Floats an island, half transparent, woven out of

sea and air;—

For such visions shaped of air, are
Frequent on our Riviera.

He whose mighty earthquake-tread all Europa shook with dread,

Chief whose infancy was cradled in that old Tyrrhenic isle,

Joins the shades of trampling legions, bringing from remotest regions

Gallic fire and Roman valour, Cimbric daring, Moorish guile,

Guests from every age to share a

Portion of this Riviera.

Then the Afric brain, whose story fills the centuries with its glory,

Moulding Gaul and Carthaginian into one all-conquering band,

With his tusked monsters grumbling, mid the alien snow-drifts stumbling,

Then, an avalanche of ruin, thundering from that frozen land

Into vales their sons declare are

Sunny as our Riviera.

Thus forever, in our musing, comes man's spirit

interfusing

Thought of poet and of hero with the landscape and the sky;

And this shore, no longer lonely, lives the life of romance only:

Gauls and Moors and Northern Sea-Kings, all are gliding, ghostlike, by.

So with Nature man is sharer

Even on the Riviera.

JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.

MOONLIGHT ON THE RIVIERA

Buoyant, exulting

I thread in the morning

Orchards of olive

Up to the heights;

Wander at noonday,

Quietly pacing

Gardens of palm trees;

Then in the evening

Loll in my balcony,

Over the boundless

Undulant ocean

Dreaming and dreaming.

Swift in the southland

Steals to the earth

Tranquil-browed evening.

And as a mother-hand softly,

Crooningly patters

The back of her slumbering infant,

Softly the flood

Beats on the verdurous

Rim of the ocean:

Luller of continents,

Drowsily crooning

Ditties of cradle-land.

Slow reappear

From their dark deeps

Those divers the stars,

Singly at first,

Here one and here;

Then all at once

Everywhere, everywhere,

Richly and richlier!

Glitters with gold-dust
The ample, the far-flowing
Mantle of Night-

And with the stars
As if fraternally
Thoughts arise also.

Timid at first,

Scarcely they dare

Venture to rise

From the mysterious
Caves of emotion;

But their star-brothers

Speak to them, answer them.

Richly and richlier

Flaming they come;
Then all at once,

Everywhere! everywhere!

Blindingly infinite.

Stand over me

Star-worlds and thoughts.

Now in her glory

Out of the flood

Rises the moon
Throwing across

A highway of light,
And the star-brothers
Wander upon it,
To thee, Belovéd.
The sea is resplendent
And the palm-garlanded
Spurs of the mountains!
The earth is resplendent,
Resplendent the heavens
Arrayed in the moonbeams
And in thy love, Dearest!

RICHARD LEANDER.

Tr. Robert Haven Schauffler.

THE APENNINES

PASSAGE OF THE APENNINES

LISTEN, listen, Mary mine,

'To the whisper of the Apennine;

It bursts on the roof like the thunder's roar,
Or like the sea on a northern shore,

Heard in its raging ebb and flow

By the captives pent in the cave below.
The Apennine in the light of day

Is a mighty mountain dim and gray,

Which between the earth and sky doth lay;
But when night comes, a chaos dread

On the dim starlight then is spread,

And the Apennine walks abroad with the storm.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

TO THE APENNINES

YOUR peaks are beautiful, ye Apennines!
In the soft light of these serenest skies;
From the broad highland region, black with pines,
Fair as the hills of Paradise they rise,

Bathed in the tint Peruvian slaves behold
In rosy flushes on the virgin gold.