There is no vacant chair. If he will take
The mood to listen mutely, be it done.

By his least mood we crossed, for which the heart must ache,

Plead not nor question! Let him have this one.

Death is a mood of life. It is no whim

By which life's Giver mocks a broken heart. Death is life's reticence. Still audible to Him, The hushed voice, happy, speaketh on, apart.

There is no vacant chair. To love is still

To have. Nearer to memory than to eye,
And dearer yet to anguish than to comfort, will
We hold him by our love, that shall not die.

For while it doth not, thus he cannot. Try!
Who can put out the motion or the smile?
The old ways of being noble all with him laid by?
Because we love, he is. Then trust awhile.
-Song of the Silent World.

NEW NEIGHBORS.

Within the window's scant recess,
Behind a pink geranium flower,
She sits and sews, and sews and sits,
From patient hour to patient hour.

As woman-like as marble is,

Or as a lovely death might be-
A marble death condemned to make
A feint at life perpetually.

Wondering, I watch to pity her;

Wandering, I go my restless ways;
Content, I think the untamed thoughts.
Of free and solitary days,

Until the mournful dusk begins
To drop upon the quiet street,

Until, upon the pavement far,

There falls the sound of coming feet:

A happy, hastening, ardent sound,
Tender as kisses on the air-
Quick, as if touched by unseen lips
Blushes the little statue there;

And woman-like as young life is,
And woman-like as joy may be,
Tender with color, lithe with love,
She starts, transfigured gloriously.

Superb in one transcendent glance-
Her eyes, I see, are burning black-
My little neighbor, smiling, turns,
And throws my unasked pity back.

I wonder, is it worth the while,

To sit and sew from hour to hourTo sit and sew with eyes of black, Behind a pink geranium flower?

-Songs of the Silent Land.

WARD, MRS. HUMPHRY, an English novelist, born at Hobart, Tasmania, in 1851. Her maiden name was Mary Augusta Arnold. Her father, Thomas a younger brother of Matthew Arnold -was a government officer in Tasmania. He became afterward a professor in the Roman Catholic University of Dublin, but, losing faith, settled at Oxford, edited books, and wrote a manual of English Literature. The daughter married Thomas Humphry Ward, author of English Poets, Men of the Reign, The Reign of Queen Victoria, etc. Mrs. Ward is the author of Milly and Olly, or a Holiday among the Mountains (1880); Miss Bretherton (1884); a translation of Amiel's Journal (1885); a critical estimate of Mrs. Browning; Robert Elsmere, a novel (1888), by which she is best known; David Grieve (1892); Marcella (1894); Sir George Tressady and The Story of Bessie Costrell (1895).

Of Robert Elsmere, William Sharp says: "All that the critic of fiction commonly looks to-incident, evolution of plot, artistic sequence of events, and so forth-seems secondary when compared with the startlingly vivid presentment of a human soul in the storm and stress incidental to the renunciation of past spiritual domination and the acceptance of new hopes and aspirations. Merely as a tale of contemporary English life, a fictitious record of the joys and sorrows, loves