"It's dull in our town since my playmates left!

I can't forget that I'm bereft

Of all the pleasant sights they see,
Which the piper also promised me;
For he led us, he said, to a joyous land,
Joining the town and just at hand,

Where waters gushed, and fruit-trees grew,
And flowers put forth a fairer hue,

And everything was strange and new;

The sparrows were brighter than peacocks here,

And their dogs outran our fallow deer,

And honey-bees had lost their stings,

And horses were born with eagles' wings;

And just as I became assured

My lame foot would be speedily cured,
The music stopped and I stood still,
And found myself outside the Hill,
Left alone against my will,

To go now limping as before,

And never hear of that country more!"

Alas, alas for Hamelin!

There came into many a burgher's pate
A text which says, that Heaven's gate
Opes to the rich at as easy rate

As the needle's eye takes a camel in!
The Mayor sent East, West, North, and South,
To offer the Piper by word of mouth,
Wherever it was men's lot to find him,
Silver and gold to his heart's content,
If he'd only return the way he went,

And bring the children behind him.
But when they saw 't was a lost endeavor,
And piper and dancers were gone for ever,

They made a decree that lawyers never
Should think their records dated duly
If, after the day of the month and year,
These words did not as well appear,
"And so long after what happened here
On the Twenty-second of July,
Thirteen Hundred and Seventy-six :'
And the better in memory to fix

The place of the Children's last retreat
They called it the Pied Piper's Street-
Where any one playing on pipe or tabor
Was sure for the future to lose his labor.
Nor suffered they hostelry or tavern

To shock with mirth a street so solemn;
But opposite the place of the cavern

They wrote the story on a column,

And on the Great Church window painted
The same, to make the world acquainted
How their children were stolen away;
And there it stands to this very day.

And I must not omit to say

That in Transylvania there's a tribe
Of alien people that ascribe

The outlandish ways and dress

On which their neighbors lay such stress
To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterranean prison
Into which they were trepanned

Long time ago, in a mighty band,
Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
But how or why, they don't understand.

So, Willy, let you and me be wipers

Of scores out with all men-especially pipers;

And, whether they pipe us free from rats or from mice,

If we've promised them aught, let us keep our promise.

ROBERT BROWNING.

QUATRAINS.

MOONLIGHT SONG OF THE MOCKING-BIRD,

EACH golden note of music greets
The listening leaves, divinely stirred,
As if the vanished soul of Keats
Had found its new birth in a bird.

NIGHT MISTS.

SOMETIMES, when Nature falls asleep,
Around her woods and streams
The mists of night serenely creep—
For they are Nature's dreams.

AN AUTUMN BREEZE.

THIS gentle and half melancholy breeze
Is but a wandering Hamlet of the trees,
Who finds a tongue in every lingering leaf
To voice some subtlety of sylvan grief.

WILLIAM HAMILTON HAYNE.

A YELLOW PANSY.

To the wall of the old green garden
A butterfly quivering came;
His wings on the sombre lichens
Played like a yellow flame.

He looked at the gray geraniums,
And the sleepy four-o'-clocks,
He looked at the low lanes bordered
With the glossy growing box.

He longed for the peace and the silence

And the shadows that lengthened there,
And his wild wee heart was weary
Of skimming the endless air.

And now in the old green garden,-
I know not how it came,—

A single pansy is blooming,
Bright as a yellow flame.

And whenever a gay gust passes,
It quivers as if with pain,

For the butterfly soul within it

Longs for the winds again.

HELEN GRAY CONE.

ECHO AND SILENCE.*

In eddying course when leaves began to fly,
And Autumn in her lap the store to strew,

As mid wild scenes I chanced the Muse to woo,
Through glens untrod, and woods that frowned on

high,

Two sleeping nymphs with wonder mute I spy! And, lo, she 's gone!—In robe of dark-green hue,

'T was Echo from her sister Silence flew,

For quick the hunter's horn resounded to the sky! In shade affrighted Silence melts away.

Not so her sister. Hark! for onward still,

*Declared by Wordsworth to be the best sonnet in the English language.

With far-heard step, she takes her listening way, Bounding from rock to rock, and hill to hill.

Ah, mark the merry maid in mockful play

With thousand mimic tones the laughing forest fill!

SIR SAMUEL EGERTON BRYDGES.

SHERWOOD.

SHERWOOD in the twilight, is Robin Hood awake? Gray and ghostly shadows are gliding thro' the brake; Shadows of the dappled deer, dreaming of the morn, Dreaming of a shadowy man that winds a shadowy horn.

Robin Hood is here again; all his merry thieves
Hear a ghostly bugle-note shivering thro' the leaves,
Calling as he used to call, faint and far away,
In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

Merry, merry England has kissed the lips of June:
All the wings of fairyland were here beneath the

moon;

Like a flight of rose leaves fluttering in a mist
Of opal and ruby and pearl and amethyst.

Merry, merry England is waking as of old,

With eyes of blither hazel and hair of brighter gold: For Robin Hood is here again beneath the bursting

spray

In Sherwood, in Sherwood, about the break of day.

Love is in the greenwood building him a house
Of wild rose and hawthorne and honeysuckle

boughs: