"And thou, by one of those still lakes That in a shining cluster lie,

On which the south wind scarcely breaks
The image of the sky,

A bower for thee and me hast made
Beneath the many-coloured shade.

"And thou dost wait and watch to meet
My spirit sent to join the blessed,
And, wondering what detains my feet
From the bright land of rest,
Dost seem, in every sound, to hear
The rustling of my footsteps near."

ODE FOR AN AGRICULTURAL CELEBRATION.

FAR back in the ages,

The plough with wreaths was crowned;
The hands of kings and sages

Entwined the chaplet round;

Till men of spoil disdained the toil

By which the world was nourished,
And dews of blood enriched the soil

Where green their laurels flourished:
-Now the world her fault repairs—

The guilt that stains her story;
And weeps her crimes amid the cares
That formed her earliest glory.

The proud throne shall crumble,
The diadem shall wane,
The tribes of earth shall humble

The pride of those who reign;
And War shall lay his pomp away;-
The fame that heroes cherish,

G

The glory earned in deadly fray
Shall fade, decay, and perish.
Honour waits, o'er all the Earth,

Through endless generations, The art that calls her harvests forth, And feeds the expectant nations.

RIZPAH.

And he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the hill before the Lord; and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of the harvest, in the first days, in the beginning of barley-harvest.

And Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until the water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest upon them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night.

2 SAMUEL, xxi. 10.

HEAR what the desolate Rizpah said,

As on Gibeah's rocks she watched the dead.
The sons of Michal before her lay,

And her own fair children, dearer than they :

By a death of shame they all had died,

And were stretched on the bare rock, side by side.

And Rizpah, once the loveliest of all

That bloomed and smiled in the court of Saul,
All wasted with watching and famine now,
And scorched by the sun her haggard brow,
Sat mournfully guarding their corpses there,
And murmured a strange and solemn air;

The low, heart-broken, and wailing strain
Of a mother that mourns her children slain:

"I have made the crags my home, and spread On their desert backs my sackcloth bed; I have eaten the bitter herb of the rocks, And drunk the midnight dew in my locks;

I have wept till I could not weep, and the pain
Of my burning eyeballs went to my brain.
Seven blackened corpses before me lie,

In the blaze of the sun and the winds of the sky.
I have watched them through the burning day,
And driven the vulture and raven away;
And the cormorant wheeled in circles round,
Yet feared to alight on the guarded ground.
And when the shadows of twilight came,
I have seen the hyena's eyes of flame,
And heard at my side his stealthy tread,
But aye at my shout the savage fled:
And I threw the lighted brand to fright
The jackal and wolf that yelled in the night.

"Ye were foully murdered, my hapless sons, By the hands of wicked and cruel ones; Ye fell, in your fresh and blooming prime,

All innocent, for your father's crime.