The ship suddenly sinketh.

'Dear Lord! it hath a fiendish look

(The pilot made reply) ——

Since then, at an uncertain hour, That agony returns ;

The boat came closer to the ship,
But I nor spake nor stirred;

The boat came close beneath the ship,
And straight a sound was heard.

Under the water it rumbled on,
Still louder and more dread :

It reached the ship, it split the bay;
The ship went down like lead.

This heart within me burns.

O sweeter than the marriage-feast,
'Tis sweeter far to me,
To walk together to the kirk
With a goodly company!—

To walk together to the kirk,
And all together pray,

While each to his great Father bends-
Old men, and babes, and loving friends,
And youths and maidens gay!

Farewell! farewell! but this I tell

To thee, thou Wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,

And scarcely he could stand.

The Mariner, whose eye is bright,

Mariner ear

treateth the

nestly en

herimit to

shrieve him:

man!'.

The hermit crossed his brow:

and the pen. Say quick,' quoth he, bid

ance of life

falls on him.

say

What manner of man art thou?'

And ever

and anon throughout

his future life an agony

constraineth him to travel from land to land

and to teach by his own example, love and reverence to all things. that God made and loveth.

wrenched

With a woful agony,

He rose the morrow morn.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

IMOGINE.

A WARRIOR SO bold, and a virgin so I right,
Conversed as they sat on the green;
They gazed on each other with tender delight:
Alonzo the Brave was the name of the knight, –
The maiden's, the Fair Imnogine.

"And O," said the youth, "since to-morrow I go To fight in a far distant land,

Your tears for my absence soon ceasing to flow, Some other will court you, and you will bestow On a wealthier suitor your hand!”

"O, bush these suspicions," Fair Imogine said, "Offensive to love and to me;

For, if you be living, or if you be dead,

I swear by the Virgin that none in your stead
Shall husband of Imogine be.

"If e'er I, by lust or by wealth led aside,
Forget my Alonzo the Brave,

God grant that, to punish my falsehood and pride, Your ghost at the marriage may sit by my side, May tax me with perjury, claim me as bride, And bear me away to the grave!"

To Palestine hastened the hero so bold,

His love she lamented him sore;

But scarce had a twelvemonth elapsed when, behold!

A baron, all covered with jewels and gold,
Arrived at Fair Imogine's door.

His treasures, his presents, his spacious domain,
Soon made her untrue to her vows;

He dazzled her eyes, he bewildered her brain;
He caught her affections, so light and so vain,
And carried her home as his spouse.

And now had the marriage been blest by the priest;

The revelry now was begun;

The tables they groaned with the weight of the feast,

Nor yet had the laughter and merriment ceased, When the bell at the castle tolled-one.

Then first with amazement Fair Imogine found
A stranger was placed by her side:
His air was terrific; he uttered no sound,

He spake not, he moved not, he looked not around,

But earnestly gazed on the bride.

His visor was closed, and gigantic his height,
His armor was sable to view;

All pleasure and laughter were hushed at his sight;

The lights in the chamber burned blue!

His presence all bosoms appeared to dismay;
The guests sat in silence and fear;

At length spake the bride, while she trembled, "I pray,

Sir knight, that your helmet aside you would lay, And deign to partake of our cheer.”

The lady is silent; the stranger complies -
His visor he slowly unclosed;

O God! what a sight met Fair Imogine's eyes!
What words can express her dismay and surprise,
When a skeleton's head was exposed!

All present then uttered a terrified shout,

All turned with disgust from the scene; The worms they crept in, and the worms they crept out,

And sported his eyes and his temples about
While the spectre addressed Imogine:

"Behold me, thou false one, behold me!" he cried,

"Remember Alonzo the Brave!

God grants that, to punish thy falsehood and pride,
My ghost at thy marriage should sit by thy side;
Should tax thee with perjury, claim thee as bride,
And bear thee away to the grave!"

Thus saying his arms round the lady he wound,
While loudly she shrieked in dismay;
Then sunk with his prey through the wide-
yawning ground,

Nor ever again was Fair Imogine found,
Or the spectre that bore her away.

Not long lived the baron; and none, since that time,

To inhabit the castle presume;
For chronicles tell that, by order sublime,
There Imogine suffers the pain of her crime,
And mourns her deplorable doom.

At midnight, four times in each year, does her sprite,

When mortals in slumber are bound, Arrayed in her bridal apparel of white, Appear in the hall with the skeleton knight, And shriek as he whirls her around!

While they drink out of skulls newly torn from the grave,

Dancing round them the spectres are seen; Their liquor is blood, and this horrible stave They howl: "To the health of Alonzo the Brave, And his consort, the Fair Imogine!"

MATTHEW GREGORY LEWIS

THE KING OF THULE.

MARGARET'S SONG IN "FAUST."

THERE was a king in Thule, Was faithful till the grave, To whom his mistress, dying, A golden goblet gave.

Naught was to him more precious;
He drained it at every bout:
His eyes with tears ran over,
As oft as he drank thereout.

When came his time of dying, The towns in his land he told, Naught else to his heir denying Except the goblet of gold.

He sat at the royal banquet With his knights of high degree, In the lofty hall of his fathers, In the Castle by the Sea.

There stood the old carouser, And drank the last life-glow; And hurled the hallowed goblet Into the tide below.

He saw it plunging and filling,
And sinking deep in the sea,
Then fell his eyelids forever,
And never more drank he.

From the German of GOETHE. Trans.
lation of BAYARD TAYLOR.

THE PHILOSOPHER'S SCALES.

