rocket and storm of shell!

Where to-day is the forehead fair,
Crowned with masses of midnight hair?

A summer's twilight saw him fall,
Dead on Verdun's leaguered wall.

Where, alas! is the little cot?
Ask the blackened walls of Gravelotte!

Under the lilac broods alone
A maid whose heart is turned to stone.

Who sits, with folded fingers, dumb,
And meekly prays that her time may come!

Yet see! the Death-god's baleful star!
And War's black eagle screams afar!

And lo! the Christmas shadows wane
Over the hills of sad Lorraine.

_Quarterly_, 1873.

IN ANSWER

"S."

And thou didst idly dream,
Or, careless of thy action, think,
To cast a veil o'er all the past
And weld anew the broken link?
Vain thought to weave anew the bond
That thou didst ruthless sever;
Know friendship often turns to love,
But love to friendship never.

And love ne'er dies but when some hand
Too careless of their mimic strife,
Slow cleaves its tendrils from their hold,
And hurls them down bereft of life.
And love once fled can ne'er return,
Nor in its stead can friendship stand,
Nor twine again the tendrils frail,
Nor e'er unites the broken band.

_Athenoeum_, 1875.

THE MYSTIC

"TROUBADOUR"

An early memory of my earliest youth.

There came into the village I called home
A traveller, worn and faint. His garments held
The alien dust of many a weary march;
None but a child would e'er have thought the man
A thing to look at twice, much less adore.
But unto me, child that I was, the look
In his large pleading eyes seemed so divine,
The massive brow so free from thought of earth,
The curves of his sad mouth so tremulous
With more than woman's love and tenderness,
And in each word and act such gentleness,
That the quaint thought possessed and held my mind,
That by some strange hap an angel soul,
As penance for some small offense in heaven
Had been compelled to traverse in this wise
Our darkened world. And not alone his look
Which made his rusty vesture fine, nor yet
Alone the birds which fluttered round him as
He were a friend, led to the same belief--
But he with other men had naught in common.
They called him fool and idiot, jibed at him
And at his rags, and mocked his lofty air
So far above his low condition.
And yet unto their jeers he never word
Replied, nor ever seemed