HREE words fall sweetly on my soul That bid my spirit spurn control And upward to its source aspire; The sweetest sounds to mortals given Are heard in Mother, Home, and Heaven. Dear Mother! ne'er shall I forget Thy brow, thine eye, thy pleasant smile! Though in the sea of death hath set Thy star of life, my guide awhile, And like a bird that from the flowers, And while to one engulfing grave, By time's swift tide we 're driven, How sweet the thought that every wave But bears us nearer Heaven! There we shall meet when life is o'er, In that blest Home, to part no more. WILLIAM GOLDSMITH BROWN. GIVE ME BACK MY YOUTH AGAIN. SHEN give me back that time of pleasures, Then bright mist veiled the world before me, Which every valley richly bore me! I nothing had, and yet enough for youthJoy in Illusion, ardent thirst for Truth. Give unrestrained the old emotion, BAYARD TAYLOR. CALL that, the Book of Job, aside from all theories about it, one of the grandest things ever written with pen. One feels, indeed, as if it were not Hebrew; such a noble universality, different from noble patriotism or sectarianism, reigns in it. A noble book! all men's book! It is our first, oldest statement of the never-ending problem-man's destiny-and God's way with him here in this earth. And all in such free, flowing outlines; grand in its sincerity, in its simplicity; in its epic melody, and repose of reconcilement. There is the seeing eye, the mildly understanding heart. So true every way; true eyesight and vision for all things; material things no less than spiritual; the horse hast thou clothed his neck with thunder?-he "laughs at the shaking of the spear!" Sublime sorrow, sublime reconciliation; oldest choral melody as of the heart of mankind; so soft and great; as the summer midnight, as the world with its seas and stars! There is nothing written, I think, in the Bible or out of it, of equal literary merit. Such living likenesses were never since drawn. THOMAS CARLYLE. MORTALITY. OH, why should the spirit of mortal be proud? Like a fast-flitting meteor, a fast-flying cloud, The leaves of the oak and the willow shall fade, And the young and the old, and the low and the high, The child that a mother attended and loved, The maid on whose cheek, on whose brow, in whose eye, Shone beauty and pleasure, her triumphs are by; And the memory of those that beloved her and praised, Are alike from the minds of the living erased. The hand of the king that the sceptre hath borne, The peasant whose lot was to sow and to reap, The beggar that wandered in search of his bread, The saint that enjoyed the communion of heaven, So the multitude goes, like the flower and the weed, So the multitude comes, even those we behold, For we are the same that our fathers have been; The thoughts we are thinking our fathers would think; From the death we are shrinking from, they too would shrink; To the life we are clinging to, they too would cling; They loved, but their story we cannot unfold; |