What has the Calendar to do

With poets? What Time's fruitless tooth

With gay immortals such as you

Whose years but emphasize your youth?

One air gave both their lease of breath; The same paths lured our boyish feet; One earth will hold us safe in death,

With dust of saints and scholars sweet.

You snub me with a pitying " Where Were you in the September Gale?" Both stared entranced at Lafayette,

Saw Jackson dubbed with LL. D. What Cambridge saw not strikes us yet As scarcely worth one's while to seo.

Ten years my senior, when my name

In Harvard's entrance-book was writ, Her halls still echoed with the fame Of you, her poet and her wit.

"T is fifty years from then to now:

But your Last Leaf renews its green, Though, for the laurels on your brow (So thick they crowd), 't is hardly

drawn,

I scarce distinguish yours from mine, And don't we make the Gentiles yawn With "You remembers? o'er our wine!

If I, with too senescent air,

Invade your elder memory's pale,

But in no sadly literal sense, With elders and coevals too, Whose verb admits no preterite tense

Master alike in speech and song

Of fame's great antiseptic-Style, You with the classic few belong Who tempered wisdom with a smile.

The moral? Where Doubt's eddies toss and twirl

Faith's slender shallop till her footing reel, Plunge: if you find not peace beneath the whirl,

Groping, you may like Omar grasp a pearl.

ON RECEIVING A COPY OF MR. AUSTIN DOBSON'S "OLD WORLD IDYLLS."

I.

Ar length arrived, your book I take
To read in for the author's sake;
Too gray for new sensations grown,
Can charm to Art or Nature known
This torpor from my senses shake?

Hush! my parched ears what runnels slake?

Is a thrush gurgling from the brake?
Has Spring, on all the breezes blown,
At length arrived ?

Long may you live such songs to make,
And I to listen while you wake,
With skill of late disused, each tone
Of the Lesboum barbiton,

At mastery, through long finger-ache, At length arrived.

II.

As I read on, what changes steal O'er me and through, from head to heel?

A rapier thrusts coat-skirt aside, My rough Tweeds bloom to silken pride,

Who was it laughed? Your hand, Dick Steele !

Down vistas long of clipt charmille Watteau as Pierrot leads the reel; Tabor and pipe the dancers guide As I read on.

While in and out the verses wheel
The wind-caught robes trim feet reveal,
Lithe ankles that to music glide,
But chastely and by chance descried;
Art? Nature? Which do I most feel
As I read on?

TO C. F. BRADFORD

ON THE GIFT OF A MEERSCHAUM PIPE,
THE pipe came safe, and welcome too,
As anything must be from you;
A meerschaum pure, 't would float as
light

As she the girls call Amphitrite.
Mixture divine of foam and clay,
From both it stole the best away:
Its foam is such as crowns the glow
Of beakers brimmed by Veuve Clicquot;
Its clay is but congested lymph
Jove chose to make some choicer nymph;
And here combined, why, this must
be

The birth of some enchanted sea,
Shaped to immortal form, the type
And very Venus of a pipe.

Wears its first down of snow in green disdain:

Much did he, and much well; yet most of all

I prized his skill in leisure and the ease Of a life flowing full without a plan; For most are idly busy; him I call Thrice fortunate who knew himself to

please,

were known

Of orbs dim hovering on the skirts of

SHY Soul and stalwart, man of patient will Through years one hair's-breadth on our Dark to gain,

Who, from the stars he studied not in vain, Had learned their secret to be strong and still,

Careless of fames that earth's tin trumpets fill;

Born under Leo, broad of build and brain, While others slept, he watched in that hushed fane

Of Science, only witness of his skill: Sudden as falls a shooting-star he fell, But inextinguishable his luminous trace In mind and heart of all that knew him well.

sweet

THE wisest man could ask no more of Fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the Many, honored by the Few;

To count as naught in World, or Church, or State,

But inwardly in secret to be great;
To feel mysterious Nature ever new;
To touch, if not to grasp, her endless
clue,

And learn by each discovery how to wait. He widened knowledge and escaped the praise;

He wisely taught, because more wise to learn ;

He toiled for Science, not to draw men's gaze,

But for her lore of self-denial stern. That such a man could spring from our decays

Fans the soul's nobler faith until it burn.

TO A FRIEND

WHO GAVE ME A GROUP OF WEEDS AND GRASSES, AFTER A DRAWING OF DÜRER.

TRUE as the sun's own work, but more refined,

It tells of love behind the artist's eye, Of sweet companionships with earth and sky,

And summers stored, the sunshine of the mind.

What peace! Sure, ere you breathe, the fickle wind

Will break its truce and bend that grassplume high,

Scarcely yet quiet from the gilded fly That flits a more luxurious perch to find. Thanks for a pleasure that can never pall,

A serene moment, deftly caught and kept To make immortal summer on my wall. Had he who drew such gladness ever

wept?

Ask rather could he else have seen at all, Or grown in Nature's mysteries an adept?

449

E. G. DE R.

WHY should I seek her spell to decom

pose

Or to its source each rill of influence trace

That feeds the brimming river of her grace?

The petals numbered but degrade to prose

Summer's triumphant poem of the rose: Enough for me to watch the wavering chase,

Like wind o'er grass, of moods across

her face,

Fairest in motion, fairer in repose. Steeped in her sunshine, let me, while I

may,

Partake the bounty: ample 't is for me That her mirth cheats my temples of their gray, Her charm makes years long spent seem yet to be.