W.D. Howells.

BEFORE THE GATE.

They gave the whole long day to idle laughter,
To fitful song and jest,

To moods of soberness as idle, after,

And silences, as idle too as the rest.

But when at last upon their way returning,

Taciturn, late, and loath,

Through the broad meadow in the sunset burning,
They reached the gate, one sweet spell hindered them both.

Her heart was troubled with a subtile anguish

Such as but women know

That wait, and lest love speak or speak not languish, And what they would, would rather they would not so;

Till he said,-man-like nothing comprehending
Of all the wondrous guile

That women won win themselves with, and bending
Eyes of relentless asking on her the while,—

"Ah, if beyond this gate the path united

"Our steps as far as death,

"And I might open it!" His voice, affrighted At its own daring, faltered under his breath.

Then she-whom both his faith and fear enchanted

Far beyond words to tell,

Feeling her woman's finest wit had wanted

The art he had that knew to blunder so well—

Shyly drew near, a little step, and mocking,
"Shall we not be too late

"For tea?" she said. "I'm quite worn out with walking:

"Yes, thanks, your arm.

And will you-open the gate?"

THE FIRST CRICKET.

Ah me! is it then true that the year has waxed into waning, And that so soon must remain nothing but lapse and decay,— Earliest cricket, that out of the midsummer midnight complaining,

All the faint summer in me takest with subtle dismay?

Though thou bringest no dream of frost to the flowers that slumber,

Though no tree for its leaves, doomed of thy voice, maketh

moan;

With the unconscious earth's boded evil my soul thou dost cumber,

And in the year's lost youth makest me still lose my own.

Answerest thou, that when nights of December are blackest and bleakest,

And when the fervid grate feigns me a May in my room, And by my hearthstone gray, as now sad in my garden, thou creakest,

Thou wilt again give me all,-dew and fragrance and bloom?

Nay, little poet! full many a cricket I have that is willing,
If I but take him down out of his place on my shelf,
Me blither lays to sing than the blithest known to thy shrilling,
Full of the rapture of life, May, morn, hope, and—himself:

Leaving me only the sadder; for never one of my singers

Lures back the bee to his feast, calls back the bird to his tree. Hast thou no art can make me believe, while the summer yet

lingers,

Better than bloom that has been red leaf and sere that must be?

IN EARLIEST SPRING.

Tossing his mane of snows in wildest eddies and tangles,
Lion-like, March cometh in, hoarse, with tempestuous breath,
Through all the moaning chimneys, and thwart all the hollows
and angles

Round the shuddering house, threating of winter and death.

But in my heart I feel the life of the wood and the meadow Thrilling the pulses that own kindred with fibres that lift Bud and blade to the sunward, within the inscrutable shadow, Deep in the oak's chill core, under the gathering drift.

Nay, to earth's life in mine some prescience, or dream, or desire (How shall I name it aright?) comes for a moment and goes,— Rapture of life ineffable, perfect,—as if in the brier,

Leafless there by my door, trembled a sense of the rose.

THE PILOT'S STORY.

I.

It was a story the pilot told, with his back to his hearers,— Keeping his hand on the wheel and his eye on the globe of the jack-staff,

Holding the boat to the shore and out of the sweep of the

current,

Lightly turning aside for the heavy logs of the driftwood, Widely shunning the snags that made us sardonic obeisance.

II.

All the soft, damp air was full of delicate perfume

From the young willows in bloom on either bank of the river,—

Faint, delicious fragrance, trancing the indolent senses

In a luxurious dream of the river and land of the lotus.
Not yet out of the west the roses of sunset were withered;
In the deep blue above light clouds of gold and of crimson
Floated in slumber serene, and the restless river beneath
them

Rushed away to the sea with a vision of rest in its bosom.
Far on the eastern shore lay dimly the swamps of the cy-

press;

Dimly before us the islands grew from the river's expanses,Beautiful, wood-grown isles, with the gleam of the swart

inundation

Seen through the swaying boughs and slender trunks of their willows;

And on the shore beside us the cotton-trees rose in the even

ing,

Phantom-like, yearningly, wearily, with the inscrutable sad

ness

Of the mute races of trees. While hoarsely the steam from her 'scape-pipes

Shouted, then whispered a moment, then shouted again to the

silence,

Trembling through all her frame with the mighty pulse of her

engines,

Slowly the boat ascended the swollen and broad Mississippi,
Bank-full, sweeping on, with nearing masses of driftwood,
Daintily breathed about with hazes of silvery vapor,
Where in his arrowy flight the twittering swallow alighted,
And the belated blackbird paused on the way to its nestlings.

III.

It was the pilot's story:-" They both came aboard there, at

Cairo,

From a New Orleans boat, and took passage with us for Saint

Louis.

She was a beautiful woman, with just enough blood from her mother,

Darkening her eyes and her hair, to make her race known to a trader :

You would have thought she was white. The man that was

with her, you see such,—

Weakly good-natured and kind, and weakly good-natured and vicious,

Slender of body and soul, fit neither for loving nor hating.
I was a youngster then, and only learning the river,—
Not over-fond of the wheel. I used to watch them at monte,
Down in the cabin at night, and learned to know all of
the gamblers.

So when I saw this weak one staking his money against them,