Into these slender hands is given;
Blood must she spill, but evil blood,
As evil as hath ever flowed.
Now enters she the moonlit room;
She sees a bed bright in the gloom,
Whereon an old man slumbers deep;
Ah, God, how well the wicked sleep!
But a faint breathing all she hears,
As silently the couch she nears.
Now the bright dagger at her breast
She plucks from out her maiden vest.
Why hesitates she? and a space
Uncertain stands above that face?
Is it some memory of youth,

That brings upon her heart this ruth?
Some far-off picture that she sees,
When she was dandled on his knees?
Is it the hair, so utter white,

Hair that should seem a holy sight?
Then the red shame leaps to her heart
And furious thoughts again upstart.
O'er him she leans; no eyelid he
Stirs as tho' warned of destiny.

What cry was that? A single cry,
That pierced the palace to the sky?
And then came down a silence deep,
Yet had each sleeper leapt from sleep,
And wandering lights and hurrying feet,
Hither and thither shadows fleet.
But she in silence pure and clean
Passed to her chamber all unseen.

THE PARTING OF LAUNCELOT AND GUINEVERE

Into a high-walled nunnery had fled

Queen Guinevere, amid the shade to weep,
And to repent 'mid solemn boughs, and love
The cold globe of the moon; but now as she
Meekly the scarcely-breathing garden walked,
She saw, and stood, and swooned at Launcelot,
Who burned in sudden steel like a blue flame
Amid the cloister. Then, when she revived,
He came and looked on her: in the dark place
So pale her beauty was, the sweetness such
That he half-closed his eyes and deeply breathed;
And as he gazed, there came into his mind
That night of May, with pulsing stars, the strange
Perfumed darkness, and delicious guilt

In silent hour; but at the last he said:
"Suffer me, lady, but to kiss thy lips
Once, and to go away for evermore.
But she replied, "Nay, I beseech thee, go!
Sweet were those kisses in the deep of night;
But from those kisses is this ruin come.
Sweet was thy touch, but now I wail at it,
And I have hope to see the face of Christ:
Many are saints in heaven who sinned as I."
Then said he, "Since it is thy will, I go."
But those that stood around could scarce endure
To see the dolour of these two; for he

Swooned in his burning armour to her face,
And both cried out as at the touch of spears:
And as two trees at midnight, when the breeze
Comes over them, now to each other bend,
And now withdraw; so mournfully these two
Still drooped together and still drew apart.
Then like one dead her ladies bore away
The heavy queen; and Launcelot went out
And through a forest weeping rode all night.

A GLEAM!

Ah! You and I love our boy.

Such a warrior is he;

So splendid of limb, so swift and so joyous,

At his lightest word we touch each other and smile;
We watch him secretly, earnestly, out of the shadow,
Our eyes like angels attend him about the room.
Ah! You and I love our boy!

And yet when we wander out in the falling darkness,
When the glooming garden discloses her soul in dew,
In that hour of odour and longing,

Of voices ceasing in leaves,

When a human trouble arises from evening meadows,

A divine home-sickness from heaped grass,

Then I know that it is not of him you are thinking sorely,

But still you remember the other, the girl-child that vanished. Scarce had we kissed her with awe, when she died:

We but named her, and lost her.

And they say to us, “Why, O why,

With yon beautiful boy in your sight,

Do

ye

still hark back to the other face that is fled?"

But because of her swiftness in passing,

Because she just smiled, and died;

She moveth us more than the other to tender thought,

And the wistful puzzle of tears.

I shall know, ere the sun arises,

By a sudden stirring of thee,

Or blind slight touch in the dark,

Or face upturned in quivering dream,

That your heart, like mine, has gone home in the hush to its dead,

Through dew and beginning birds;

Unto her hath returned,

Who dazzled, and left us to darkness,

But a beam, but a gleam!

THE REVEALED MADONNA

As I stood in the tavern-reek, amid oaths and curses,
'Mid husbands entreated and drugged,

Amid mothers poisoned and still of the poison sipping,
Here harboured from storms of home;

For a moment the evil glare on a woman falling
Disclosed her with babe at her breast;

An instant she downward gazed on the babe that slumbered,
And holy the tavern grew,

For she gazed with the brooding look of the mother of Jesus, On her lips the divine half-şmile;

An instant she smiled; then the tavern reeled back hellward, And I heard but the oath and the curse.1

1These poems are reprinted from Stephen Phillips's Lyrics and Dramas by permission the John Lane Company, copyright 1913 by John Lane.

HON. EMILY LAWLESS

[BORN in Ireland in 1845, the daughter of the third Lord Cloncurry. Much of her youth was passed in Ireland, in the country by the sea, where she developed to the full her remarkable powers of observation, whether of the animal and insect world or of human character. She wrote various scientific papers, and in 1886 published her first novel, Hurrish, which was followed by five or six others, by A Garden Diary (1901), and by a volume of poems, With the Wild Geese (1902). Her last years were spent in England: she died October 21, 1913.]

It was as a delightful novelist that Emily Lawless first became known to the world. In the two studies of peasant life in Wester Ireland, Hurrish and Grania, she embodied her own close and tender knowledge of the Clare and Galway country—its land scape, its people, its laughter, its tragedies, and all its wild natural life; while in the two historical novels or quasi-novels of Maelcho and With Essex in Ireland, she brought imagination, and a pas sionate sympathy, to bear on the historical wrongs and miseries of the land she loved. She belonged to one of the Anglo-Irish families, who represent in that tormented country the only fusion so far attained there between the English and Irish tempers. Her grandfather was imprisoned in the Tower in 1798 for complicity with the United Irish conspiracy, but the ex-rebel ended his days as an English peer, the husband of a Scottish wife, and an enlightened landowner in Kildare, devoted to the interests of his tenantry and estates. Down to the last generation the family was Catholic, and kinsmen of Emily Lawless had fought valiantly for Catholic emancipation and hotly opposed the Union. A Lawless-probably of her blood-became a member of the latest Irish Legion fighting for France, on his escape from Ireland after the collapse of the rebellion of '98. In spite, therefore, of her many English friends and connexions, Emily Lawless was by nature and feeling a patriotic Irishwoman, with a full share of Irish humour and Irish poetry. Her childhood and youth were passed in a free open-air life, now among the woods and fields of Mid Ireland, now by the sea. She became a considerable natu ralist, a great reader, and a dreamer whose dreams took shape, at first in her novels, and then in her few poems. If Mr. Yeats's