I turn away. It is the hour of fate,

And they who follow me reach every state
Mortals desire, and conquer every foe

Save death; but those who doubt or hesitate,
Condemned to failure, penury, and woe,
Seek me in vain and uselessly implore.
I answer not, and I return no more!

John James Ingalls.

OPPORTUNITY

THEY do me wrong who say I come no more
When once I knock and fail to find you in;
For every day I stand outside your door

And bid you wake, and rise to fight and win.

Wail not for precious chances passed away!
Weep not for golden ages on the wane!
Each night I burn the records of the day
At sunrise every soul is born again!

Dost thou behold thy lost youth all aghast?
Dost reel from righteous Retribution's blow?
Then turn from blotted archives of the past
And find the future's pages white as snow.

Art thou a mourner? Rouse thee from thy spell; Art thou a sinner? Sins may be forgiven; Each morning gives thee wings to flee from hell, Each night a star to guide thy feet to heaven.

Laugh like a boy at splendors that have sped,

To vanished joys be blind and deaf and dumb;

THE CRICKET

My judgments seal the dead past with its dead,
But never bind a moment yet to come.

241

Though deep in mire, wring not your hands and

weep;

I lend my arm to all who say "I can!” No shame-faced outcast ever sank so deep But yet might rise and be again a man!

Walter Malone.

THE RACERS

TIME at my elbow plucks me sore;
Yet I'll not slack my pace to hear
The one sad word which, o'er and o'er,
He whispers in my ear.

Upon my hair he dusts his rime;

I shake my head full laughingly,
For howsoever fleet be Time,

He shall not outstrip me.

James B. Kenyon.

THE CRICKET

PIPER of the fields and woods

And the fragrant solitudes,

When the trees are stripped of leaves,
And the choked brook sobs and grieves;

When the golden-rod alone

Feigns the summer hath not flown;

Then while evening airs grow chill,

And the flocks upon the hill

Huddle in the waning light,
Thou, ere falls the frosty night,
To the kine that homeward pass
Pipest 'mid the stiffening grass.
Dark may dawn the winter days,
Where thou art the summer stays;
Though the ruffian north winds roar,
Lash the roof and smite the door,
Thou from hearths secure and warm
Laughest at the brewing storm,
And thy merry minstrelsy
Sets the frozen fancy free.
Dost thou dream, O piper brave,
That from his sea-haunted grave
He who praised thy song of yore
Hath come back to hear once more,
Through high noons, thy strident strain
Borne o'er Enna's saffron plain?
Long, long since the nectared hoard
That the yellow bees have stored
In the turf above thy head
Hath, by many a passing tread
O'er the chamber of his sleep,
In the dust been trampled deep.
From his lentisk couch of rest,
In his shaggy goat-skin vest,
He shall rise no more to hear,
With the poet's raptured ear,
O'er the thymy pastures swell
Morning sounds he loved so well.
Other skies are over us,

And afar Theocritus

Slumbers deep, O piper small,

PREVISION

And he will not heed at all

Though be struck thy shrillest notes;
Yet a voice like thine still floats

O'er him where thy shy kin be

'Mid the dews of Sicily.

243

James B. Kenyon.

PREVISION

Он, days of beauty standing veiled apart,
With dreamy skies and tender, tremulous air,
In this rich Indian summer of the heart
Well may the earth her jewelled halo wear.

The long brown fields

no longer drear and dull

Burn with the glow of these deep-hearted hours,

Until the dry weeds seem more beautiful,

More spiritlike than even summer's flowers.

But yesterday the world was stricken bare,
Left old and dead in gray, enshrouding gloom;
To-day what vivid wonder of the air

Awakes the soul of vanished light and bloom?

Sharp with the clean, fine ecstasy of death,

A mightier wind shall strike the shrinking earth, An exhalation of creative breath

Wake the white wonder of the winter's birth.

In her wide Pantheon - her temple place

Wrapped in strange beauty and new comforting, We shall not miss the Summer's full-blown grace, Nor hunger for the swift, exquisite Spring.

Ada Foster Murray.

THE SPIRIT OF THE FALL

COME, on thy swaying feet,

Wild Spirit of the Fall!

With wind-blown skirts, loose hair of russet-brown, Crowned with bright berries of the bittersweet.

Trip a light measure with the hurrying leaf,
Straining thy few late roses to thy breast,

With laughter over-gay, sweet eyes drooped down,
That none may guess thy grief.

Dare not to pause for rest

Lest the slow tears should gather to their fall.

But when the cold moon rises o'er the hill,
The last numb crickets cease, and all is still,
Face down thou liest on the frosty ground
Strewed with thy fortune's wreck, alas, thine all

There, on a winter dawn, thy corse I found,
Lone Spirit of the Fall.

Danske Dandridge.

DIES ULTIMA

WHITE in her woven shroud,

Silent she lies,

Deaf to the trumpets loud

Blown through the skies;

Never a sound can mar

Her slumber long:

She is a faded star,

A finished song!