A MONK, when his rites sacerdotal were o'er,
In the depth of his cell with its stone-covered
floor,

Resigning to thought his chimerical brain,
Once formed the contrivance we now shall explain;
But whether by magic's or alchemy's powers
We know not; indeed, 't is no business of ours.

Perhaps it was only by patience and care,
At last, that he brought his invention to bear.
In youth 't was projected, but years stole away,
And ere 't was complete he was wrinkled and
gray;

But success is secure, unless energy fails;

And at length he produced THE PHILOSOPHER'S SCALES.

O no; for such properties wondrous had they, That qualities, feelings, and thoughts they could weigh,

Together with articles small or immense,
From mountains or planets to atoms of sense.

Naught was there so bulky but there it would lay,
And naught so ethereal but there it would stay,
And naught so reluctant but in it must go :
All which some examples more clearly will show

The first thing he weighed was the head of Voltaire,

Which retained all the wit that had ever been

there;

As a weight, he threw in the torn scrap of a leaf Containing the prayer of the penitent thief; When the skull rose aloft with so sudden a spell That it bounced like a ball on the roof of the cell.

One time he put in Alexander the Great,
With the garment that Dorcas had made, for a

weight;

And though clad in armor from sandals to crown, The hero rose up, and the garment went down.

A long row of almshouses, amply endowed
By a well-esteemed Pharisee, busy and proud,
Next loaded one scale; while the other was
pressed

By those mites the poor widow dropped into the chest :

Up flew the endowment, not weighing an ounce, And down, down the farthing-worth came with a bounce.

By further experiments (no matter how)

He found that ten chariots weighed less than one plough;

A sword with gilt trapping rose up in the scale,
Though balanced by only a ten-penny nail;
A shield and a helmet, a buckler and spear,
Weighed less than a widow's uncrystallized tear.
A lord and a lady went up at full sail,
When a bee chanced to light on the opposite

scale;

Ten doctors, ten lawyers, two courtiers, one earl, Ten counsellors' wigs, full of powder and curl, All heaped in one balance and swinging from thence,

Weighed less than a few grains of candor and

sense;

ently see;

These scales were not made to weigh sugar and tea.

One pearl to outweigh, -'t was THE PEARL OF

GREAT PRICE.

grate,

With the soul of a beggar to serve for a weight, When the former sprang up with so strong a rebuff

That it made a vast rent and escaped at the roof!
When balanced in air, it ascended on high,
And sailed up aloft, a balloon in the sky;
While the scale with the soul in 't so mightily
fell

That it jerked the philosopher out of his cell.

JANE TAYLOR.

THE NIGHTINGALE AND GLOW-WORM.

A NIGHTINGALE, that all day long Had cheered the village with his song, Nor yet at eve his note suspended, Nor yet when eventide was ended, Began to feel - as well he might The keen demands of appetite; When, looking eagerly around, He spied, far off, upon the ground, A something shining in the dark, And knew the glow-worm by his spark; So, stooping down from hawthorn top, He thought to put him in his crop. The worm, aware of his intent, Harangued him thus, quite eloquent, "Did you admire my lamp," quoth he, "As much as I your minstrelsy, You would abhor to do me wrong, As much as I to spoil your song; For 't was the seif-same Power divine Taught you to sing, and me to shine; That you with music, I with light, Might beautify and cheer the night." The songster heard his short oration, And, warbling out his approbation, Released him, as my story tells, And found a supper somewhere else.

WILLIAM COWPER.

THE PETRIFIED FERN.

IN a valley, centuries ago,

Grew a little fern-leaf, green and slender, Veining delicate and fibres tender;

Waving when the wind crept down so low.

Stately forests waved their giant branches,
Mountains hurled their snowy avalanches,
Mammoth creatures stalked across the plain;
Nature revelled in grand mysteries,
But the little fern was not of these,
Did not number with the hills and trees;
Only grew and waved its wild sweet way,
No one came to note it day by day.

Earth, one time, put on a frolic mood,
Heaved the rocks and changed the mighty
motion

Of the deep, strong currents of the ocean; Moved the plain and shook the haughty wood, Crushed the little fern in soft moist clay, Covered it, and hid it safe away.

O, the long, long centuries since that day!
O, the changes! O, life's bitter cost,
Since that useless little fern was lost!

Useless? Lost? There came a thoughtful man
Searching Nature's secrets, far and deep;
From a fissure in a rocky steep

He withdrew a stone, o'er which there ran
Fairy pencillings, a quaint design,
Veinings, leafage, fibres clear and fine.
And the fern's life lay in every line!
So, I think, God hides some souls away,
Sweetly to surprise us, the last day.

MARY L. BOLLES BRANCH.

THE COMET.

OCTOBER, 1858.

ERRATIC Soul of some great Purpose, doomed To track the wild illimitable space, Till sure propitiation has been made For the divine commission unperformed ! What was thy crime? Ahasuerus' curse Were not more stern on earth than thine in heaven!

Art thou the Spirit of some Angel World, For grave rebellion banished from thy peers, Compelled to watch the calm, immortal stars Circling in rapture the celestial void, While the avenger follows in thy train To spur thee on to wretchedness eterne?

Or one of Nature's wildest fantasies, From which she flies in terror so profound,

Playful sunbeams darted in and found it,
Drops of dew stole in by night, and crowned it,
But no foot of man e'er trod that way;
Earth was young, and keeping holiday

That mighty earthquakes yawn where'er she

treads;

While War makes red its terrible right hand, And Famine stalks abroad all lean and wan?