"Sleep, sleep to-day, tormenting cares, Of earth and folly born!" Solemnly sang the village choir

On that sweet Sabbath morn.

Through the closed blinds the golden sun
Poured in a dusty beam,
Like the celestial ladder seen
By Jacob in his dream.

And ever and anon, the wind

Sweet-scented with the hay,

Turned o'er the hymn-book's fluttering leaves

That on the window lay.

Long was the good man's sermon,
Yet it seemed not so to me;
For he spake of Ruth the beautiful,
And still I thought of thee.

Long was the prayer he uttered,

Yet it seemed not so to me; For in my heart I prayed with him,

And still I thought of thee.

But now, alas! the place seems changed;
Thou art no longer here:

Part of the sunshine of the scene
With thee did disappear.

Though thoughts, deep-rooted in my heart,
Like pine-trees dark and high,
Subdue the light of noon, and breathe
A low and ceaseless sigh;

This memory brightens o'er the past,

As when the sun, concealed Behind some cloud that near us hangs, Shines on a distant field.

THE ARSENAL AT SPRINGFIELD

On his wedding journey in the summer of 1843, Mr. Longfellow passed through Springfield, Massachusetts, and visited the United States arsenal there, in company with Mr. Charles Sumner. "While Mr. Sumner was endeavoring," says Mr. S. Longfellow, "to impress upon the attendant that the money expended upon these weapons of war would have been much better spent upon a great library, Mrs. Longfellow pleased her husband by remarking how like an organ looked the ranged and shining gun - barrels which covered the walls from floor to ceiling, and suggesting what mournful music Death would bring from them. • We grew quite warlike against war,' she wrote, and I urged H. to write a peace poem." The poem was written

some months later.

And thy brave and thrifty burghers boasted, in their uncouth rhymne,

That their great imperial city stretched its hand through every clime.

In the court-yard of the castle, bound with many an iron band,

Stands the mighty linden planted by Queen Cunigunde's hand;

On the square the oriel window, where in old heroic days

Sat the poet Melchior singing Kaiser Maximilian's praise.

Everywhere I see around me rise the wondrous world of Art:

Fountains wrought with richest sculpture standing in the common mart;

And above cathedral doorways saints and bishops carved in stone,

By a

former age commissioned as apostles

to our own.

In the church of sainted Sebald sleeps enshrined his holy dust,

tals

The blast of War's great organ shakes

the skies!

But beautiful as songs of the immortals, The holy melodies of love arise.

NUREMBERG

In a letter to Freiligrath, printed in the Life, I. 436, Mr. Longfellow describes with enthusiasm a day at Nuremberg, from the memory of which this poem sprang.

In the valley of the Pegnitz, where across broad meadow-lands

Rise the blue Franconian mountains, Nuremberg, the ancient, stands.

Quaint old town of toil and traffic, quaint

old town of art and song, Memories haunt thy pointed gables, like

the rooks that round them throng:

Memories of the Middle Ages, when the

emperors, rough and bold, Had their dwelling in thy castle, timedefying, centuries old;

from

age to age their trust;

In the church of sainted Lawrence stands a pix of sculpture rare,

Like the foamy sheaf of fountains, rising through the painted air.

Here, when Art was still religion, with a simple, reverent heart,

Lived and labored Albrecht Dürer, the Evangelist of Art;

Hence in silence and in sorrow, toiling still with busy hand,

Like an emigrant he wandered, seeking for the Better Land.

Through these streets so broad and stately,

these obscure and dismal lanes, Walked of yore the Mastersingers, chanting rude poetic strains.

From remote and sunless suburbs came they to the friendly guild, Building nests in Fame's great temple, as in spouts the swallows build.

As the weaver plied the shuttle, wove he too the mystic rhyme,

And the smith his iron measures hammered to the anvil's chime;

Thanking God, whose boundless wisdom makes the flowers of poesy bloom In the forge's dust and cinders, in the tissues of the loom.

Here Hans Sachs, the cobbler-poet, laureate of the gentle craft,

Wisest of the Twelve Wise Masters, in huge folios sang and laughed.

