Men stood and saw their all caught up in char- And finds no spot of all the world my own. iots of flame

No mantle falling from the sky they ever thought to claim,

And empty-handed as the dead, they turned away and smiled,

And bore a stranger's household gods and saved a stranger's child!

What valor brightened into shape, like statues in a hall,

When on their dusky panoply the blazing torches fall,

Stood bravely out, and saw the world spread wings of fiery flight,

And not a trinket of a star to crown disastered night!

From these the feeble heart and long-fallen His children's looks, that brighten at the blaze,

mind

An easy compensation seem to find.

Here may be seen, in bloodless pomp arrayed,
The pasteboard triumph and the cavalcade;
Processions formed for piety and love,
A mistress or a saint in every grove.

By sports like these are all their cares beguiled:
The sports of children satisfy the child.
Each nobler aim, repressed by long control,
Now sinks at last, or feebly mans the soul,
While low delights, succeeding fast behind,
In happier meanness occupy the mind.

While his loved partner, boastful of her hoard,
Displays her cleanly platter on the board;
And haply, too, some pilgrim, hither led,
With many a tale repays the nightly bed.
Thus every good his native wilds impart
Imprint the patriot passion on his heart,
And even those hills, that round his mansion
rise,

Enhance the bliss his scanty fund supplies.
Dear is that shed to which his soul conforms
And dear the hill which lifts him to the storms;
And as a child when scaring sounds molest,

As in those domes, where Cæsars once bore Clings close and closer to the mother's breast.

sway,

Defaced by time, and tottering in decay,

There in the ruin, heedless of the dead,

The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed, And, wondering man could want the larger pile,

Exults, and owns his cottage with a smile.

My soul, turn from them, turn we to survey
Where rougher climes a nobler race display;
Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansions
tread

And force a churlish soil for scanty bread.
No product here the barren hills afford
But man and steel, the soldier and his sword;
No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array,
But winter lingering chills the lap of May;
No zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast,

But meteors glare, and stormy glooms invest. For this, for everything, we are out of tune:

Yet still, e'en here, content can spread a charm,

Redress the clime, and all its rage disarm.
Though poor the peasant's hut, his feasts but
small,

He sees his little lot the lot of all;
Sees no contiguous palace rear its head,
To shame the meanness of his humble shed;
No costly lord the sumptuous banquet deal,
To make him loathe his vegetable meal;
But calm, and bred in ignorance and toil,
Each wish contracting, fits him to the soil.

It moves us not. Great God! I'd rather be

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn!

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea. Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn!

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH.

A CHAMBER SCENE.

Cheerful at morn, he wakes from short repose,READ softly through these

Breasts the keen air, and carols as he goes;
With patient angle trolls the finny deep,
Or drives the venturous plowshare to the
steep;

Or seeks the den where snow-tracks mark

amoros

For every bough is hung with life,
And kisses, in harmonious strife,
Unloose their sharp and winged perfumes:
From Afric, and the Persian looms,

The carpet's silken leaves have sprung,
And heaven, in its blue bounty, flung
These starry flowers, and azure blooms.

Tread softly! by a creature fair
The deity of love reposes,

OURNEYING down the Rhone on a summer's day, you have perhaps felt the sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks in certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose, like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generations whose breath is in their nostrils, and making their dwellings a desolation. Strange contrast, you may have thought, between the effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of common-place houses, which in their best days were but the sign of a sor

did life, belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era; and the effect produced by these ruins on the castled Rhine, which have crumbled and mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps, that they seem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain pine; nay, even in the day when they were built they must have had this fitness, as if they had been raised by an earth-born race, who had inherited from their mighty parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of romance! If those robber-barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres, they had a certain.grandeur of the wild beast in them, they were forest boars with tusks, tearing and rending, not the ordinary grunter; they represented the demon forces forever in collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life; they made a fine contrast in the picture with the wandering minstrel, the soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse, and the timid Israelite. That was a time of color, when the sunlight fell on glancing steel and floating banners; a time of adventure and fierce struggle, nay, of living, religious art and religious enthusiasm; for were not cathedrals built in those days, and did not great emperors leave their Western palaces to die before the infidel strongholds in the sacred East? Therefore it is that these Rhine castles thrill me with a sense of poetry: they belong to the grand historic life of humanity, and raise up for me the vision of an epoch. But these deadtinted, hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppress me with the feeling that human life, very much of it, is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a cruel conviction that the lives of these ruins are the traces of, were part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers. MARIAN EVANS CROSS. ("George Eliot.")