YOUTH, DAY, OLD AGE, AND NIGHT.

Youth, large, lusty, loving-youth full of grace, force, fascination,

Do you know that Old Age may come after you with equal grace, force, fascination?

Day, full-blown and splendid-day of the immense sunaction, ambition, laughter,

The Night follows close with millions of suns, and sleep, and restoring darkness.

DAREST THOU NOW, O SOUL?

Darest thou now, O soul,

Walk out with me toward the unknown region, Where neither ground is for the feet nor any path to follow?

No map there, nor guide,

Nor voice sounding, nor touch of human hand,

Nor face with blooming flesh, nor lips nor eyes are in that land.

I know it not, O soul,

Nor dost thou-all is a blank before us,

All waits undream'd of in that region, that inaccessible land.

Till when the ties loosen,

All but the ties eternal, Time and Space,

Nor darkness, gravitation, sense, nor any bounds bound

ing us.

Then we burst forth, we float,

In Time and Space, O soul, prepared for them,

Equal, equipt at last (O joy! O fruit of all!) them to fulfil, O soul.

WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH.

Whispers of heavenly death murmur'd I hear,
Labial gossip of night, sibilant chorals,

Footsteps gently ascending, mystical breezes wafted soft and low,

Ripples of unseen rivers, tides of a current flowing, forever flowing,

(Or is it the plashing of tears? the measureless waters of human tears?)

I see, just see skyward, great cloud-masses.

Mournfully, slowly they roll, silently swelling and mixing,

With at times a half-dimm'd, sadden'd, far-off star
Appearing and disappearing.

(Some parturition, rather, some solemn, immortal birth ;
On the frontiers, to eyes impenetrable,
Some soul is passing over.)

TO THE MAN-OF-WAR BIRD.

Thou who hast slept all night upon the storm,
Waking renew'd on thy prodigious pinions.
(Burst the wild storm? above it thou ascended'st,
And rested on the sky, thy slave that cradled thee).
Now a blue point, far, far in heaven floating,

As to the light emerging here on deck I watch thee
(Myself a speck, a point on the world's floating vast).
Far, far at sea,

After the night's fierce drifts have strewn the shore with wrecks,

With reappearing day as now so happy and serene,
The rosy and elastic dawn, the flashing sun,

The limpid spread of air cerulean,

Thou also reappearest.

Thou born to match the gale (thou art all wings),

To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane, Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails,

Days, even weeks, untired and onward, through space's realms gyrating,

At dusk that look'st on Senegal, at morn America,

That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder

cloud,

In them, in thy experiences, hadst thou my soul,
What joys! what joys were thine!

TO THOSE WHO'VE FAIL'D.

To those who've fail'd, in aspiration vast,

To unnam'd soldiers fallen in front on the lead, To calm, devoted engineers-to over-ardent travellers -to pilots on their ships,

To many a lofty song and picture without recognition -I'd rear a laurel-covered monument,

High, high above the rest-to all cut off before their time,

Possess'd by some strange spirit of fire,
Quench'd by an early death.

DIRGE FOR ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

O captain! my captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weathered every rock, the prize we sought

is won.

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exult

ing,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and

daring;

But O heart! heart! heart!

Leave you not the little spot,

Where on the deck my captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

O captain! my captain! rise up and hear the bells; Rise up for you the flag is flung-for you the bugle trills;

For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths-for you the shore a-crowding;

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

O captain! dear father!

This arm I push beneath you;

It is some dream that on the deck

You've fallen cold and dead.

My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still; My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor

But the ship, the ship is anchored safe, its voyage closed and done;

From fearful trip, the victor ship comes in with object

won.

Exult, O shore, and ring, O bells!

But I, with silent tread,

Walk the spot my captain lies,

Fallen cold and dead.

JOY, SHIPMATE, JOY!

Joy, shipmate, joy!

(Pleas'd to my soul at length I cry),
Our life is closed, our life begins,
The long, long anchorage we leave,
The ship is clear at last, she leaps!
She swiftly courses from the shore,
Joy, shipmate, joy!

HEROIC DEATHS.

The final use of the greatest men of a Nation is, after all, not with reference to their deeds in themselves, or their direct bearing on their times or lands. The final use of a heroic-eminent life-especially of a heroiceminent death-is its indirect filtering into the nation and the race, and to give, often at many removes, but unerringly, age after age, color and fibre to the personalism of the youth and maturity of that age, and of mankind. Then there is a cement to the whole people, subtler, more underlying than anything in written. constitution, or courts or armies-namely, the cement of a death identified thoroughly with that people, at its head, and for its sake. Strange, (is it not?) that battles, martyrs, agonies, blood, even assassination, should so condense-perhaps only really, lastingly condensea Nationality.

I repeat it-the grand deaths of the race--the dramatic deaths of every nationality-are its most important inheritance value-in some respects beyond its literature and art-(as the hero is beyond his finest portrait, and the battle itself beyond its choicest song or epic).-The Death of Abraham Lincoln.

WHITNEY, ADELINE DUTTON TRAIN, an American novelist, born in Boston, Mass., September 15, 1824. After receiving her education in Boston, she was married to Seth D. Whitney in 1843. She has contributed to magazines, and is the author of Footsteps on the Seas, a poem (1857); Mother Goose for Grown Folks (1860; revised ed., 1882); Boys at Chequasset (1862); Faith Gartney's Girlhood (1863); The Gayworthys (1865); A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life (1866); Patience Strong's Outings (1868); Hitherto (1869); We Girls (1870); Real Folks (1871); Pansies, poems (1872); The Other Girls (1873); Sights and Insights (1876); Just How a Key to the Cook Books (1878); Odd or Even (1880); Bonnyborough (1885); Homespun Yarns (1886); Holly-Tides (1886); Daffodils (1887); Bird Talk (1887); Ascutney Street (1890); A Golden Gossip (1892); White Memories: Three Poems (1893).

"The most sympathetic of interpreters of the mixed and varied motives of our human hearts," says Henry W. Bellows in Old and New (January 1872), "and recognizing the infirmities and follies. of the test, she never confounds right and wrong, nor conceals from herself the essential quality of human actions. There is a noble severity in the moral tone of this writer which is rare and sanative. She never allows vice or folly or falsehood in her characters to escape chastisement;