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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

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[From The Legend of St. Olaf's Kirk.]

VALBORG WATCHING AXEL'S DEPARTURE.

AT kirk knelt Valborg, the cold altar-stone
Reeling beneath her. Filled with choking grief
She could not say good-bye, but by a page
Her rosary sent him; and when he had climbed
His horse, and on the far-off bridge she heard

The dull tramp of his troopers, up she fared
By stair and ladder to old Steindor's post,
For he was mute, and could not nettle her
With words' cheap guise of sympathy. There perched
Beside him up among the dusty bells,

She pushed her face between the mullions, looked
Across the world of snow, lighted like day
By moon and moor-ild; saw with misty eyes
A gleam of steel, an eagle's feather tall;

And through the clear air watched it, tossing, pass
Across the sea-line; saw the ship lift sail
And blow to southward, catching light and shade
As 'mong the sheers and skerries it picked out
A crooked pathway; saw it round the ness,
And, catching one last flicker of the moon,
Fade into nothingness. With desolate steps
She left the bellman and crept down the stairs;
Heard all the air re-echoing: "He is gone!"
Felt a great sob behind her lips, and tears
Flooding the sluices of her eyes; turned toward
The empty town, and for the first time saw
That Nidaros was small and irksome, felt
First time her tether galling, and, by heaven!
Wished she'd been born a man-child, free to fare
Unhindered through the world's wide pastures, free
To stand this hour with Axel as his squire.

And with him brave the sea-breeze. Aimlessly

She sought the scattered gold-threads that had formed
Life's glowing texture: but how dull they seemed!
How bootless the long waste of lagging weeks,

With dull do-over of mean drudgeries,

And miserable cheer of pitying mouths

Whistling and whipping through small round of change
Their cowering pack of saw and circumstance!

How slow the crutches of the limping years!

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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;

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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,
Though my home be still the same,
For I have lost the veriest friend
Whomever a friend could name;
I'm not where I was yesterday,
Though change there be little to see,
For a part of myself has lapsed away
From Time to Eternity.

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 Death but to lose it all?
Weeds be for those that are left be-
hind,

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

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Though change there be little to see.

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