common ways of life,
With passions held in sternest leash,
And hearts that knew not strife.

To yon grim meeting-house they fared,
With thoughts as sober as their speech,
To voiceless prayer, to songless praise,
To hear the elders preach.

Through quiet lengths of days they came,
With scarce a change to this repose;
Of all life's loveliness they took
The thorn without the rose.

But in the porch and o'er the graves,
Glad rings the southward robin's glee,
And sparrows fill the autumn air
With merry mutiny;

While on the graves of drab and gray
The red and gold of autumn lie,
And wilful Nature decks the sod
In gentlest mockery.

SILAS WEIR MITCHELL.

GREENWOOD CEMETERY.

How calm they sleep beneath the shade
Who once were weary of the strife,
And bent, like us, beneath the load
Of human life!

The willow hangs with sheltering grace
And benediction o'er their sod,
And Nature, hushed, assures the soul
They rest in God.

O weary hearts, what rest is here,
From all that curses yonder town!
So deep the peace, I almost long
To lay me down.

For, oh, it will be blest to sleep,
Nor dream, nor move, that silent night,
Till wakened in immortal strength
And heavenly light!

CRAMMOND KENNEDY.

THE DEAD.

The dead abide with us! Though stark and cold
Earth seems to grip them, they are with us still:
They have forged our chains of being for good or ill;
And their invisible hands these hands yet hold.
Our perishable bodies are the mould
In which their strong imperishable will--
Mortality's deep yearning to fulfil--
Hath grown incorporate through dim time untold.
Vibrations infinite of life in death,
As a star's travelling light survives its star!
So may we hold our lives, that when we are
The fate of those who then will draw this breath,
They shall not drag us to their judgment-bar,
And curse the heritage which we bequeath.

MATHILDE BLIND.

ON A GRAVE AT GRINDELWALD.

Here let us leave him; for his shroud the snow,
For funeral-lamps he has the planets seven,
For a great sign the icy stair shall go
Between the heights to heaven.

One moment stood he as the angels stand,
High in the stainless eminence of air;
The next, he was not, to his fatherland
Translated unaware.

FREDERIC WILLIAM HENRY MYERS.

THE EMIGRANT LASSIE.

As I came wandering down Glen Spean,
Where the braes are green and grassy,
With my light ste