When young and old in circle

Around the firebrands close;
When the girls are weaving baskets,
And the lads are shaping bows;

When the goodman mends his armour,
And trims his helmet's plume;
When the goodwife's shuttle merrily
Goes flashing through the loom ;
With weeping and with laughter
Still is the story told,

How well Horatius kept the bridge
In the brave days of old.

MACAULAY.

THE DYING CHRISTIAN TO HIS SOUL.

VITAL spark of heavenly flame!
Quit, oh, quit this mortal frame;
Trembling, hoping, lingering, flying,
Oh! the pain, the bliss of dying!
Cease fond nature, cease thy strife,
And let me languish into life.

Hark! they whisper,-Angels say,
"Sister spirit, come away!"
What is this absorbs me quite,
Steals my senses, shuts my sight,—
Drowns my spirits, draws my breath,-
Tell me, my soul, can this be death?

The world recedes: it disappears

Heaven opens on my eyes!

With sounds seraphic ring!

my ears

Lend, lend your wings! I mount!
Oh! Grave! where is thy victory?
Oh! Death! where is thy sting?

fly!

POPE.

THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS.

It was the schooner Hesperus,

That sailed the wintry sea;

And the skipper had taken his little daughter,

To bear him company.

Blue where her eyes, as the fairy-flax,
Her cheeks like the dawn of day,

And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds,
That ope in the month of May.

The skipper he stood beside the helm,
With his pipe in his mouth,

And watched how the veering flaw did blow
The smoke now West now South.

Then up and spake an old sailor,
Had sailed the Spanish Main,
"I pray thee, put into yonder port,
For I fear a hurricane.

"Last night the moon had a golden ring,

And to-night no moon we see!"

The skipper he blew a whiff from his pipe,
And a scornful laugh laughed he.

Colder and louder blew the wind,
A gale from the North-east;
The snow fell hissing in the brine,

And the billows frothed like yeast.

Down came the storm and smote amain
The vessel in its strength;

She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,
Then leaped her cable's length.

"Come hither! come hither! my little daughter,

And do not tremble so;

For I can weather the roughest gale,

That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat,

Against the stinging blast;

He cut a rope from a broken spar,

And bound her to the mast.

"O father! I hear the church-bells ring,

say, what may it be?"

""T is a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast!

And he steered for the open sea.

"O father! I hear the sound of guns, O say, what may it be?"

"Some ship in distress, that cannot live In such an angry sea!"

"O father! I see a gleaming light,
O say, what may it be?"

But the father answered never a word:-
A frozen corpse was he.

Lashed to the helm, all stiff and stark,

With his face to the skies,

The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow On his fixed and glassy eyes.

Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed That saved she may be ;

And she thought of Christ who stilled the waves On the Lake of Galilee.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,
Through the whistling sleet and snow,

Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept
Towards the reef of Norman's Woe.

And ever the fitful gusts between
A sound came from the land;

It was the sound of the trampling surf
On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.

The breakers were right beneath her bows,
She drifted a dreary wreck,

And a whooping billow swept the crew
Like icicles from her deck.

She struck where the white and fleecy waves
Looked soft as carded wool,

But the cruel rocks, they gored her side,
Like the horns of an angry bull.

Her rattling shrouds, all sheathed in ice,
With the masts, went by the board;
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank,
Ho! ho! the breakers roared!

At daybreak on the bleak sea-beach,
A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair,
Lashed close to a drifting mast.

The salt sea was frozen on her breast,
The salt tears in her eyes;

And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-weed,
On the billows fall and rise.

Such was the wreck of Hesperus,

In the midnight and the snow! Christ save us all from death like this,

On the reef of Norman's Woe!

LONGFELLOW.