The verdure of the meadow ground,

But in their stead

The Nymphs are leading a bewildering round,
Vivid and light, as o'er some flowering rise
A dance of butterflies,

Their tossing hair with slender lilies crowned,
And greener ivy than o'erran

The brows of Bacchus and the reed of Pan!

I faint, I die :

The flames expire,

That made my blood a fluid fire:
Steeped in delicious weariness I lie.
O, lay me in some pearlèd shell,
Soft-balanced on the rippling sea,
Where sweet, cheek-kissing airs may wave
Their fresh wings over me;

Let me be wafted with the swell

Of Nereid voices; let no billow rave

To break the cool green crystal of the sea.
For I will wander free

Past the blue islands and the fading shores,

To Calpè and the far Azores,

And still beyond, and wide away,

Beneath the dazzling wings of tropic day,

Where, on unruffled seas,

Sleep the green isles of the Hesperides.

The Triton's trumpet calls:

I hear, I wake, I rise:

The sound peals up the skies,

And mellowed Echo falls

In answer back from Heaven's cerulean walls. Give me the lyre that Orpheus played upon,

Or bright Hyperion,

Nay, rather come, thou of the mighty bow,

Come thou below,

Leaving thy steeds unharnessed go!

Sing as thou wilt, my voice shall dare to follow, And I will sun me in thine awful glow,

Divine Apollo !

Then thou thy lute shalt twine

With Bacchic tendrils of the glorious vine

That gave Sicilian wine:

And henceforth when the breezes run

Over its clusters, ripening in the sun,
The leaves shall still be playing,

Unto thy lute its melody repaying,

And I, that quaff, shall evermore be free

To mount thy car and ride the heavens with thee!

SUMMER'S BACCHANAL.

ILL the cup from some secretest fountain,

Under granite ledges, deep and low, Where the crystal vintage of the moun

tain,

Runs in foam from dazzling fields of snow.

Some lost stream, that in a woodland hollow
Coils, to sleep its weariness away,

Shut from prying stars, that fain would follow,
In the emerald glooms of hemlock spray.

Fill, dear friend, a goblet cool and sparkling
As the sunlight of October morns,
Not for us the crimson wave, that darkling
Stains the lips of olden drinking-horns!

We will quaff, beneath the noontide glowing, Draughts of nectar, sweet as faery dew; Couched on ferny banks, where light airs blowing, Shake the leaves between us and the blue.

We will pledge in breathless, long libation,
All we have been, or have sworn to be,-
Fame, and Joy, and Love's dear adoration,
Summer's lusty bacchanals are we!

Round the white roots of the fragrant lily,
And the mossy hazels, purple-stained,
Once the music of these waters chilly

Gave return for all the sweetness drained.

How that rare, delicious, woodland flavor
Mocked my palate in the fever hours,
When I pined for springs of coolest savor,
As the burning Earth for thunder-showers!

In the wave, which through my maddened dreaming
Flowed to cheat me, fill the cups again!
Drink, dear friend, to life which is not seeming, —
Fresh as this to manhood's heart and brain!

Fill, fill high! and while our goblets, ringing, Shine with vintage of the mountain-snow, Youth shall bid his Fountain, blithely springing, Brim our souls to endless overflow !

STORM-LINES.

HEN the rains of Novemberare dark on the hills, and the pine-trees incessantly

roar

To the sound of the wind-beaten crags, and the floods that in foam through their black channels pour :

When the breaker-lined coast stretches dimly afar through the desolate waste of the gale,

And the clang of the sea-gull at nightfall is heard from the deep, like a mariner's wail:

When the gray sky drops low, and the forest is bare, and the laborer is housed from the storm, And the world is a blank, save the light of his home through the gust shining redly and warm :

Go thou forth, if the brim of thy heart with its tropical fulness of life overflow,

If the sun of thy bliss in the zenith is hung, nor a shadow reminds thee of woe!

Leave the home of thy love; leave thy labors of fame; in the rain and the darkness go forth, When the cold winds unpausingly wail as they drive from the cheerless expanse of the North.

Thou shalt turn from the cup that was mantling before; thou shalt hear the eternal despair Of the hearts that endured and were broken at last, from the hills and the sea and the air!

Thou shalt hear how the Earth, the maternal, laments for the children she nurtured with tears,How the forest but deepens its wail and the breakers their roar, with the march of the years!

Then the gleam of thy hearth-fire shall dwindle away, and the lips of thy loved ones be still; And thy soul shall lament in the moan of the storm, sounding wide on the shelterless hill.

All the woes of existence shall stand at thy heart, and the sad eyes of myriads implore,

In the darkness and storm of their being, the ray, streaming out through thy radiant door.

Look again how that star of thy Paradise dims, through the warm tears, unwittingly shed; Thou art man, and a sorrow so bitterly wrung never fell on the dust of the Dead!

Let the rain of the midnight beat cold on thy cheek, and the proud pulses chill in thy frame, Till the love of thy bosom is grateful and sad, and thou turn'st from the mockery of Fame!

Take with humble acceptance the gifts of thy life; let thy joy touch the fountain of tears; For the soul of the Earth, in endurance and pain, gathers promise of happier years!