And lifts us unawares

Out of all meaner cares.

Honor to those whose words or deeds
Thus help us in our daily needs,
And by their overflow

Raise us from what is low.

Thus thought I, as by night I read
Of the great army of the dead,
The trenches cold and damp,
The starved and frozen camp, —

The wounded from the battle-plain,
In dreary hospitals of pain,
The cheerless corridors,
The cold and stony floors.

Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see

Pass through the glimmering gloom,

And flit from room to room.

And slow, as in a dream of bliss,
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls
Upon the darkening walls.

As if a door in heaven should be
Opened and then closed suddenly,
The vision came and went,
The light shone and was spent.

On England's annals, through the long
Hereafter of her speech and song,

That light its rays shall cast
From portals of the past.

A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,

Heroic womanhood.

Nor even shall be wanting here
The palm, the lily, and the spear,
The symbols that of yore

Saint Filomena bore.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Smyrna.

SMYRNA.

SMYRNA contested, with much plausibility, for the honor of being the birthplace of the blind minstrel. A cave in the vicinity is marked by tradition as Homer's retreat.

THE sunset gun has died along the sea,

It is the evening of Bairami's fête.

The torches on each tapering minaret
Flash in the rippling waters of the bay,
And purple vapor dims the droning town.

From Smyrna's dewy gardens floats the scent
Of myrtle, rose, and citron, softly blent,
Like votive incense by each zephyr blown
Around Mæonides' cave. Since he began
His deathless song, weird city of the dead!
Aged Smyrna! thou hast heard the busy tread
Of buried millions, where the caravan

Now wends its tinkling way by Meles' stream, Where ramparts moulder in the moonlight beam. Seymour Green Wheeler Benjamin.

SMYRNA.

66

HE "Ornament of Asia" and the Crown

THE

Of fair Ionia." Yea; but Asia stands

No more an empress, and Ionia's hands

Have lost their sceptre. Thou, majestic town,
Art as a diamond on a faded robe:

The freshness of thy beauty scatters yet
The radiance of that sun of Empire set,

Whose disk sublime illumed the ancient globe.
Thou sitt'st between the mountains and the sea;
The sea and mountains flatter thine array,
And fill thy courts with grandeur, not decay;
And power, not death, proclaims thy cypress tree.
Through thee, the sovereign symbols Nature lent
Her rise, make Asia's fall magnificent.

Bayard Taylor

TO A PERSIAN BOY

IN THE BAZAAR AT SMYRNA.

THE gorgeous blossoms of that magic tree
Beneath whose shade I sat a thousand nights
Breathed from their opening petals all delights
Embalmed in spice of Orient Poesy,

When first, young Persian, I beheld thine eyes,
And felt the wonder of thy beauty grow
Within my brain, as some fair planet's glow
Deepens, and fills the summer evening skies.
From under thy dark lashes shone on me
The rich, voluptuous soul of Eastern land,
Impassioned, tender, calm, serenely sad,
Such as immortal Hafiz felt when he
Sang by the fountain-streams of Rocnabad,
Or in the bowers of blissful Samarcand.

Bayard Taylor.

Teos (Sigagik).

THE TOMB OF ANACREON.

[OTHER of purple grapes, soul-soothing vine,

MOTH

Ꮇ

Whose verdant boughs their graceful tendrils twine:

Still round this urn, with youth unfading, bloom,
The gentle slope of old Anacreon's tomb.

For so the unmixed-goblet-loving sire,
Touching the livelong night his amorous lyre,
Even low in earth, upon his brows shall wear
The ruddy clustering crowns thy branches bear,
Where, though still fall the sweetest dews, the song
Distilled more sweetly from that old man's tongue.

Simonides. Tr. H. H. Milman.

0

Tmolus, the Mountain.

AN EPISTLE FROM MOUNT TMOLUS.

TO RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.

I.

FRIEND, were you but crouched on Tmolus' side,

In the warm myrtles, in the golden air

Of the declining day, which half lays bare, Half drapes, the silent mountains and the wide Embosomed vale, that wanders to the sea;

And the far sea, with doubtful specks of sail, And farthest isles, that slumber tranquilly

Beneath the Ionian autumn's violet veil;
Were you but with me, little were the need
Of this imperfect artifice of rhyme,

Where the strong Fancy peals a broken chime
And the ripe brain but sheds abortive seed.
But I am solitary, and the curse,

Or blessing, which has clung to me from birth,