Of the fire-balls of death, crashing souls out of men, When Venice and Rome keep their new jubilee, When your flag takes all heaven for its green white and red, When you have a country from mountain to sea, When King Victor has Italy's crown on his head, And I have my dead. What then? Do not mock me. Ah! ring your bells low, And burn your lights faintly. My country is there, Dead! one of them shot by the sea in the west, Mrs. Browning. The Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaklava. I. Half a league, half a league, Half a league onward, Rode the Six Hundred. "Forward, the Light Brigade! Rode the Six Hundred. II. "Forward, the Light Brigade!" Theirs not to make reply, III. Cannon to right of them, Cannon in front of them, Volleyed and thundered. Stormed at with shot and shell, Boldly they rode and well; Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell, Rode the Six Hundred. IV. Flashed all their sabres bare, All the world wondered. Plunged in the battery smoke, Right through the line they broke: Cossack and Russian Reeled from the sabre-stroke, Shattered and sundered. Then they rode back, but not, Not the Six Hundred. V. Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon behind them, Volleyed and thundered. Stormed at with shot and shell. While horse and hero fell, They that had fought so well All that was left of them, Left of Six Hundred. VI. When can their glory fade? Noble Six Hundred. Tennyson. May Days. In sweet May time, so long ago, I stood by the big wheel spinning tow, Derk, rough logs from the ancient trees, Above the smoky boards and beams, Down through the crevice poured golden gleams, Baby playing with upturned chairs, These within. Out under the sky Up from the earth curled leaves were coming, O, how I longed to burst away Then hope went spinning a brighter thread, Rest! 'twas the rest that childhood takes, To the wilds, where the earliest woodland flings But ye come together to me no more, For common work, and humdrum ways. But my steps were turned, I was up the lane, My yarn had finished the ten knot skein; "You are my good girl to work so well," She should work no more at wheel or loom, So the sweet dream ran, as the wheel buzzed on, Cold clouds shading life's sunniest glow, In the same low room my mother pressed, Yet with the bursting leaves and flowers, Scrooge and Marley. MARLEY was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is |