Save thy toiling, spare thy treasure;
All I ask is friendship's pleasure;
Let the shining ore lie darkling,
Bring no gem in luster sparkling ;
Gifts and gold are naught to me,
I would only look on thee!

Tell to thee the high-wrought feeling,
Ecstasy but in revealing;

Paint to thee the deep sensation,
Rapture in participation;

Yet but torture, if comprest
In a lone, unfriended breast.

Absent still! Ah! come and bless me !
Let these eyes again caress thee.
Once, in caution, I could fly thee;
Now, I nothing could deny thee.

In a look if death there be,
Come, and I will gaze on thee!

MARIA BROOKS.

THE ABSENT SOLDIER SON.

FROM 'THE ROMAN.”

LORD, I am weeping. As thou wilt, O Lord,
Do with him as thou wilt; but O my God,
Let him come back to die! Let not the fowls
O' the air defile the body of my child,
My own fair child, that when he was a babe,
I lift up in my arms and gave to thee!
Let not his garment, Lord, be vilely parted,
Nor the fine linen which these hands have spun
Fall to the stranger's lot! Shall the wild bird,
That would have pilfered of the ox, this year
Disdain the pens and stalls? Shall her blind

O Lord, thou doest well. I am content.
If thou have need of him, he shall not stay.
But as one calleth to a servant, saying
"At such a time be with me," so, O Lord,
Call him to thee! O, bid him not in haste
Straight whence he standeth. Let him lay aside
The soiled tools of labor. Let him wash
His hands of blood. Let him array himself
Meet for his Lord, pure from the sweat and fume
Of corporal travail ! Lord, if he must die,
Let him die here. O, take him where thou gavest!

COME to me, O my Mother! come to me,
Thine own son slowly dying far away !
Through the moist ways of the wide ocean, blown
By great invisible winds, come stately ships
To this calm bay for quiet anchorage;

They come, they rest awhile, they go away,
But, O my Mother, never comest thou !

The snow is round thy dwelling, the white snow,

That cold soft revelation pure as light,

And the pine-spire is mystically fringed, Laced with incrusted silver. Here ah me!

The winter is decrepit, underborn,

A leper with no power but his disease.
Why am I from thee, Mother, far from thee?
Far from the frost enchantment, and the woods
Jeweled from bough to bough? O home, my

home!

O river in the valley of my home,
With mazy-winding motion intricate,
Twisting thy deathless music underneath
The polished ice-work, must I nevermore
Behold thee with familiar eyes, and watch
Thy beauty changing with the changeful day,
Thy beauty constant to the constant change?

DAVID GRAY.

THE RUSTIC LAD'S LAMENT IN THE TOWN.

O, WAD that my time were owre but,
Wi' this wintry sleet and snaw,
That I might see our house again,
I' the bonnie birken shaw !
For this is no my ain life,

And I peak and pine away

Wi' the thochts o' hame and the young flowers, In the glad green month of May.

I used to wauk in the morning
Wi' the loud sang o' the lark,
And the whistling o' the plowman lads,
As they gaed to their wark;

I used to wear the bit young lambs
Frae the tod and the roaring stream;
But the warld is changed, and a' thing now
To me seems like a dream.