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"And I will stay, for to go were a sin,

For all a woman's tears,

And see the noble Gamelyn

Laid low with the De Veres."

The lady went with a sick heart out Into the kind fresh air,

And told her Robin all about

The abbot whom he saw there:

And how his uncle must have been
Disturbed in his failing sense,

To leave his wealth to these artful men
At hers and Robin's expense.

Sad was the stately day for all

But the Vere Abbey friars,

When the coffin was stript of its hiding pall, Amidst the hushing choirs.

Sad was the earth-dropping "dust to dust,"
And "
'our dear brother here departed;"
The lady shook at them, as shake we must;
And Robin he felt strange-hearted.

That self-same evening, nevertheless,
They returned to Locksley town,
The lady in a dumb distress,

And Robin looking down.

They went, and went, and Robin took
Long steps by his mother's side,
Till she asked him with a sad sweet look
What made him so thoughtful-eyed.

"I was thinking, mother," said little Robin, And with his own voice so true,

He spoke right out, "that if I was a king,
I'd see what those friars do."

His mother stooped with a tear of joy,
And she kissed him again and again,
And said, "My own little Robin boy,
Thou wilt be a King of Men!"

ROBIN HOOD'S FLIGHT.

Robin Hood's mother, these twelve years now,
Has been gone from her earthly home;
And Robin has paid, he scarce knew how,
A sum for a noble tomb.

The church-yard lies on a woody hill,
But open to sun and air;

It seems as if the heavens still
Were looking and smiling there.

Often when Robin looked that way,

He looked through a sweet thin tear,

But he looked in a different manner, they say, Towards the Abbey of Vere.

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Only on the haughty rich,

And on their unjust store, He'd lay his fines of equity

For his merry men and the poor.

And special was his joy no doubt (Which made the dish to curse) To light upon a good fat friar,

And carve him of his purse.

A monk to him was a toad in the hole,
And an abbot a pig in grain,
But a bishop was a baron of beef
With cut and come again.

Never poor man came for help

And went away denied; Never woman for redress,

And went away wet-eyed.

Says Robin to the poor who came To ask of him relief,

You do but get your goods again That were altered by the thief;

There, ploughman, is a sheaf of yours
Turned to yellow gold;

And, miller, there's your last year's rent, "Twill wrap thee from the cold:

And you there, Wat of Lancashire,
Who such a way have come,

Get upon your land tax, man,
And ride it merrily home.

THE HOUR IS COME.

The hour is come-too soon it cameWhen you and I, fair girl, must sever; But though as yet be strange thy name, Thy memory will be loved for ever.

We met as pilgrims on the way,

ETHICAL AND ARTISTIC NOTES.

[John Ruskin, LL.D., born in London, February. 1819. He was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he gained the Newdigate prize for poetry in 1539. He was appointed Rede Lecturer at Cambridge in 1867, and Slade Professor of Art in the University of Oxford in 1869. In 1871 he gave to the latter university £5000, for the endowment of a mastership of drawing in the Taylor Galleries. As an art critic he has exercised an important influence upon modern art, although many of his opinions have been vigorously opposed. His chief work is Modern Painters, the first volume of which appeared in 1843, the fifth and last in 1860. The preface to the last volume explains the delay in the completion of the book, and contains the following characteristic sentences, which give the key-note of all the author's work:-"In the main aim and prin ciple of the book there is no variation from its first syllable to its last. It declares the perfectness and eternal beauty of the Work of God, and tests all work of man by concurrence with, or subjection to, that And it differs from most books, and has a chance of being in some respects better for the difference, that a has not been written either for fame or for money, or for conscience' sake, but of necessity." In the comme of an active and earnest life, Mr. Ruskin has produced numerous works, of which we may note: The Sea Lamps of Architecture: The Stones of Venice; Notes on the Construction of Sheepfolds; Pre-Raphaditism; The King of the Golden River, or the Black Brothers, a Legend of Stiria, illustrated by Richard Doyle; Lectures on Architecture and Painting; Giotto and his Works in Padua: The Two Paths, being Lectures on Art and its Applica tion to Decoration and Manufacture; &c. &c. An 4mirable selection from the writings of Mr. Ruskin has been published by Smith, Elder, & Co.]

THE SACREDNESS OF HOME.

I cannot but think it an evil sign of a people when their houses are built to last for one generation only. There is a sanctity in a good man's house which cannot be renewed in every tenement that rises on its ruins: and I believe that good men would generally feel this; and that having spent their lives happily and hon ourably, they would be grieved at the close of them to think that the place of their earthly

Thy smiles made bright the gloomiest weather, abode, which had seen, and seemed almost to Yet who is there can name the day

When we shall meet again together!

