Let us be patient! These severe afflictions

Not from the ground arise,

But oftentimes celestial benedictions
Assume this dark disguise.

We see but dimly through the mists and vapors ;
Amid these earthly damps

What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers
May be heaven's distant lamps.

There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath

Is but a suburb of the life elysian,

Whose portal we call Death,

She is not dead, -the child of our affection,-
But gone unto that school

Where she no longer needs our poor protection,
And Christ himself doth rule.

In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion, By guardian angels led,

Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, She lives, whom we call dead.

Day after day, we think what she is doing

In those bright realms of air;

Then up sprang Appius Claudius:

"Stop him; alive or dead! Ten thousand pounds of copper

To the man who brings his head."

He looked upon his clients;

But none would work his will.

He looked upon his lictors;

But they trembled, and stood still.

And as Virginius through the press

His way in silence cleft, Ever the mighty multitude

Fell back to right or left.

And he hath passed in safety

Unto his woful home,

And there ta en horse to tell the camp
What deeds are done in Rome.

-Thomas Babington Macaulay.

And now with noiseless step sweet memory comes
And leads me gently through her twilight;
What poet's tuneful lyre has ever sung realms
Or delicatest pencil e'er portrayed

The enchanted shadow land where memory dwells?
It has its valleys, cheerless, lone and drear,
Dark, shaded, mournful, cypress tree;
And yet its sunlit mountain tops are bathed
In heaven's own blue. Upon its craggy cliffs
Robed in the dreamy light of distant years,
Are clustered joys serene of other days.
Upon its gently sloping hillsides bend
The weeping willows o'er the sacred dust
Of dear departed ones; yet in that land,
Where'er our footsteps fall upon the shore,
They that were sleeping rise from out the dust
Of death's long, silent years, and round us stand
As erst they did before the prison tomb
Received their clay within its voiceless halls.
The heavens that bend above that land are hung
With clouds of various hues. Some dark and chill,

Surcharged with sorrow, cast their sombre shade

Upon the sunny, joyous land below.

Others are floating though the dreamy air,
White as the falling snow, their margins tinged
With gold and crimson hues; their shadows fall
Upon the flowery meads and sunny slopes,
Soft as the shadow of an angel's wing.
When the rough battle of the day is done,
And evening's peace falls gently on the heart,
I bound away, across the noisy years,
Unto the utmost verge of memory's land,
Where earth and sky in dreamy distance meet,
And memory dim with dark oblivion joins ;
Where woke the first remembered sound that fell
Upon the ear in childhood's early morn;
And, wandering thence along the rolling years,

I see the shadow of my former self,

Gliding from childhood up to man's estate;

The path of youth winds down through many a vale,
And on the brink of many a dread abyss,
From out whose darkness comes no ray of light,
Save that a phantom dances o'er the gulf
And beckons toward the verge. Again the path
Leads o'er the summit where the sunbeams fall:
And thus in light and shade, sunshine and gloom,
Sorrow and joy this life-path leads along.

-James Abram Garfield.

I

HAVE had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing, Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.