Misty purple bathes the Spring:
Swallows flashing here and there
Float and dive on waves of air,
And make love upon the wing;
Crocus-buds in sheaths of gold

Burst like sunbeams from the mould.

Chestnut leaflets burst their buds,
Perching tiptoe on each spray,
Springing toward the radiant day,
As the bland, pacific floods
Of the generative sun

All the teeming earth o'errun.

Can this earth run o'er with beauty,
Laugh through leaf and flower and grain,
While in close-pent court and lane,
In the air so thick and sooty,
Little ones pace to and fro,
Weighted with their parents' woe?

Woe-predestined little ones!
Putting forth their buds of life
In an atmosphere of strife,
And crime-breeding ignorance;
Where the bitter surge of care
Freezes to a dull despair.

Dull despair and misery

Lie about them from their birth;
Ugly curses, uglier mirth,

Are their earliest lullaby;

Fathers have they without name,

Mothers crushed by want and shame.

Brutish, overburthened mothers,
With their hungry children cast
Half-nude to the nipping blast;
Little sisters with their brothers
Dragging in their arms all day
Children nigh as big as they.

Children mothered by the street:
Shouting, flouting, roaring after
Passers-by with gibes and laughter,
Diving between horses' feet,
In and out of drays and barrows,
Recklessly like London sparrows.

Mudlarks of our slums and alleys,
All unconscious of the blooming
World behind those housetops looming,
Of the happy fields and valleys,
Of the miracle of Spring

With its boundless blossoming.

Blossoms of humanity!

Poor soiled blossoms in the dust!
Through the thick defiling crust
Of soul-stifling poverty,

In

your features may be traced Childhood's beauty half effaced

Childhood, stunted in the shadow
Of the light-debarring walls :
Not for you the cuckoo calls
O'er the silver-threaded meadow;
Not for you the lark on high
Pours his music from the sky.

Ah! you have your music too!
And come flocking round that player
Grinding at his organ there,

Summer-eyed and swart of hue,
Rattling off his well-worn tune
On this April afternoon.

Lovely April lights of pleasure
Flit o'er want-beclouded features
Of these little outcast creatures,
As they swing with rhythmic measure,
In the courage of their rags,

Lightly o'er the slippery flags.

Little footfalls, lightly glancing
In a luxury of motion,
Supple as the waves of ocean
In your elemental dancing,
How you fly, and wheel, and spin,
For your hearts, too, dance within.

Dance along with mirth and laughter,
Buoyant, fearless, and elate,
Dancing in the teeth of fate,
Ignorant of your hereafter,
That with all its tragic glooms
Blindly on your future looms.

Past and future, hence away !
Joy, diffused throughout the earth,
Centre in this moment's mirth
Of ecstatic holiday:

Once in all their lives' dark story,

Touch them, Fate! with April glory.

PADDY.

"WILLIAM O'GRADY, bachelor, and Mary Lee, spinsther.' So

His Riverence call'd us in the church, it's just five year ago. Three times the banns was put up for us, but* the day that follow'd the third,

I meets my Mary an' says,

their word."

"Let us each give back the other

She knew why I spoke out then to her; it was growin' for mony a day

Afore at last it lep into speech, as we stood amoong the hay, Down in the half-mown meddas: the sun was gone to rest, An' the corncrake was crakin' an' croakin',-I knew where she had her nest

It wasn't a sharp, quick quarrel iv ours, to blaze up strong an' die out;

It wasn't doubtin' each other we was, we niver had had a

doubt,

But a thing that had smowldher'd an' smowldher'd until I'd made up my mind at last,

The loovet I'd been buildin' my future on must be a thing o' the past.

"Mary," says I, "there's a word, a name, that comes between us two,

A name that slips like a bit iv a sting from that purty mouth

iv you;

*The u all through as in put. + As in look.