But his house is now an ale-house, with a nicely sanded floor,

The following passage from Thierry was sent to Mr. Longfellow by an unknown correspondent, who sug gested it as a theme for a poem.

Dans les moments de la vie où la réflexion devient plus calme et plus profonde, où l'intérêt et l'avarice parlent moins haut que la raison, dans les instants de chagrin domestique, de maladie, et de péril de mort, les nobles se repentirent de posséder des serfs, comme d'une chose peu agréable à Dieu, qui avait créé tous les hommes à son image. Conquête de l'Angleterre.

In his chamber, weak and dying,
Was the Norman baron lying;
Loud, without, the tempest thundered,
And the castle-turret shook.

In this fight was Death the gainer,
Spite of vassal and retainer,
And the lands his sires had plundered,
Written in the Doomsday Book.

By his bed a monk was seated, Who in humble voice repeated

above the door;

From the missal on his knee;

And, amid the tempest pealing,
Sounds of bells came faintly stealing,
Bells, that from the neighboring kloster
Rang for the Nativity.

In the hall, the serf and vassal
Held, that night, their Christmas wassail;
Many a carol, old and saintly,

Sang the minstrels and the waits;

And so loud these Saxon gleemen Sang to slaves the songs of freemen, That the storm was heard but faintly, Knocking at the castle-gates.

Till at length the lays they chanted Reached the chamber terror-haunted, Where the monk, with accents holy,

Whispered at the baron's ear.

Tears upon his eyelids glistened,
As he paused awhile and listened,
And the dying baron slowly

Turned his weary head to hear.

This poem was begun October 2, 1845, and on the 13th of the next month Mr. Longfellow noted in his diary: "Wlked in the garden and tried to finish the Ode to a Child; but could not find the exact expres sions I wanted, to round and complete the whole." After the publication of the volume containing it, he wrote: "The poem To a Child and The Old Clock on the Stairs seem to be the favorites. This is the best answer to my assailants." Possibly the charge was made then as frequently afterward that his poetry was an echo of foreign scenes. It is at any rate noticeable that in this poem he first strongly expressed that domestic sentiment which was to be so conspicuous in his after work. It will be remembered that he was married to Miss Appleton in July, 1843, and his second

child was born at the time when he was writing this ode. Five years later he made the following entry in his diary: Some years ago, writing an Ode to a Child, I spoke of

The buried treasures of the miser, Time.

What was my astonishment to-day, in reading for the first time in my life Wordsworth's beautiful ode On the Power of Sound, to read

All treasures hoarded by the miser, Time."

DEAR child! how radiant on thy mother's knee,

With merry-making eyes and jocund smiles,

Thou gazest at the painted tiles,
Whose figures grace,

With many a grotesque form and face,
The ancient chimney of thy nursery!
The lady with the gay macaw,
The dancing girl, the
grave bashaw
With bearded lip and chin;
And, leaning idly o'er his gate,
Beneath the imperial fan of state,
The Chinese mandarin.

With what a look of proud command
Thou shakest in thy little hand
The coral rattle with its silver bells,
Making a merry tune!

Thousands of years in Indian seas
That coral grew, by slow degrees,
Until some deadly and wild monsoon
Dashed it on Coromandel's sand!
Those silver bells
Reposed of yore,
As shapeless ore,

Far down in the deep-sunken wells
Of darksome mines,

In some obscure and sunless place,
Beneath huge Chimborazo's base,
Or Potosí's o'erhanging pines!
And thus for thee, O little child,
Through many a danger and escape,
The tall ships passed the stormy cape;
For thee in foreign lands remote,
Beneath a burning, tropic clime,

The Indian peasant, chasing the wild goat
Himself as swift and wild,

In falling, clutched the frail arbute,
The fibres of whose shallow root,
Uplifted from the soil, betrayed
The silver veins beneath it laid,
The buried treasures of the miser, Time.

But, lo thy door is left ajar! Thou hearest footsteps from afar !