Then steal away, give little warning,

Choose thine own time;

Say not Good-night,— but in some brighter clime Bid me Good-morning.

40.

SWEET PERIL.

ALAS! how easily things go wrong-
A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,
And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.

ANNA LETITIA BARBAULD.

Alas! how hardly things go right —
'Tis hard to watch in a summer night,

For the sigh will come, and the kiss will stay,
And the summer night is a winter day.

41. DEATH.

- GEORGE MACDONALD.

—

THEY die -the dead return not. Misery

Sits near an open grave, and calls them over,

A youth with hoary hair and haggard eye.

They are the names of kindred, friend, and lover, Which he so feebly calls. They all are gone, Fond wretch, all dead! Those vacant names alone, This most familiar scene, my pain, These tombs, alone remain.

Misery, my sweetest friend, oh! weep no more!
Thou wilt not be consoled? I wonder not:
For I have seen thee from thy dwelling's door
Watch the calm sunset with them, and this spot
Was even as bright and calm but transitory, -
And now thy hopes are gone, thy hair is hoary.
This most familiar scene, my pain,
These tombs, -alone remain.

- PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

42.

SORROW-SONG.

O SORROW, Sorrow, say where dost thou dwell?

In the lowest room of hell.

Art thou born of human race?

No, no, I have a furier face.

Art thou in city, town, or court?
I to every place resort.

Oh, why into the world is sorrow sent?

Men afflicted best repent.

What dost thou feed on?

Broken sleep.

What tak'st thou pleasure in?

To weep,

To sigh, to sob, to pine, to groan,
To wring my hands, to sit alone.

Oh, when, oh, when shall sorrow quiet have?

Never, never, never, never.

Never till she finds a grave.

- SAMUEL ROWLEY.

43.

DEATH'S TRIUMPH.

THE glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armor against fate:
Death lays his icy hand on kings.
Sceptre and crown

Must tumble down,

And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crooked scythe and spade.

Some men with swords may reap the field,

And plant with laurels where they kill; But their strong nerves at last must yield, They tame but one another still;

Early or late,

They stoop to fate,

And must give up their murmuring breath,
When they, pale captives! creep to death.

The garlands wither on your brow;

Then boast no more your mighty deeds; Upon death's purple altar, now,

See where the victor victim bleeds!

All heads must come

To the cold tomb,

Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet and blossom in the dust.

-JAMES SHIRLEY.

44.

TO LIFE'S PILGRIM.

FLY from the press, and dwell with soothfastness;
Suffice unto thy good, though it be small,
For hoard hath hate, and climbing tickleness;
Preise hath envie, and weal is blent o'er all.
Savour no more than thee behoven shall,
Rede well thyself that other folk can'st rede,
And Truth thee shalt deliver 'tis no drede.

That thee is sent receive in buxomness:

The wrestling of this world, asketh a fall. Here is no home, here is but wilderness.

Forth, pilgrim, forth - on, best out of thy stall; Look up on high, and thank the God of all! Weivith thy lust, and let thy ghost thee lead, And Truth thee shalt deliver - 'tis no drede.

――――――――

GEOFFREY CHAUCER.

45.

LAST LINES.

EVEN Such is time, that takes in trust
Our youth, our joys, our all we have,
And pays us but with earth and dust;
Who, in the dark and silent grave,
When we have wandered all our ways,
Shuts up the story of our days;
But from this earth, this grave, this dust,
My God shall raise me up I trust.

NOTES.

No. 1. MAN'S MORTALITY. First published in the second edition of Wastell's Microbiblion, 1629. There are doubts concerning its authorship. 1. 6. gourd which Jonas had. See Jonah, iv.

No. 4. THE RETREAT. "This poem, apart from its proper beauty, has a deeper interest, as containing in the germ Wordsworth's still higher strain, namely, his Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood. I proceeded in my first edition to say, 'I do not mean that Wordsworth had ever seen this poem when he wrote his own. The coincidences are so remarkable that it is certainly difficult to esteem them accidental; but Wordsworth was so little a reader of anything out of the way, and at the time when his Ode was composed, the Silex Scintillans was altogether out of the way, a book of such excessive rarity, that an explanation of the points of contact between the poems must be sought for elsewhere.' That this was too rashly spoken I have since had proof. A correspondent, with date July 13, 1869, has written to me, 'I have a copy of the first edition of the Silex, incomplete and very much dampstained, which I bought in a lot with several other books at the poet Wordsworth's sale.' The entire forgetfulness into which poetry, which, though not of the very highest order of all, is yet of a very high one, may fall, is strikingly exemplified in the fact that as nearly as possible two centuries intervened between the first and second editions of Vaughan's poems. The first edition of the first part of the Silex Scintillans appeared in 1650, the second edition of the book in 1847. That which is sometimes referred to as a second edition, bearing date 1655, is indeed only the first, with a new title-page and preface, and some eighty-four pages of additional matter. Oblivion overtook him from the first. Phillips in his Theatrum Poetarum, 1675, just mentions him and no more; and knows him only by his Olor Iscanus, a juvenile production, of comparatively little worth; which yet, seeing that it yields such lines as the following — they form part of a poem addressed to the unfortunate Elizabeth of Bohemia, daughter of our first James - cannot be affirmed to be of none :

'Thou seem'st a rosebud born in snow;
A flower of purpose sprung to bow
To heedless tempests and the rage
Of an incensed stormy age: