XCII. THE THRUSH'S SONG. SWEET MAVIS! at this cool delicious hour Holy as manna on the meadow falls, Thy song's impassioned clarity, trembling through This omnipresent stillness, disenthrals The soul to adoration. First I heard A low thick lubric gurgle, soft as love, Yet sad as memory, through the silence poured Like starlight. But the mood intenser grows, Precipitate rapture quickens, move on move Lucidly linked together, till the close. DAVID GRAY. XCIII. TO A FRIEND. Now, while the long delaying ash assumes Stirring the still perfume that wakes around ; Come with thy native heart, O true and tried! Or, as on stately pinion, through the grey XCIV. WRITTEN IN EDINBURGH. EVEN thus, methinks, a city reared should be, As if to vindicate 'mid choicest seats Of art, abiding Nature's majesty ; And the broad sea beyond, in calm or rage. EUGENE LEE.HAMILTON. XCV. SEA SHELL MURMURS. THE hollow sea-shell which for years hath stood And pulses keeping pace with hope and fear And with our feelings' ever shifting mood. Lo! in my heart I hear, as in a shell, The murmur of a world beyond the grave, Thou fool! this echo is a cheat as well,- XCVI. JUDITH. THERE was a gleam of jewels in the tent Which one dim cresset lit—a baleful gleam— And from his scattered armour seemed to stream A dusky evil light that came and went. But from her eyes, as over him she bent, Watching the surface of his drunken dream, A look in which her life's one lust found vent. As with her scimitar she crouched above His dark, doomed head, and held her perilous breath, While ever and anon she saw him move His red lascivious lips, and smile beneath His curled and scented beard, and mutter love. |