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leasant deceits, While he leaves the remembrance of all that was best, Love, friendship, and hope, and the promise of rest. Sweet shadows of twilight! how calm their repose, While the dewdrops fall soft in the breast of the rose! How blest to the toiler his hour of release When the vesper is heard with its whisper of peace! Then here's to the wrinkled old miser, our friend; May he send us his bills to the century's end, And lend us the moments no sorrow alloys, Till he squares his account with the last of "The Boys." FOR CLASS MEETING 1875 IT is a pity and a shame--alas! alas! I know it is, To tread the trodden grapes again, but so it has been, so it is; The purple vintage long is past, with ripened clusters bursting so They filled the wine-vats to the brim,-'t is strange you will be thirsting so! Too well our faithful memory tells what might be rhymed or sung about, For all have sighed and some have wept since last year's snows were flung about; The beacon flame that fired the sky, the modest ray that gladdened us, A little breath has quenched their light, and deepening shades have saddened us. No more our brother's life is ours for cheering or for grieving us, One only sadness they bequeathed, the sorrow of their leaving us; Farewell! Farewell!--I turn the leaf I read my chiming measure in; Who knows but something still is there a friend may find a pleasure in? For who can tell by what he likes what other people's fancies are? How all men think the best of wives their own particular Nancies are? If what I sing you brings a smile, you will not stop to catechise, Nor read Bceotia's lumbering line with nicely scanning Attic eyes. Perhaps the alabaster box that Mary broke so lovingly, While Judas looked so sternly on, the Master so approvingly, Was not so fairly wrought as those that Pilate's wife and daughters had, Or many a dame of Judah's line that drank of Jordan's waters had. Perhaps the balm that cost so dear, as some remarked officiously, The precious nard that filled the room with fragrance so deliciously, So oft recalled in storied page and sung in verse melodious, The dancing girl had thought too cheap,--that daughter of Herodias. Where now are all the mighty deeds that Herod boasted loudest of? Where now the flashing jewelry the tetrarch's wife was proudest of? Yet still to hear how Mary loved, all tribes of men are listening, And still the sinful woman's
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