'87

The mellow light steals o'er its silent strings,
That catch the sound of some far sylvan strain;
Such fantasie as thrills the poet's brain,
Or Morpheus, floating 'neath the pale stars, brings.

And list! Divinely, on its own sad wings,
It sings a wondrous pitiful refrain,
Methinks some soul with aching grief is lain--
That moans and dies with broken murmurings.

The voice is hushed, the lights are low and spent;
The dancers bid farewell, with tired feet.
Too few, I ween, this thing of wood has meant
A tenth part what its harmony, so sweet,
Has told to me. 'Mid joy, the sorrows greet
The wanderer, their hearts by weeping rent.

_Fortnight_, 1887.

MILLET'S "ANGELUS"

ELBRIDGE LAPHAM ADAMS '87

Dim, distant, tinkling chimes,
That summoned men in olden times
To pray the Virgin grace impart;
Ye solemn voices of a day gone by,
Whose mystic strains of melody
Alike touched peer and peasant's heart:
Your music falters in the fleeting years,
Yet still comes faintly to our ears,
Saved by a master's cunning art.

_Literary Monthly_, 1885.

A SUMMER AFTERNOON

HENRY D. WILD '88

In the country, with a soft, calm, hazy afternoon to keep you company!
To feel that Nature and yourself have moods in common, for you are
lazy and Nature is lazy, too, and blinks sleepily at you from filmy,
dreamy eyes that open and shut with your own in a sort of drowsy
rhythm. What more delightful than to yield yourself entirely to the
present mood and wander off somewhere, aimless except to see and feel?
The trim soberness of the dusty road with its gray windings and vistas
of sand-ruts becomes less matter-of-fact at length, and so you leave
it to itself, and seek a path that leads to the heart of Nature and
far from ways of men. Down grassy slopes and over little hillocks that
pique your curiosity by shutting out the view of what is coming next;
now skirting the edge of a furrowed potato-patch, and now sauntering
down cool lanes of corn, listening to the breezy lisping of the long,
green leaves that flap you softly in the face; now across a moist spot
where a spring bubbles forth, apparently only to nourish a family of
cowslips, and so on and on until you break the stillness of a shady
wood as your feet keep alternate time among the heaps of leaves whose
rustling is varied by the occasional noise of crackling twigs. The
damp air, freshened by con