotos-eating by the ocean side;

We came to know and love each pleasant spot
About the place; the sheltered nooks where grew
Dwarfed flowers, whose downy seeds had come,
mayhap,

Upon the wings of Autumn's winds upborne,

A thousand miles, to drop, and germinate,
In the dry sand; to grow, and blow, and bloom,
And then to wither't were a happy fate-
In brown-eyed Marian's bosom. And we knew
Each craggy rock that overhung the sea,
Whence we could gaze far out across the waste
Of heaving waters, dotted here and there
With sails that shone and glimmered in the sun,
Like planets in a mellow evening sky.
Sometimes we went adventurously forth
When northeast tempests raged along the coast,
Flinging the white foam upward in great sheets,
Like hungry monsters rushing from the deep
To swallow up the land.

Then, bits of wrecks,
Odd timbers spiked with rusty iron bolts,
Fragments of masts, and empty water-casks,-
Sad débris of the storm, came up next day,
Drifting ashore on smooth, unbroken swells.

Oh, cool, green waves that ebb and flow,
Reflecting calm, blue skies above,
How gently now ye come and go,
Since ye have drowned my love!
Ye lap the shore of beaten sand,

With cool, salt ripples circling by;
But from your depths a ghostly hand
Points upward to the sky.

O waves! strew corals white and red,
With shells and strange weeds from tne

deep,

To make a rare and regal bed
Whereon my love may sleep:

May sleep, and, sleeping, dream of me,
In dreams that lovers find so sweet;
And I will couch me by the sea,
That we in dreams may meet.

VI.

But, while the pleasant season lasted still,
My friends deserted me for other scenes,
Leaving me lonely in the lonely house,
Alone I sang the plaintive little songs,
With memory's ghosts to bear me company.
That brown-eyed Marian had sung with me:
Alone I trod the path along the shore,
Where we so often had together strolled:
Alone I watched the moonrise, from the rocks
Where Marian had erstwhile walked with me,
To let the salt breeze, freshening with the night,
Play in her ringlets, and bring up the bloom.
Of rose and lily to her cheek.

Alas!

If I should tell the whole of what I felt,
In waking these dear memories of the past,
This simple idyl would be lengthened out
Into a history of two hearts, that met-
That met and parted!

Ah! the theme is old,
And worn quite threadbare, not alone in books,
But in the hearts of men and maids as well.
But then, all stories that are true are old.

The breakers come and the breakers go, Along the silvery sand,

With a changing line of feathery snow, Between the water and land.

Sea-weeds gleam in the sunset light,
On the ledges of wave-worn stone;
Orange and crimson, purple and white,
In regular windrows strewn.

All moveless stand the ancient cedar-trees

Along the drifted sand-hills where they grow; And from the dark west comes a wandering breeze, And waves them to and fro.

A murky darkness lies along the sand,
Where bright the sunbeams of the morning
shone;

And the eye vainly seeks by sea and land,
Some light to rest upon.

No large, pale star its glimmering vigil keeps;
An inky sea reflects an inky sky;
And the dark river, like a serpent, creeps
To where its black piers lie.

Strange, salty odors through the darkness steal,
And through the dark the ocean-thunders roll.
Thick darkness gathers, stifling, till I feel
Its weight upon my soul!

I stretch my hands out in the empty air;
I strain my eyes into the heavy night;

in book-form in 1869. The same magazine also contained The House that John Built, a story of adventure for boys. Another set of giant and pigmy adventurers also appeared in Hearth and Home. To the Southern Literary Messenger he contributed several novelettes, besides a number of humorous sketches to Punchinello and like journals. His stories are direct and clear in method and style, while their humor is quiet, picturesque, and quaint. His latest work is Round-About Rambles, an illustrated book of sketches for the young folks.

** LUCY HAMILTON HOOPER,

A LADY of culture, and the author of several volumes of Poems, is a native of Philadelphia, and the only child of the late B. Muse Jones, a well-known merchant of that city. She was married to Mr. Robert M. Hooper in 1854. Her fugitive verses were first collected into a volume in 1864, entitled: Poems: with Translations from the German of Geibel and Others. She gave the first hundred copies of that edition to the Great Central Fair in Philadelphia for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission, at which she was chairman of the Ladies' Committee on Booksellers and Publishers. In conjunction with Mr. Charles G. Leland, she also edited Our Daily Fare, the daily chronicle of the Fair.

Mrs. Hooper was for two years assistant editor of Lippincott's Magazine. She is a constant contributor to it, as well as to the Galaxy, and other leading periodicals. A second and complete volume of her Poems was published by the Messrs. Lippincott in 1871. It contains some eighty pieces, a third of which are spirited translations, chiefly from the German of Geibel, and including The Fisher, and The King of Thulé, from Goethe, Thekla by Schiller, with several from Victor Hugo-his Lines written in a copy of the Divina Cominedia, A Legend of the Centuries, etc. Among the favorites of the original poems are, Princess and Page, the Duel, On an Old Portrait, Gretchen, Autumnal Lyrics, the King's Ride, Miserrimus, and Too