es away
As fades a perfect summer day.

O vibrant strains of the to-be,
With promise pregnant and with hope,
You are a glad epitome
Of the hereafter's power and scope;
Yet 'neath your softest note appears
The thunder-march of coming years.

Ring, Christmas bells! The past is dead,
E'en though its requiem never die,
And God His endless love has spread
Upon the scenes that round us lie.
Ring loudly to the midnight air
That Love and Hope have slain Despair.

Ring out, O bells! The world is wide,
And Goodness sits upon a throne.
Ring out upon the Christmas-tide
That God will not forget His own,
And that on all, from far above,
Descends His never-failing love.

WILLIAM E. S. FALES.

_THE AMERICAN EAGLE UNDER DIFFICULTIES._

It seems to be a striking case of misunderstanding from the Romans down,
or up, to the Americans. Every theory and supposition has curiously
added to the misapprehension. Rightly judged, with the plainest facts of
his life even casually considered, the Bird o' Freedom seems so
disreputable a fowl that one wonders how he ever came to be chosen as a
figure-head by Romans, Germans, Americans, or the Michigan Regiment that
bore him alive as its standard through the smoke of a score of battles,
and brought him home again unscathed to make a curious part of the
history of a gallant State in the times that tried men's souls.
Innumerable myths trail behind him as appendages to his unearned fame.
He was the Bird of Jove. He has ever been the reputed king of an
ethereal world of fancy. His eye alone may look upon the sun unwinking
and undazed. And yet it is all in his eye, or rather in that of the
credulous mortals who believe the ancient story. There never lived a
poet, sticking to his business, that has not at some time in his career
become a panegyrist of his extraordinary supposed qualities and a
proclaimer of his magnificence. It is a curious fact, too, that all the
moralists, save one, have at some time or other used him as a simile, a
great example, a something to be imitated. That one, greatest of all, is
content with the familiar and plebeian hen and chickens in one of the
most eloquent and touching of his monologues, and uses the miserable
sparrow in that illustration which has in all time since given comfort
to forsaken souls.

With the poetry about this overrated fowl everybody is more or less
familiar. There is nothing finer; a