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His friends not false, his wife no shrew,
Many his gains, his children few,

He passed his hours in peace.
But while he viewed his wealth increase,
While thus along life's dusty road
The beaten track content he trod,
Old Time, whose haste no mortal spares,
Uncalled, unheeded, unawares,

Brought on his eightieth year.
And now, one night, in musing mood,

As all alone he sate,
The unwelcome messenger of Fate
Once more before him stood.

Half killed with anger and surprise,
"So soon returned!" Old Dodson cries.
"So soon, d'ye call it!" Death replies ;
"Surely, my friend, you 're but in jest!
Since I was here before

'Tis six-and-thirty years at least, And you are now fourscore."

"So much the worse," the clown rejoined; "To spare the aged would be kind : However, see your search be legal ; And your authority, is 't regal? Else you are come on a fool's errand, With but a secretary's warrant.

Beside, you promised me three warnings, Which I have looked for nights and mornings; But for that loss of time and ease

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"Hold," says the farmer, "not so fast! I have been lame these four years past." "And no great wonder," Death replies : "However, you still keep your eyes; And sure, to see one's loves and friends For legs and arms would make amends." "Perhaps," says Dodson, "so it might, But latterly I've lost my sight."

"This is a shocking tale, 't is true;
But still there's comfort left for you:
Each strives your sadness to amuse;
I warrant you hear all the news."

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The rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the rose ;

The moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare;
Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,

To me alone there came a thought of grief;
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong.

"There's none," cries he; "and if there were, The cataracts blow their trumpets from the

I'm grown so deaf, I could not hear."

"Nay, then," the spectre stern rejoined, "These are unjustifiable yearnings:

If you are lame and deaf and blind,

steep,

No more shall grief of mine the season wrong.

I hear the echoes through the mountains throng; The winds come to me from the fields of sleep.

And all the earth is gay;

Land and sea

Give themselves up to jollity; And with the heart of May

Doth every beast keep holiday;

Thou child of joy,

Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

Behold the child among his new-born blisses,--
A six years' darling of a pygmy size!
See, where mid work of his own hand he lies,

Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,

happy shepherd boy!

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A single field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone;
The pansy at my feet

Doth the same tale repeat.
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting;
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar :
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory, do we come
From God, who is our home :
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy ;

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is nature's priest
And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended :

At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,

The homely nurse doth all she can To make her foster-child, her inmate man,

With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly learned art,
A wedding or a festival,

A mourning or a funeral ;

And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue

To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long

Ere this be thrown aside,

And with new joy and pride

The little actor cons another part, -
Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"
With all the persons, down to palsied age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy soul's immensity!

Thou best philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage! thou eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted forever by the eternal mind!·

Mighty prophet! Seer blest!

On whom those truths do rest

Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou over whom thy immortality
Broods like the day, a master o'er a slave,
A presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

O joy that in our embers
Is something that doth live;
That Nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!

The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not, indeed,

For that which is most worthy to be blest, —
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of childhood, whether busy or at rest,

With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his To live beneath your more habitual sway.

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Not for these I raise

The song of thanks and praise;

But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts, before which our mortal nature Did tremble like a guilty thing surprised: But for those first affections, Those shadowy recollections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our seeing;

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make Our noisy years seem moments in the being Of the eternal silence: truths that wake, To perish never;

Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor,
Nor man nor boy,

Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!

Hence, in a season of calm weather,
Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

Then sing, ye birds, sing, sing a joyous song! And let the young lambs bound

As to the tabor's sound!

We in thought will join your throng,

Ye that pipe and ye that play,
Ye that through your hearts to-day
Feel the gladness of the May!

What though the radiance which was once so bright

Be now forever taken from my sight,

Though nothing can bring back the hour

I love the brooks which down their channels fret, Even more than when I tripped lightly as they ; The innocent brightness of a new-born day

Is lovely yet;

The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober coloring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality;
Another race hath been, and other palms are won.
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

SOLILOQUY: ON IMMORTALITY.

FROM "CATO," ACT V. SC. 1.

SCENE. - CATO, sitting in a thoughtful posture, with Plato's book on the Immortality of the Soul in his hand, and a drawn sword on the table by him.

IT must be so Plato, thou reasonest well!— Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire, This longing after immortality?

Or whence this secret dread, and inward horror, Of falling into naught? Why shrinks the soul Back on herself, and startles at destruction? 'T is the divinity that stirs within us; 'Tis Heaven itself, that points out a hereafter, And intimates eternity to man.

Eternity!-thou pleasing, dreadful thought! Through what variety of untried being, Through what new scenes and changes, must we pass!

The wide, the unbounded prospect lies before me; But shadows, clouds, and darkness rest upon it. Here will I hold. If there's a Power above us (And that there is, all Nature cries aloud Through all her works), he must delight in virtue ;

And that which he delights in must be happy. But when? or where? This world was made for Cæsar.

Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; I'm weary of conjectures, this must end 'em.

We will grieve not, rather find

Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy

Which, having been, must ever be ;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;

In the faith that looks through death, In years that bring the philosophic mind.

And O ye fountains, meadows, hills, and groves,
Forebode not any severing of our loves!
Yet in my heart of hearts I feel your might;
I only have relinquished one delight

(Laying his hand on his sword.) ·

Thus am I doubly armed: my death and life, My bane and antidote, are both before me : This in a moment brings me to an end; But this informs me I shall never die. The soul, secured in her existence, smiles At the drawn dagger, and defies its point. The stars snail fade away, the sun himself Grow dim with age, and Nature sink in years; But thou shalt flourish in immortal youth, Unhurt amid the war of elements, The wrecks of matter, and the crush of worlds! JOSEPH ADDISON.

O, MAY I JOIN THE CHOIR INVISIBLE! | Lost in a gay and festal throng,

O, MAY I join the choir invisible

Of those immortal dead who live again

In minds made better by their presence; live

In pulses stirred to generosity,

In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn

Of miserable aims that end with self,

I tremble at some tender song,

Set to an air whose golden bars

I must have heard in other stars.

In sacred aisles I pause to share The blessings of a priestly prayer,

In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like When the whole scene which greets mine eyes

stars,

And with their mild persistence urge men's minds To vaster issues.

So to live is heaven:

To make undying music in the world,
Breathing a beauteous order, that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.
So we inherit that sweet purity

For which we struggled, failed, and agonized
With widening retrospect that bred despair.
Rebellious flesh that would not be subdued,
A vicious parent shaming still its child,
Poor anxious penitence, is quick dissolved ;
Its discords quenched by meeting harmonies,
Die in the large and charitable air.
And all our rarer, better, truer self,
That sobbed religiously in yearning song,
That watched to ease the burden of the world,
Laboriously tracing what must be,
And what may yet be better, -saw within
A worthier image for the sanctuary,
And shaped it forth before the multitude,
Divinely human, raising worship so
To higher reverence more mixed with love,
That better self shall live till human Time
Shall fold its eyelids, and the human sky
Pe gathered like a scroll within the tomb,
Unread forever.

This is life to come,

Which martyred men have made more glorious For us, who strive to follow.

May I reach

That purest heaven, be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense !
So shall I join the choir invisible,
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

MARIAN EVANS LEWES CROSS (George Eliot).

PRE-EXISTENCE.

WHILE sauntering through the crowded street, Some half-remembered face I meet,

Albeit upon no mortal shore

That face, methinks, has smiled before.

In some strange mode I recognize

As one whose every mystic part

I feel prefigured in my heart.

At sunset, as I calmly stand,

A stranger on an alien strand,

Familiar as my childhood's home
Seems the long stretch of wave and foam.

One sails toward me o'er the bay,
And what he comes to do and say

I can foretell. A prescient lore
Springs from some life outlived of yore.
O swift, instinctive, startling gleams
Of deep soul-knowledge! not as dreams
For aye ye vaguely dawn and die,
But oft with lightning certainty

Pierce through the dark, oblivious brain,
To make old thoughts and memories plain,
Thoughts which perchance must travel back
Across the wild, bewildering track

Of countless æons; memories far,
High-reaching as yon pallid star,

Unknown, scarce seen, whose flickering grace
Faints on the outmost rings of space!

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SLUMBER, Sleep, they were two brothers, servants to the gods above;

Kind Prometheus lured them downwards, ever filled with earthly love;

[The MS. of this poem, which appeared during the first quarter of the present century, was said to have been found in the Museum But what gods could bear so lightly, pressed too

of the Royal College of Surgeons, in London, near a perfect human skeleton, and to have been sent by the curator to the Morning

Chronicle for publication. It excited so much attention that every

effort was made to discover the author, and a responsible party went so far as to offer a reward of fifty guineas for information that would discover its origin. The author preserved his incognito, and, we believe, has never been discovered.]

BEHOLD this ruin! "T was a skull
Once of ethereal spirit full.

This narrow cell was Life's retreat;

This space was Thought's mysterious seat.
What beauteous visions filled this spot!
What dreams of pleasure long forgot!
Nor hope, nor joy, nor love, nor fear
Has left one trace of record here.

Beneath this mouldering canopy
Once shone the bright and busy eye :
But start not at the dismal void,
If social love that eye employed,
If with no lawless fire it gleamed,

But through the dews of kindness beamed,
That eye shall be forever bright
When stars and sun are sunk in night.

Within this hollow cavern hung
The ready, swift, and tuneful tongue :
If Falsehood's honey it disdained,

And when it could not praise was chained;
If bold in Virtue's cause it spoke,
Yet gentle concord never broke,
This silent tongue shall plead for thee
When Time unveils Eternity!

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