C. K. PAUL.

LINES

In the merry hay-time we raked side by side,
In the harvest he whispered-Wilt thou be my bride?
And my girl-heart bounded-Forgive, God, the crime,
If I loved him more than Thee in the merry hay-time.

In the sad hay-time I sit on the grass,

The scythe whistles clear, the merry mowers pass;
But he cometh never, for under the lime

Is a long low hillock since the last hay-time.

HERMAN MERIVALE.

FROM "THE WHITE PILGRIM "

Thordisa in the agony of lost love calls on Death, the White Pilgrim, to appear to her.

THORDISA.

Spirit, I know thee not. I look on thee

With awe, but not with terror. All my fears

Fall from me as a garment.

Art thou

PILGRIM.

Hush!

Miscall me not! Men have miscalled me much;

Have given harsh names and harsher thoughts to me,
Reviled and evil entreated me,

Built me strange temples as an unknown god,
Then called me idol, devil, unclean thing,
And to rude insult bowed my godhead down.
Miscall me not! for men have marred my form,
And in the earth-born grossness of their thought
Have coldly modelled me of their own clay,
Then fear to look on that themselves have made.
Miscall me not! ye know not what I am,
But ye shall see me face to face, and know.
I take all sorrows from the sorrowful,
And teach the joyful what it is to joy.

I gather in my land-locked harbour's clasp,
The shattered vessels of a vexèd world,
And even the tiniest ripple upon life

Is to my calm sublime as tropic storm.

When other leech-craft fails the breaking brain,
I, only, own the anodyne to still

Its eddies into visionless repose.

The face, distorted with life's latest pang,
I smooth, in passing, with an angel wing;
And from beneath the quiet eyelids steal
The hidden glory of the eyes, to give
A new and nobler beauty to the rest.

Belie me not; the plagues that walk the Earth,
The wasting pain, the sudden agony,

Famine, and War, and Pestilence and all

The terrors that have darkened round my nameThese are the works of Life, they are not mine; Vex when I tarry, vanish when I come,

Instantly melting into perfect peace,

As at His word, whose master spirit I am,
The troubled waters slept on Galilee.

Tender I am, not cruel: when I take

The shape most hard to human eyes, and pluck The little baby-blossom yet unblown,

'Tis but to graft it on a kindlier stem,

And leaping o'er the perilous years of growth,
Unswept of sorrow, and unscathed of wrong,
Clothe it at once with rich maturity.
'Tis I that give a soul to memory;

For round the follies of the bad I throw

The mantle of a kind forgetfulness;

But, canonised in dear Love's calendar,

I sanctify the good for evermore.

Miscall me not! my generous fulness lends Home to the homeless, to the friendless, friends; To the starved babe, the mother's tender breast; Wealth to the poor, and to the restless, rest!

Shall I unveil, Thordisa? If I do,

Then shall I melt at once the iron bonds

Of this mortality that fetters thee.

Gently, so gently like a tired child,

Will I enfold thee. But thou mayst not look
Upon my face and stay. In the busy haunts
Of human life, in the temple and the street,
And when the blood runs fullest in the veins,
Unseen, undreamed of, I am often by,
Divided from the giant in his strength
But by the thickness of this mighty veil,
But none can look behind that veil, and stay.
Shall I withdraw it now?

THORDISA.

A little while

Give me a little yet! Spirit, I love him,
And would not go till I have heard once more
In accents, whose rich music was the tune
To which my life was set, not that he loves me,
But that he loved me once. Spirit, not yet!
I am all too earthly in my thoughts of him;
I am not fit for-

PILGRIM.

Hush! Miscall me not!

FROM "OLD AND NEW ROME"

Still, as we saunter down the crowded street,

On our own thoughts intent, and plans, and pleasures,

For miles and miles beneath our idle feet,

Rome buries from the day yet unknown treasures.

The whole world's alphabet, in every line
Some stirring page of history she recalls,
Her Alpha is the Prison Mamertine,

Her Omega, St. Paul's, without the walls.

Above, beneath, around, she weaves her spells,
And ruder hands unweave them all in vain :
Who once within her fascination dwells,

Leaves her with but one thought-to come again.

So cast thine obol into Trevi's fountain-
Drink of its waters, and, returning home,
Pray that by land or sea, by lake or mountain,
"All roads alike may lead at last to Rome."