Sing, as thou drink'st of heaven thy fill,
All hope, all wonder, all desire -
Creation's ancient canticle

To which the worlds conspire!

Somewhat as thou, man once could sing,
In porches of the lucent morn,
Ere he had felt his lack of wing,
Or cursed his iron bourn.

The Springtime bubbled in his throat, The sweet sky seemed not far above, And young and lovesome came the noteAh, thine is Youth and Love!

Thou sing'st of what he knew of old,

And dreamlike from afar recalls,

In flashes of forgotten gold

An orient glory falls.

And, as he listens, one by one

Life's utmost splendors blaze more nigh:

Less inaccessible the sun,

Less alien grows the sky.

For thou art native to the sphere,

And of the courts of heaven art free,

And carriest to his temporal ears
News from eternity;

And lead'st him to the dizzy verge,

And lur'st him o'er the dazzling line, Where mortal and immortal merge,

And human dies Divine.

CHICKENS

GAIL HAMILTON

Mary A. Dodge, better known as "Gail Hamilton," was born in Hamilton, Mass., about 1838. She was a very popular writer. Among her works are "Woman's Worth and Woman's Worthlessness," "Battle of the Books," "Sermons to the Clergy,” “Our Common School System," Skirmishes and Sketches," 66 Wool Gathering," "What Think Ye of Christ?" "Twelve Miles from a Lemon," "Woman's Wrongs: a Counter Irritant," "A New Atmosphere," "Gala Days," and "Country Living and Country Thinking." The following sketch will give a good idea of her style. She was a very bright and piquant writer.

A

CHICKEN is beautiful and round and full of cun

ning ways, but he has no resources for an emergency. He will lose his reckoning and be quite out at sea, though only ten steps from home. He never knows enough to turn a corner. All his intelligence is like light, moving only in straight lines. He is impetuous and timid, and has not the smallest presence of mind or sagacity to discern between friend and foe. He has no confidence in any earthly power that does not reside in an old hen. Her cluck will he follow to the last ditch, and to nothing else will he give heed.

I am afraid that the Interpreter was putting almost too fine a point upon it, when he had Christiana and her children "into another room, where was a hen and chickens, and bid them to observe awhile. So one of the chickens went to the trough to drink, and every time she drank she lifted up her head and her eyes toward heaven. 'See,' said he, what this little chick doth, and learn of her to acknowledge whence your mercies come, by receiving them with looking up.'

Doubtless the chick lifts her eyes toward heaven, but a close acquaintance with the race would put anything but acknowledgment in the act. A gratitude that thanks heaven for favors received, and then runs into a hole to prevent any other person from sharing the benefit of those favors, is a very questionable kind of gratitude, and certainly should be confined to the bipeds that wear feathers.

Yet if you take away selfishness from a chicken's moral make-up, and fatuity from his intellectual, you have a very charming little creature left. For, apart from their excessive greed, chickens seem to be affectionate. They have sweet, social ways.

They huddle together with fond, caressing chatter, and chirp soft lullabies. Their toilet performances are full of interest. They trim each other's bills with great thoroughness and dexterity, much better, indeed, than they dress their own heads, for their bungling, awkward little claws make sad work of it.

It is as much as they can do to stand on two feet, and they naturally make several revolutions when they attempt to stand on one. Nothing can be more ludicrous than their early efforts to walk. They do not really walk. They sight their object, waver, balance, decide, and then tumble forward, stopping all in a heap as soon as the original impetus is lost-generally some way ahead of the place to which they wished to go.

It is delightful to watch them as drowsiness films their round, bright, black eyes, and the dear old mother croons them under her ample wings, and they nestle in perfect harmony. How they manage to bestow themselves with such limited accommodations, or how they manage to

breathe in a room so close, it is difficult to imagine. They certainly deal a staggering blow to our preconceived notions of the necessity of oxygen and ventilation, but they make it easy to see whence the Germans derived their fashion of sleeping under feather beds. But breathe and bestow themselves they do. The deep mother heart and the broad mother wings take them all in.

They penetrate her feathers, and open for themselves unseen little doors into the mysterious, brooding, beckoning darkness. But it is long before they can arrange themselves satisfactorily. They chirp, and stir, and snuggle, trying to find the softest and warmest nook. Now an uneasy head is thrust out, and now a whole tiny body; but it soon reënters in another quarter, and at length the stir and chirp grow still. You see only a collection of little legs, as if the hen were a banyan tree, and presently even they disappear. She settles down comfortably, and all are wrapped in a slumberous silence.

And as I sit by the hour, watching their winning ways, and see all the steps of this sleepy subsidence, I can but remember that outburst of love and sorrow from the lips of Him who, though he came to earth from a dwelling place of ineffable glory, called nothing unclean because it was common, found no homely detail too homely or too trivial to illustrate the Father's love; but from the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, the lilies of the field, the stones in the street, the foxes in their holes, the patch on the coat, the oxen in the furrow, the sheep in the pit, the camel under his burden, drew lessons of divine pity and patience, of heavenly duty and delight.

Standing in the presence of the great congregation, see

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ing, as never man saw, the hypocrisy and the iniquity gathered before him seeing too, alas, the calamities and the woe that awaited this doomed people, a godlike pity overbears his righteous indignation, and cries out in passionate appeal, "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets, and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!"

Lord Byron was born in London in 1788. Perhaps his most noted work is "Childe Harold." He wrote much. His first published work, "Hours of Idleness," was severely criticised by the Edinburgh