Be that as 'twill, if ne'er to meet,

At least we've had one day of gladness; And oh a glimpse of joy's more sweet That it is seen through clouds of sadness. Thus did the sun-half-hid to-day

Seem lovelier in its hour of gleaming, Than had we mark'd its fervid ray Through one untired day of beaming.

THOMAS ATKINSON.

sympathize in, all their honour, their gladness, or their suffering,-that this, with all the record it bare of them, and all of material things that they had loved and ruled over, and set the stamp of themselves upon-was to be swept away as soon as there was room made for them in the grave; that no respect was to be shown to it, no affection felt for it, no good to be drawn from it by their children; that though there was a monument in the church, there was no warm monument in the hearth and house to them: that all that they ever treasured

was despised, and the places that had sheltered and comforted them were dragged down to the dust. I say that a good man would fear this; and that, far more, a good son, a noble descendant, would fear doing it to his father's house. I say that if men lived like men indeed, their houses would be temples-temples which we should hardly dare to injure, and in which it would make us holy to be permitted to live; and there must be a strange dissolution of natural affection, a strange unthankfulness for all that homes have given and parents taught, a strange consciousness that we have been unfaithful to our father's honour, or that our own lives are not such as would make our dwellings sacred to our children, when each man would fain build to himself, and build for the little | revolution of his own life only. And I look upon those pitiful concretions of lime and clay which spring up in mildewed forwardness out of the kneaded fields about our capital-upon those thin, tottering, foundationless shells of splintered wood and imitated stone- upon those gloomy rows of formalized minuteness, alike without difference and without fellowship, solitary as similar-not merely with the careless disgust of an offended eye, not merely with sorrow for a desecrated landscape, but with a painful foreboding that the roots of our national greatness must be deeply cankered when they are thus loosely struck in their native ground; that those comfortless and unhonoured dwellings are the signs of a great and spreading spirit of popular discontent; that they mark the time when every man's aim is to be in some more elevated sphere than his natural one, and every man's past life is his habitual scorn; when men build in the hope of leaving the places they have built, and live in the hope of forgetting the years that they have lived; when the comfort, the peace, the religion of home have ceased to be felt; and the crowded tenements of a struggling and restless population differ only from the tents of the Arab or the Gipsy by their less healthy openness to the air of heaven, and less happy choice of their spot of earth; by their sacrifice of liberty without the gain of rest, and of stability without the luxury of change.

household God, as well as a heavenly one; He has an altar in every man's dwelling; let men look to it when they rend it lightly and pour out its ashes. It is not a question of mere ocular delight, it is no question of intellectual pride, or of cultivated and critical fancy, how and with what aspect of durability and of completeness the domestic buildings of a nation shall be raised. It is one of those moral duties, not with more impunity to be neglected because the perception of them depends on a finely toned and balanced conscientiousness, to build our dwellings with care, and patience, and fondness, and diligent completion, and with a view to their duration at least for such a period as, in the ordinary course of national revolutions, might be supposed likely to extend to the entire alteration of the direction of local interests. This at the least; but it would be better if, in every possible instance, men built their own houses on a scale commensurate rather with their condition at the commencement than their attainments at the termination of their worldly career; and built them to stand as long as human work at its strongest can be hoped to stand; recording to their children what they had been, and from what, if so it had been permitted them, they had risen. And when houses are thus built, we may have that true domestic architecture, the beginning of all other, which does not disdain to treat with respect and thoughtfulness the small habitation as well as the large, and which invests with the dignity of contented manhood the narrowness of worldly circumstance.

I look to this spirit of honourable, proud, peaceful self-possession, this abiding wisdom of contented life, as probably one of the chief sources of great intellectual power in all ages, and beyond dispute as the very primal source of the great architecture of old Italy and France. To this day, the interest of their fairest cities depends, not on the isolated richness of palaces, but on the cherished and exquisite decoration of even the smallest tenements, of their proud periods. The most elaborate piece of architecture in Venice is a small house at the head of the Grand Canal, consisting of a ground-floor with two stories above, three This is no slight, no consequenceless evil; windows in the first and two in the second. it is ominous, infectious, and fecund of other Many of the most exquisite buildings are on fault and misfortune. When men do not love the narrower canals, and of no larger dimentheir hearths, nor reverence their thresholds, sions. One of the most interesting pieces of it is a sign that they have dishonoured both, fifteenth-century architecture in North Italy and that they have never acknowledged the is a small house in a back street, behind the true universality of that Christian worship market-place of Vicenza. It bears date 1481, which was indeed to supersede the idolatry, and the motto, Il. n'est. rose. sans. but not the piety, of the pagan. Our God is a has also only a ground-floor and two stories,

épine; it

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