Ah! each sailor in the port I have waited on the piers, So I never quite despair, Nor let hope or courage fail; And some day, when skies are fair, I shall buy then all I need, - Everything - except a heart That is lost, that is lost. Once, when I was pure and young, Or a wrinkle creased my brow, ROBERT STEVENSON COFFIN. LOVE'S YOUNG DREAM. FROM IRISH MELODIES." O THE days are gone when beauty bright When my dream of life, from morn till night, Was love, still love! New hope may bloom, And days may come, Of milder, calmer beam, But there's nothing half so sweet in life As love's young dream! O, there's nothing half so sweet in life Though the bard to purer fame may soar, Though he win the wise, who frowned before, When hearts have once mingled, Love first leaves the well-built nest; The weak one is singled To endure what it once possessed. O Love! who bewailest The frailty of all things here, Why choose you the frailest For your cradle, your home, and your bier? Its passions will rock thee As the storms rock the ravens on high; From thy nest every rafter WHITTIER As some tall pine that from a mountain side What reed of Pan, however fine it blew, November, 1892 LOUISE Á. MCGAFFEY From Belford's Magazine, Chicago Five summers ago, when you wooed her, you stood on the self-same plane, Face to face, heart to heart, never dreaming your souls could be parted again. She loved you at that time entirely, in the bloom of her life's early May; And it is not her fault, I repeat it, that she does not love you to-day. Nature never stands still, nor souls either: they ever go up or go down; And hers has been steadily soaring, - but how has it been with your own? She cannot look down to her lover her love, like her soul, aspires; The first stanza of this song appears in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Act iv. Sc. 1.; the same, with the second He must stand by her side, or above her, who stanza added, is found in Beaumont and Fletchers Bloody Brother, Act v. Sc. 2. would kindle its holy fires. A word unkind or wrongly taken, O, love that tempests never shook, A breath, a touch like this has shaken! And ruder words will soon rush in To spread the breach that words begin ; And eyes forget the gentle ray They wore in courtship's smiling day; And voices lose the tone that shed A tenderness round all they said Till fast declining, one by one, The sweetnesses of love are gone, And hearts so lately mingled, seem Like broken clouds, or like the stream, That smiling left the mountain's brow, ; As though its waters ne'er could sever, Yet, ere it reach the plain below, Breaks into floods that part forever. O you, that have the charge of Love, As in the Fields of Bliss above He sits, with flowerets fettered round; Loose not a tie that round him clings, Nor ever let him use his wings; For even an hour, a minute's flight Will rob the plumes of half their light. Like that celestial bird, whose nest Is found beneath far Eastern skies, Whose wings, though radiant when at rest, Lose all their glory when he flies! AUX ITALIENS. THOMAS MOORE. AT Paris it was, at the opera there; Of all the operas that Verdi wrote, The best, to my taste, is the Trovatore; The moon on the tower slept soft as snow; The emperor there, in his box of state, The empress, too, had a tear in her eye : again, For one moment, under the old blue sky, To the old glad life in Spain. Well there in our front-row box we sat back And both were silent, and both were sad; So confident of her charm! I have not a doubt she was thinking then I hope that, to get to the kingdom of heaven, I wish him well for the jointure given Meanwhile, I was thinking of my first love As I had not been thinking of aught for years; Till over my eyes there began to move Something that felt like tears. I thought of the dress that she wore last time, Of that muslin dress (for the eve was hot); And falling loose again; And she looked like a queen in a book that And the jasmine flower in her fair young breast; night, With the wreath of pearl in her raven hair, And the brooch on her breast so bright. (O the faint, sweet smell of that jasmine flower!) And the one bird singing alone to his nest; And the one star over the tower. |