rs and tides, in life's divine renewal,

If some grey eve to certain eyes should wear
A deeper radiance than mere light can give,
Some silent page abruptly flush and live,
May it not be that you and I are there?

USES

AH, from the niggard tree of Time
How quickly fall the hours!
It needs no touch of wind or rime
To loose such facile flowers.

Drift of the dead year's harvesting,
They clog to-morrow's way,
Yet serve to shelter growths of spring
Beneath their warm decay,

Or, blent by pious hands with rare
Sweet savours of content,
Surprise the soul's December air
With June's forgotten scent.

A MEETING

ON a sheer peak of joy we meet;
Below us hums the abyss;
Death either way allures our feet
If we take one step amiss.

One moment let us drink the blue
Transcendent air together--
Then down where the same old work's to do
In the same dull daily weather.

We may not wait . . . yet look below!
How part? On this keen ridge
But one may pass. They call you--go!
My life shall be your bridge.

Note.--Vesalius, the great anatomist, studied at Louvain and Paris,
and was called by Venice to the chair of surgery in the University
of Padua. He was one of the first physiologists to dissect the human
body, and his great work "The Structure of the Human Body" was an
open attack on the physiology of Galen. The book excited such
violent opposition, not only in the Church but in the University,
that in a fit of discouragement he burned his remaining manuscripts
and accepted the post of physician at the Court of Charles V., and
afterward of his son, Philip II, of Spain. This closed his life of
free enquiry, for the Inquisition forbade all scientific research,
and the dissection of corpses was prohibited in Spain. Vesalius led
for many years the life of the rich and successful court physician,
but regrets for his past were never wholly extinguished, and in 1561
they were roused afresh by the reading of an anatomical treatise by
Gabriel Fallopius, his successor in the chair at Padua. From that
moment life in Spain became intolerable to Vesalius, and in 1563 he
set out for the East. Tradition reports that this journey was a
penance to which the Church condemned him for having opened the body
of a woman before she was actually dead; but more probably Vesalius,
sick of his long servitude, made the pilgrimage a pretext to escape
from Spain.