That pious thoughts, which visit at new graves In tender pilgrimage, will cease to go So duly and so oft, and when grass waves Over the past-away, there may be then No resurrection in the minds of men. LOVE BETTERED BY TIME. LOVE, dearest lady, such as I would speak, Lives not within the humor of the eye; Not being but an outward phantasy That skims the surface of a tinted cheek, Else it would wane with beauty, and grow weak, As if the rose made summer-and so lie Amongst the perishable things that die, Unlike the love which I would give and seek; Whose health is of no hue-to feel decay With cheeks' decay, that have a rosy prime. Love is its own great loveliness al way, And takes new beauties from the touch of time; Its bough owns no December and no May, It is not death to know this-but to But bears its blossoms into winter's [From The Legend of St. Olaf's Kirk.] VALBORG WATCHING AXEL'S DEPARTURE. AT kirk knelt Valborg, the cold altar-stone The dull tramp of his troopers, up she fared She pushed her face between the mullions, looked And through the clear air watched it, tossing, pass And with him brave the sea-breeze. Aimlessly She sought the scattered gold-threads that had formed With dull do-over of mean drudgeries, And miserable cheer of pitying mouths Whistling and whipping through small round of change How slow the crutches of the limping years! I gave my precious one back to the daisies, From where they caught their color she came; HE erred, no doubt, perhaps he And now, when I look in the face of sinned; a daisy, My little girl's face I see, I see! My tears, down dropping, with theirs commingle, And they give my precious one back to me. LORD HOUGHTON (RICHARD MONCKTON MILNES). SINCE YESTERDAY. I'm not where I was yesterday, How catch his greeting tone, And thus I went up to his door, And they told me he was gone! Oh! what is Life but a sum of love, And not for those that fall! And now how mighty a sum of love Is lost for ever to me I have lost a thought that many a No, I'm not what I was yesterday, year Though change there be little to see. |