THE CHAMBERED NAUTILUS

And coral reefs lie bare,

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Where the cold sea-maids rise to sun their streaming hair.

Its webs of living gauze no more unfurl;

Wrecked is the ship of pearl!

And every chambered cell,

Where its dim dreaming life was wont to dwell,

As the frail tenant shaped his growing shell,

Before thee lies revealed,

Its irised ceiling rent, its sunless crypt unsealed!

Year after year beheld the silent toil

That spread his lustrous coil;

Still, as the spiral grew,

He left the past year's dwelling for the new,
Stole with soft step its shining archway through,

Built up its idle door,

Stretched in his last-found home, and knew the old no

more.

Thanks for the heavenly message brought by thee, Child of the wandering sea,

Cast from her lap, forlorn!

From thy dead lips a clearer note is born

Than ever Triton blew from wreathed horn!

While on mine ear it rings,

Through the deep caves of thought I hear a voice that sings

Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,

As the swift seasons roll!

Leave thy low-vaulted past!

Let each new temple, nobler than the last,

Shut thee from heaven with a dome more vast,
Till thou at length art free,

Leaving thine outgrown shell by life's unresting sea!

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

THE LAST LEAF

I SAW him once before,

As he passed by the door,

And again

The pavement stones resound,
As he totters o'er the ground
With his cane.

They say that in his prime,

Ere the pruning-knife of Time
Cut him down,

Not a better man was found

By the Crier on his round

Through the town.

But now he walks the streets,
And he looks at all he meets

Sad and wan,

And he shakes his feeble head,

That it seems as if he said,

"They are gone."

The mossy marbles rest

On the lips that he has prest

In their bloom,

THE LAST LEAF

And the names he loved to hear
Have been carved for many a year
On the tomb.

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Oliver Wendell Holmes.

GNOSIS Knowledge

THOUGHT is deeper than all speech,
Feeling deeper than all thought;
Souls to souls can never teach
What unto themselves was taught.

We are spirits clad in veils;
Man by man was never seen;
All our deep communing fails
To remove the shadowy screen.

Heart to heart was never known;
Mind with mind did never meet;
We are columns left alone

Of a temple once complete.

Like the stars that gem the sky,
Far apart, though seeming near,

In our light we scattered lie;?
All is thus but starlight here.

What is social company

But a babbling summer stream?

What our wise philosophy

But the glancing of a dream?

Only when the sun of love

Melts the scattered stars of thought,

Only when we live above

What the dim-eyed world hath taught,

YOURSELF

Only when our souls are fed

By the fount which gave them birth, And by inspiration led

Which they never drew from earth,

We, like parted drops of rain,
Swelling till they meet and run,

Shall be all absorbed again,

Melting, flowing into one.

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Christopher Pearse Cranch.

A DEATH-BED

HER suffering ended with the day,

Yet lived she at its close,

And breathed the long, long night away,

In statue-like repose.

But when the sun in all his state

Illumed the eastern skies,

She passed through Glory's morning gate

And walked in Paradise.

James Aldrich.

YOURSELF

'T is to yourself I speak; you cannot know
Him whom I call in speaking such a one,
For you beneath the earth lie buried low,
Which he, alone, as living walks upon.

You may at times have heard him speak to you,
And often wished perchance that you were he;