How strange the sculptures that adorn these towers! This crowd of statues, in whose folded sleeves Birds build their nests; while canopied with leaves Parvis and portal bloom like trellised bowers, And vast the minster seems a cross of flowers!

But fiends and dragons on the gargoyled eaves Watch the dead Christ between the living thieves, And, underneath, the traitor Judas lowers! Ah! from what agonies of heart and brain,

What exultations trampling on despair,
What tenderness, what tears, what hate of wrong,
What passionate outcry of a soul in pain,

Uprose this poem of the earth and air,
This medieval miracle of song!

I enter, and I see thee in the gloom

Of the long aisles, O poet saturnine!

And strive to make my steps keep pace with thine. The air is filled with some unknown perfume; The congregation of the dead make room

For thee to pass; the votive tapers shine; Like rooks that haunt Ravenna's grove of pine The hovering echoes fly from tomb to tomb. From the confessionals I hear arise

Rehearsals of forgotton tragedies,

And lamentations from the crypts below; And then a voice celestial, that begins

With the pathetic words, "Although your sins As scarlet be," and ends with as the snow."

I lift mine eyes, and all the windows blaze
With forms of saints and holy men who died,
Here martyred and hereafter glorified;
And the great Rose upon its leaves displays
Christ's Triumph, and the angelic roundelays,
With splendor upon splendor multiplied;
And Beatrice again at Dante's side

No more rebukes, but smiles her words of praise. And then the organ sounds, and unseen choirs Sing the old Latin hymns of peace and love, And benedictions of the Holy Ghost;

And the melodious bells among the spires

O'er all the house tops and through heaven above Proclaim the elevation of the Host!

O star of morning and of liberty!

O bringer of the light, whose splendor shines
Above the darkness of the Apennines,
Forerunner of the day that is to be!

The voices of the city and the sea,

The voices of the mountains and the pines, Repeat thy song, till the familiar lines Are footpaths for the thought of Italy! Thy fame is blown abroad from all the heights, Through all the nations, and a sound is heard, As of a mighty wind, and men devout, Strangers of Rome, and the new proselytes, In their own language hear thy wondrous word, And many are amazed and many doubt. -Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

C

LEAR, placid Leman! thy contrasted lake,
With the wild world I dwelt in, is a thing
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake
Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring.
This quiet sail is as a noiseless wing

To waft me from distraction; once I loved

Torn ocean's roar, but thy soft murmuring
Sounds sweet as if a sister's voice reproved, [moved.
That I with stern delights should e'er have been so

It is the hush of night, and all between
Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,
Mellowed and mingling, yet distinctly seen,
Save darkened Jura, whose capt heights appear
Precipitously steep; and drawing near,

There breathes a living fragrance from the shore, Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear Drops the light drip of the suspended oar, Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more;

He is an evening reveler, who makes His life an infancy, and sings his fill; At intervals, some bird from out the brakes Starts into a voice a moment, then is still. There seems a floating whisper on the hill, But that is fancy; for the starlight dews All silently their tears of love instill, Weeping themselves away. till they infuse Deep into Nature's breast the spirit of her hues. -Lord Byron.

Burned on the water; the poop was beaten gold;
Purple on the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were lovesick with them; the oars were silver,

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water, which they beat, to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion (cloth-of-gold of tissue),
O'erpicturing that Venus, where we see
The fancy outwork nature; on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers colored fans, whose winds did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid, did.

Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthroned in the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.

H

EAVEN'S verge extreme

Reverberates the bomb's descending star

And sounds that mingled laugh, and shout, and scream,
To freeze the blood, in one discordant jar,

Rung to the pealing thunderbolts of war.
Whoop after whoop with rack the ear assailed,
As if unearthly friends had burst their bar;
While rapidly the marksman's shot prevailed,
And aye, as if for death, some lonely trumpet wailed.

They looked up to the hills, where fire o'er hung
The bandit groups in one Vesuvian glare;

Or swept, far seen, the tower, whose clock unrung,
Told elgible that midnight of despair.
She faints-she falters-the heroic fair,

As he the sword and plume in haste arrayed,

One short embrace-he clasped his dearest care;
But hark! what nearer war-drum shakes the glade!
Joy, joy! Columbia's friends are trampling through the
shade!

They came of every race, the mingled swarm,
Far rung the groves and gleamed the midnight grass
With flambeau, javelin, and naked arm;

As warriors wheeled their culverins of brass,
Sprung from the woods, a bold athletic mass,
Whom virtue fires, and liberty combines;
And first the wild Moravian yagers pass,
His plumed host the dark Iberian joins;
And Scotia's sword beneath the Highland thistle shines.
And in the buskined hunters of the deer
To Albert's home with shout and cymbal throng,