Why you who would not hurt a mouse,
Can torture so your lover.

You give your coffee to the cat,

You stroke the dog for coming,

And all your face grows kinder at

The little brown bee's humming.

But when he haunts your door,-the town
Marks coming and marks going,-

You seem to have stitched your eyelids down
To that long piece of sewing!

You never give a look, not you,

Nor drop him a "Good-morning,"
To keep his long day warm and blue,
So fretted by your scorning.

She shook her head: "The mouse and bee
For crumb or flower will linger;
The dog is happy at my knee,
The cat purrs at my finger.

"But he to him, the least thing given
Means great things at a distance;

He wants my world, my sun, my heaven,
Soul, body, whole existence.

"They say love gives as well as takes;
But I'm a simple maiden,-

My mother's first smile when she wakes I still have smiled and prayed in.

"I only know my mother's love

Which gives all and asks nothing,
And this new loving sets the groove
Too much the way of loathing.
"Unless he gives me all in change,
I forfeit all things by hm:

The risk is terrible and strange

I tremble, doubt,-deny him. '

"He's a sweetest friend, or hardest foe, Best angel or worse devil;

I either hate or love him so,

I can't be merely civil!

"You trust a woman who puts forth

Her blossoms thick as summers? You think she dreams what love is worth Who casts it to new-comers?

"Such love's a cowslip-ball to fling, A moment's pretty pastime;

I give all me, if anything,

The first time and the last time.

"Dear neighbor of the trellised house,
A man should murmur never,
Though treated worse than dog or mouse
Till doted on forever!"

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

OUT Enoch yearned to see her face again;

BUT

"If I might look on her sweet face again And know that she is happy." So the thought

Haunted and harassed him, and drove him forth
At evening when the dull November day
Was growing duller twilight, to the hill.

There he sat down gazing on all below :

There did a thousand memories roll upon him
Unspeakable for sadness. By and by
The ruddy square of comfortable light,
Far-blazing from the rear of Philip's house,
Allured him, as the beacon-blaze allures
The bird of passage, till he madly strikes
Against it, and beats out his weary life.

For Philip's dwelling fronted on the street,
The latest house to landward; but behind,
With one small gate that opened on the waste,
Flourished a little garden, square and walled:
And in it throve an ancient evergreen,
A yew tree, and all around it ran a walk

Of shingle, and a walk divided it :

But Enoch shunned the middle walk and stole

Up by the wall, behind the yew; and thence
That which he better might have shunned if griefs
Like his have worse or better, Enoch saw.

For cups and silver on the burnished board
Sparkled and shone, so genial was the hearth;
And on the right hand of the hearth he saw
Philip, the slighted suitor of old times,
Stout, rosy, with his babe across his knees;
And o'er her second father stoopt a girl,
A later but a loftier Annie Lee,
Fair-haired and tall, and from her lifted hand
Dangled a length of ribbon and a ring

To tempt the babe, who reared his creasy arms,
Caught at and ever missed it, and they laughed :

And on the left hand of the hearth he saw
The mother glancing often toward her babe,
But turning now and then to speak with him,
Her son, who stood beside her tall and strong,
And saying that which pleased him, for he smiled.

Now when the dead man come to life beheld His wife his wife no more, and saw the babe Hers, yet not his, upon the father's knee, And all the warmth, the peace, the happiness, And his own children tall and beautiful, And him, that other, reigning in his place, Lord of his rights, and of his children's love,Then he, though Miriam Lane had told him all, Because things seen are mightier than things heard, Staggered and shook, holding the branch, and

feared

To send abroad a shrill and terrible cry,

Which in one moment, like the blast of doom,
Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth.

He therefore, turning softly like a thief,
Lest the harsh shingle should grate under foot,
And feeling all along the garden wall,
Lest he should swoon and tumble and be found,
Crept to the grate and opened it, and closed,
As lightly as a sick man's chamber-door,
Behind him, and came out upon the waste.

And there he would have knelt, but that his knees
Were feeble, so that falling prone, he dug
His fingers into the wet earth, and prayed.

He was full of joke and jest,

But all his merry quips are o'er;

To see him die, across the waste

His son and heir doth ride post-haste,

But he'll be dead before.

Every one for his own!

The night is starry and cold, my friend,

And the New Year, blithe and bold, my friend,
Comes up to take his own.

How hard he breathes! over the snow
I heard just now the crowing cock.
The shadows flicker to and fro;

The cricket chirps: the light burns low:
'Tis nearly twelve o'clock.

Shake hands before you die.

Old year, we'll dearly rue for you:
What is it we can do for you?
Speak out before you die.

His face is growing sharp and thin.
Alack! our friend is gone.
Close up his eyes; tie up his chin:

Step from the corpse, and let him in

That standeth there alone,

And waiteth at the door.

There's a new foot on the floor, my friend, And a new face at the door, my friend,

A new face at the door.

-Alfred Tennyson.

Time.

Time the supreme!-Time is eternity;
Pregnant with all eternity can give;
Pregnant with all that makes archangels smile.
Who murders time, he crushes in the birth
A power ethereal, only not adored.

Ah! how unjust to Nature and himself,
Is thoughtless, thankless, inconsistent man!
Like children babbling nonsense in their sports,
We censure Nature for a span too short:
That span too short, we tax as tedious too;
Torture invention, all expedients tire,
To lash the lingering moments into speed,
And whirl us (happy riddance!) from ourselves.
Art, brainless art! our furious charioteer
(For Nature's voice, unstifled, would recall,)

Drives headlong towards the precipice of death! Death, most our dread; death thus more dreadful made:

O, what a riddle of absurdity!

Leisure is pain; take off our chariot wheels:

How heavily we drag the load of life!
Blest leisure is our curse: like that of Cain,
It makes us wander; wander earth around
To fly that tyrant, Thought. As Atlas groaned
The world beneath, we groan beneath an hour.
We cry for mercy to the next amusement:
The next amusement mortgages our fields;
Slight inconvenience! prisons hardly frown,
From hateful Time if prisons set us free.
Yet when Death kindly tenders us relief,
We call him cruel; years to moments shrink,
Ages to years. The telescope is turned.
To man's false optics (from his folly false)
Time, in advance, behind him hides his wings,
And seems to creep, decrepit with his age;
Behold him when past by; what then is seen
But his broad pinions, swifter than the winds?
And all mankind, in contradiction strong,
Rueful, aghast, cry out on his career.

Ye well arrayed! ye lilies of our land!
Ye lilies made! who neither toil nor spin
(As sister-lilies might), if not so wise
As Solomon, more sumptuous to the sight!