He calls off names as if they were

Just names to cause no heart to stir.

For listening you'll hear him say

66

"... and then to Aden and Bombay . . .'

Or "... 'Frisco first and then to Nome,
Across the Rocky Mountains

And never catch of voice to tell

Home ...

IN A WAITING-ROOM

ON a morning sick as the day of doom
With the drizzling grey

Of an English May,

There were few in the railway waiting-room.
About its walls were framed and varnished
Pictures of liners, fly-blown, tarnished.

The table bore a Testament

For travellers' reading, if suchwise bent.

I read it on and on,

And, thronging the Gospel of Saint John, additions, multiplications

Were figures

By some one scrawled, with sundry emendations; Not scoffingly designed,

But with an absent mind,

Plainly a bagman's counts of cost,
What he had profited, what lost;

And whilst I wondered if there could have been
Any particle of a soul

In that poor man at all,

To cypher rates of wage
Upon that printed page,

There joined in the charmless scene
And stood over me and the scribbled book
(To lend the hour's mean hue
A smear of tragedy too)

A soldier and wife, with haggard look
Subdued to stone by strong endeavour;

And then I heard

From a casual word

They were parting as they believed for ever.

But next there came

Like the eastern flame

Of some high altar, children

a pair

Who laughed at the fly-blown pictures there. "Here are the lovely ships that we,

Mother, are by and by going to see!

When we get there it's 'most sure to be fine,
And the band will play, and the sun will shine!”

It rained on the skylight with a din

As we waited and still no train came in;

But the words of the child in the squalid room Had spread a glory through the gloom.

THOMAS HARDY

HOME-THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD

OH, to be in England now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning

unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!

And after April, when May follows,

And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
Blossoms and dewdrops

at the bent spray's edge

That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture

The first fine careless rapture!

And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower

- Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

ROBERT BROWNING

YE MARINERS OF ENGLAND

YE Mariners of England

That guard our native seas!

Whose flag has braved a thousand years

The battle and the breeze!

Your glorious standard launch again

To match another foe;

And sweep through the deep,

While the stormy winds do blow! While the battle rages loud and long And the stormy winds do blow.

The spirits of your fathers

Shall start from every wave

For the deck it was their field of fame,
And Ocean was their grave:
Where Blake and mighty Nelson fell
Your manly hearts shall glow,
As ye sweep through the deep,
While the stormy winds do blow!
While the battle rages loud and long
And the stormy winds do blow.

Britannia needs no bulwarks,
No towers along the steep;

Her march is o'er the mountain-waves,
Her home is on the deep.
With thunders from her native oak

She quells the floods below,
As they roar on the shore,

When the stormy winds do blow! When the battle rages loud and long, And the stormy winds do blow.

The meteor flag of England

Shall yet terrific burn;

Till danger's troubled night depart

And the star of peace return.