There is no Death! What seems so is transition; This life of mortal breath Is but a suburb of the life elysian, She is not dead,-the child of our affection,- Where she no longer needs our poor protection, In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion, Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, Day after day we think what she is doing Year after year, her tender steps pursuing, Thus do we walk with her, and keep unbroken Thinking that our remembrance, though unspoken, May reach her where she lives. Not as a child shall we again behold her; For when with raptures wild In our embraces we again enfold her, But a fair maiden, in her Father's mansion, And beautiful with all the soul's expansion And though at times impetuous with emotion And anguish long suppressed, The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean, That cannot be at rest, We will be patient, and assuage the feeling We may not wholly stay; By silence sanctifying, not concealing, The grief that must have way. THE BUILDERS. ALL are architects of Fate, Working in these walls of Time; Nothing useless is or low; Each thing in its place is best; For the structure that we raise, Are the blocks with which we build. Truly shape and fashion these; In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care For the gods see everywhere. Let us do our work as well, Both the unseen and the seen; Else our lives are incomplete, Build to-day, then, strong and sure, Shall to-morrow find its place. Thus alone can we attain To those turrets, where the eye SAND OF THE DESERT IN AN HOUR-GLASS.. A HANDFUL of red sand, from the hot clime Of Arab deserts brought, Within this glass becomes the spy of Time, How many weary centuries has it been How many strange vicissitudes has seen, Perhaps the camels of the Ishmaelite When into Egypt from the patriarch's sight Perhaps the feet of Moses, burnt and bare, Or Pharaoh's flashing wheels into the air Or Mary, with the Christ of Nazareth Whose pilgrimage of hope and love and faith Or anchorites beneath Engaddi's palms And singing slow their old Armenian psalms Or caravans, that from Bassora's gate Or Mecca's pilgrims, confident of Fate, These have passed over it, or may have passed! Now in this crystal tower Imprisoned by some curious hand at last, It counts the passing hour. And as I gaze, these narrow walls expand;Before my dreamy eye Stretches the desert with its shifting sand, Its unimpeded sky. And borne aloft by the sustaining blast, Dilates into a column high and vast, And onward, and across the setting sun, The column and its broader shadow run, The vision vanishes! These walls again Shut out the hot, immeasurable plain; BIRDS OF PASSAGE. BLACK shadows fall From the lindens tall That lift aloft their massive wall And from the realms Of the shadowy elms A tide-like darkness overwhelms But the night is fair, And everywhere A warm, soft vapour fills the air, And above, in the light Of the star-lit night, Swift birds of passage wing their flight I hear the beat Of their pinions fleet, As from the land of snow and sleet I hear the cry Of their voices high Falling dreamily through the sky, But their forms I cannot see. Oh, say not so! Those sounds that flow In murmurs of delight and woe Come not from wings of birds. They are the throngs Of the poet's songs, Murmurs of pleasures, and pains, and wrongs, The sound of winged words. This is the cry Of souls, that high On toiling, beating pinions fly, Seeking a warmer clime. From their distant flight Through realms of light It falls into our world of night, With the murmuring sound of rhyme. THE OPEN WINDOW. THE old house by the lindens I saw the nursery windows The large Newfoundland house-dog They walked not under the lindens, The birds sang in the branches Will be heard in dreams alone! And the boy that walked beside me, KING WITLAF'S DRINKING-HORN. WITLAF, a king of the Saxons, That, whenever they sat at their revels, So sat they once at Christmas, In their beards the red wine glistened, |