She could not weep, and she could not pray,
But she wasted and withered from day to day,
Till you might have counted each sunken vein,
When her wrist was prest by the iron chain;
And sometimes I thought her large dark eye
Had the glisten of red insanity.

She called me once to her sleeping-place,
A strange, wild look was upon her face,
Her eye flashed over her cheek so white,
Like a gravestone seen in the pale moonlight,
And she spoke in a low, unearthly tone,
The sound from mine ear hath never gone!—
"I had last night the loveliest dream:
My own land shone in the summer beam,
I saw the fields of the golden grain,

I heard the reaper's harvest strain;

There stood on the hills the green pine-tree,
And the thrush and the lark sang merrily.

A long and a weary way I had come;

No more; and, by a sleep, to say we end
The heart-ache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, - 't is a consummation
Devoutly to be wished. To die, -to sleep;
To sleep! perchance to dream:-ay, there's the
rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of déspised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death, --
That undiscovered country, from whose bourn

But I stopped, methought, by mine own sweet No traveler returns, — puzzles the will,
home.

I stood by the hearth, and my father sat there,
With pale, thin face, and snow-white hair!
The Bible lay open upon his knee,
But he closed the book to welcome me.
He led me next where my mother lay,
And together we knelt by her grave to pray,
And heard a hymn it was heaven to hear,
For it echoed one to my young days dear.
This dream has waked feelings long, long since fled,
And hopes which I deemed in my heart were dead!
We have not spoken, but still I have hung
On the Northern accents that dwell on thy tongue.
To me they are music, to me they recall
The things long hidden by Memory's pall!
Take this long curl of yellow hair,

And give it my father, and tell him my prayer,
My dying prayer, was for him."

And makes us rather bear those ills we have,
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.

;

SHAKESPEARE.

THE SECRET OF DEATH.

"SHE is dead!" they said to him. "Come away; Kiss her and leave her, thy love is clay !"

They smoothed her tresses of dark brown hair;
On her forehead of stone they laid it fair ;

Over her eyes, which gazed too much,
They drew the lids with a gentle touch;
With a tender touch they closed up well
The sweet, thin lips that had secrets to tell;

About her brows and beautiful face
They tied her veil and her marriage-lace,

And drew on her white feet the white silk shoes,
Which were the whitest no eye could choose !

And over her bosom they crossed her hands,
"Come away," they said, "God understands!"

But there was a silence, and nothing there
But silence, and scents of eglantere,

to

"I would say, though the angel of death had The gift of another, perhaps a brother,

May recognize these when her child's clothes she The snow in cold and heavy drifts was lying, —