Into the dawn that is to be!

Only the lamp in the anchored bark
Sends its glimmer across the dark,
And the heavy breathing of the sea
Is the only sound that comes to me.
NASHANT, Sept. 8, 1880,
four o'clock in the morning.

I look, but recognize no more

The very pathway to my door
Objects familiar to my view;

Is an enchanted avenue.

All things are changed. One mass of shade,

The elm-trees drop their curtains

down;

By palace, park, and colonnade
I walk as in a foreign town.

The very ground beneath my feet
Is clothed with a diviner air;
White marble paves the silent street
And glimmers in the empty square.

THE FOUR LAKES OF MADI- Illusion! Underneath there lies

SON.

FOUR limpid lakes,-four Naiades
Or sylvan deities are these,

In flowing robes of azure dressed;
Four lovely handmaids, that uphold
Their shining mirrors, rimmed with
gold,

To the fair city in the West.
By day the coursers of the sun
Drink of these waters as they run

Their swift diurnal round on high;
By night the constellations glow
Far down the hollow deeps below,
And glimmer in another sky.
Fair lakes, serene and full of light,
Fair town, arrayed in robes of white,

How visionary ye appear!
All like a floating landscape seems,
In cloud-land or the land of dreams,
Bathed in a golden atmosphere !

MOONLIGHT.

As a pale phantom with a lamp
Ascends some ruin's haunted stair,
So glides the moon along the damp
Mysterious chambers of the air.

Now hidden in cloud, and now re-
vealed,

As if this phantom, full of pain, Were by the crumbling walls concealed,

And at the windows seen again.
Until at last, serene and proud

In all the splendour of her light,
She walks the terraces of cloud,
Supreme as Empress of the Night.

The common life of every day;
Only the spirit glorifies

With its own tints the sober gray.

In vain we look, in vain uplift

Our eyes to heaven, if we are blind;
We see but what we have the gift
Of seeing; what we bring we find.
December 20 1878.

TO THE AVON.

FLOW on, sweet river! like his verse
Who lies beneath this sculptured
hearse;

Nor wait beside the churchyard wall
For him who cannot hear thy call.

Thy playmate once; I see him now
A boy with sunshine on his brow,
And hear in Stratford's quiet street
The patter of his little feet.

I see him by thy shallow edge
Wading knee-deep amid the sedge;
And lost in thought, as if thy stream
Were the swift river of a dream.

He wonders whitherward it flows;
And fain would follow where it goes,
To the wide world, that shall erelong
Be filled with his melodious song.

Flow on, fair stream! That dream is
o'er ;

He stands upon another shore;
A vaster river near him flows,
And still he follows where it goes.