Or when, as flowers kept too long in the shade,

Ye find my colours fade,

And all that is not love in me decayed—

Such words, 'Ye loved me once'?

Could ye, 'We loved her once,'

Say cold of me, when further put away

In earth's sepulchral clay—

When mute the lips which deprecate to-day?

Not so not then-least then-when life is shriven,
And death's full joy is given,

Of those who sit and love you up in heaven,
Say not, 'We loved them once!'

Say never, ye loved once!

God is too near above, the grave beneath,

And all our moments breathe

Too quick in mysteries of life and death,
For such a word. The eternities avenge
Affections light of range;

There comes no change to justify that change,
Whatever comes-loved once!

And yet that same word-'once'

Is humanly acceptive! Kings have said,
Shaking a discrowned head,

'We ruled once;'-dotards, 'We once taught and led;' Cripples 'once' danced i' the vines; and bards approved Were once by scornings moved;

But love strikes one hour-Love. Those never loved

Who dream that they loved once.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

FAITH, HOPE, AND CHARITY.

LOVE is the star by which our course we steer;
Love for our kind its image glassed below;
And, when the breeze of hope begins to blow
The radiance spreads of that dilated sphere
O'er Life's dark waters, nearer and more near.
A silver path that star appears to throw
Toward us, and with light that plain to sow
Which shakes beneath the shock of our career.
Thus is the brightness of our heavenly home
Itself a beacon unto those that stray;
The beacon thus becomes the glittering way
To all whom hope impels her seas to roam.

What then is Hope? A Faith that dares to move
And what is Faith? The happy rest of Love.

AUBREY DE VERE.

ENOSIS.

THOUGHT is deeper than all speech,
Feeling deeper than all thought;

Souls to souls can never teach

What unto themselves was taught.

We are spirits clad in veils;

Man by man was never seen;
All our deep communing fails

To remove the shadowy screen.

Heart to heart was never known;

Mind with mind did never meet; We are columns, left alone,

Of a temple once complete.

Like the stars that gem the sky,
Far apart, though seeming near,

In our light we scattered lie;
All is thus but starlight here.

What is social company

But a babbling summer stream?

What our wise philosophy

But the glancing of a dream?

Only when the sun of love

Melts the scattered stars of thought;

Only when we live above

What the dim-eyed world hath taught ;

Only when our souls are fed

By the Fount which gave them birth, And by inspiration led

Which they never drew from earth;

We, like parted drops of rain,

Swelling till they melt and run,

Shall be all absorbed again,

Melting, flowing into one.

CHRISTOPHER P. CRANCH.

Ο

LOVE'S DEEP LIFE.

UR love is not a fading, earthly flower:

Its winged seed dropped down from Paradise, And, nursed by day and night, by sun and shower, Doth momently to fresher beauty rise.

To us the leafless autumn is not bare,

Nor winter's rattling boughs lack lusty green:
Our summer hearts make summer's fulness, where
No leaf, or bud, or blossom may be seen.
For nature's life in love's deep life doth lie—
Love, whose forgetfulness is beauty's death,
Whose mystic key these cells of Thou and I
Into the infinite freedom openeth,

And makes the body's dark and narrow grate
The wide-flung leaves of Heaven's palace-gate.

JAMES RUSSELL Lowell.

LOVE IN TEARS.

IF fate Love's dear ambition mar,

And load his breast with hopeless pain,

And seem to blot out sun and star,

Love, lost or won, is countless gain;

His sorrow boasts a secret bliss

Which sorrow of itself beguiles,

And love in tears too noble is

For pity, save of love in smiles.

But, looking backward through his tears,
With vision of maturer scope,
How often one dead joy appears

The platform of some better hope!
And, let us own, the sharpest smart
Which human patience may endure
Pays light for that which leaves the heart
More generous, dignified and pure.

COVENTRY PATMORE.

AN ANGEL IN THE HOUSE.

HOW sweet it were if, without feeble fright,

Or dying of the dreadful beauteous sight,
An angel came to us, and we could bear
To see him issue from the silent air

At evening in our room, and bend on ours
His divine eyes, and bring us from his bowers
News of dear friends, and children, who have never
Been dead indeed,-
-as we shall know for ever.
Alas! we think not what we daily see
About our hearths,-angels that are to be,
Or may be if they will, and we prepare
Their souls and ours to meet in happy air,-
A child, a friend, a wife whose soft heart sings
In unison with ours, breeding its future wings.

LEIGH HUNT.