Sing from the South-West, bring her back the tru

ants,

Nightingale and swallow, song and dipping wing.

Soft new beech-leaves, up to beamy April

Spreading bough on bough a primrose mountain,

you

Lucid in the moon, raise lilies to the skyfields,
Youngest green transfused in silver shining
through:

Fairer than the lily, than the wild white cherry:
Fair as in image my seraph love appears
Borne to me by dreams when dawn is at my eyelids:
Fair as in the flesh she swims to me on tears.

Could I find a place to be alone with heaven,

I would speak my heart out: heaven is my need. Every woodland tree is flushing like the dogwood, Flashing like the whitebeam, swaying like the

reed.

Flushing like the dogwood crimson in October; Streaming like the flag-reed South-West blown; Flashing as in gusts the sudden-lighted whitebeam: All seem to know what is for heaven alone.

GEORGE MEREDITH.

CHORUS FROM

ATALANTA IN CALYDON

BEFORE the beginning of years
There came to the making of man

Time, with a gift of tears;

Grief, with a glass that ran;

Pleasure, with pain for leaven;

Summer, with flowers that fell; Remembrance fallen from heaven, And madness risen from hell; Strength without hands to smite; Love that endures for a breath; Night, the shadow of light,

And life, the shadow of death.

And the high gods took in hand
Fire, and the falling of tears,
And a measure of sliding sand
From under the feet of the years;
And froth and drift of the sea;
And dust of the labouring earth;
And bodies of things to be

In the houses of death and of birth;
And wrought with weeping and laughter,
And fashioned with loathing and love,
With life before and after

And death beneath and above,

For a day and a night and a morrow,

That his strength might endure for a span With travail and heavy sorrow,

The holy spirit of man.

From the winds of the north and the south

They gathered as unto strife; They breathed upon his mouth, They filled his body with life; Eyesight and speech they wrought For the veils of the soul therein,

A time for labour and thought,
A time to serve and to sin;
They gave him light in his ways,
And love, and a space for delight,
And beauty and length of days,
And night, and sleep in the night.
His speech is a burning fire;
With his lips he travaileth;
In his heart is a blind desire,

In his eyes foreknowledge of death;
He weaves, and is clothed with derision;
Sows, and he shall not reap;

His life is a watch or a vision

Between a sleep and a sleep.

ALGERNON SWINBURNE.

DAISY

WHERE the thistle lifts a purple crown
Six foot out of the turf,

And the harebell shakes on the windy hill — O the breath of the distant surf!

The hills look over on the South,
And southward dreams the sea;
And with the sea-breeze hand in hand
Came innocence and she.

Where 'mid the gorse the raspberry
Red for the gatherer springs,
Two children did we stray and talk
Wise, idle, childish things.

She listened with big-lipped surprise,

Breast-deep 'mid flower and spine: Her skin was like a grape, whose veins Run snow instead of wine.

She knew not those sweet words she spake,
Nor knew her own sweet way;

But there's never a bird, so sweet a song
Thronged in whose throat that day.

O, there were flowers in Storrington
On the turf and on the spray;
But the sweetest flower on Sussex hills
Was the Daisy-flower that day!

Her beauty smoothed earth's furrowed face.
She gave me tokens three:-

A look, a word of her winsome mouth,
And a wild raspberry.

A berry red, a guileless look,

A still word, strings of sand!

And yet they made my wild, wild heart
Fly down to her little hand.

For standing artless as the air,
And candid as the skies,

She took the berries with her hand,
And the love with her sweet eyes.

The fairest things have fleetest end,'
Their scent survives their close:

But the rose's scent is bitterness
To him that loved the rose.

She looked a little wistfully,
Then went her sunshine way: -
The sea's eye had a mist on it,
And the leaves fell from the day.

She went her unremembering way,
She went and left in me
The pang of all the partings gone,
And partings yet to be.

She left me marvelling why my soul
Was sad that she was glad;
At all the sadness in the sweet,
The sweetness in the sad.

Still, still I seemed to see her, still
Look up with soft replies,

And take the berries with her hand,
And the love with her lovely eyes.

Nothing begins, and nothing ends,
That is not paid with moan;
For we are born in others' pain
And perish in our own.

FRANCIS THOMPSON.