The soul partakes the season's youth,

And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe
Lie deep 'neath a silence pure and smooth,

Like burnt-out craters healed with snow.

Lowell's delicate lines on Violets are worthy of the dainty little

Loved one of my youth thou wast,

Of my merry youth,

And I see, tearfully,

All the fair and sunny past,

All its openness and truth,

Ever fresh and green in thee,
As the moss is in the sea.

Thy little heart, that hath with love
Grown coloured like the sky above,
On which thou lookest ever,—
Can it know all the woe

Of hope for what returneth never,

All the sorrow and the longing

To these hearts of ours belonging?

One of the most touchingly beautiful of modern poems is Lowell's First Snow-fall, written on the grave of his first-born; here it isfull of gushing tenderness :

The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white.
Every pine and fir and hemlock wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree was ridged inch-deep with
pearl.

I stood and watched by the window the noiseless work of the sky,
And the sudden flurries of snow-birds like brown leaves whirling by.
I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn, where a little head-stone
stood,

How the flakes were folding it gently, as did robins the babes in the wood.

*

I remembered the gradual patience that fell from that cloud-like

snow,

Flake by flake, healing and hiding the scar of that deep-stabbed woe. And again to the child I whispered "The snow that husheth all, Darling, the merciful Father alone can make it fall.”

Then, with eyes that saw not, I kissed her; and she, kissing back, could not know

That my kiss was given to her sister folded close under deepening

snow.

His sparkling lines to the Fountain are full of beauty

Into the sunshine, full of light,

Leaping and flashing from morn till night;
Into the moonlight, whiter than snow,

Waving so flower-like when the winds blow!
Into the starlight, rushing in spray,
Happy at midnight, happy by day!
Ever in motion, blithesome and cheery,
Still climbing heavenward, never a-weary :
Glad of all weathers, still seeming best,
Upward or downward, motion thy rest:

Full of a nature nothing can tame,
Changed every moment-ever the same:
Ceaseless aspiring, ceaseless content,

Darkness or sunshine thy element :

Glorious Fountain! let my heart be

Fresh, changeful, constant, upward, like thee!

ROBERT BULWER LYTTON ("Owen Meredith") is the author, of these delicate lines, entitled The Chess-Board :

This, this at least,-if this alone ;

That never, never, never more,
As in those old still nights of yore

(Ere we were grown so sadly wise),
Can and I shut out the skies,
you

Shut out the world and wintry weather,

And, eyes exchanging warmth with eyes,

Play chess, as then we played, together!

ARTHUR CLEVELAND COXE, author of Christian Ballaas, thus pays tribute to historic Old England :

Land of the rare old chronicle, the legend, and the lay,

Where deeds of fancy's dream are truths of all thine ancient day;
Land where the holly-bough is green around the Druid's pile,
And greener yet the histories that wreathe his rugged isle;
Land of old story-like thine oak, the aged, but the strong,
And wound with antique mistletoe, and ivy-wreaths of song.
Old isle and glorious-I have heard thy fame across the sea,
And know my fathers' homes are thine; my fathers rest with thee!