uth of an imagined sailor,
but they are none the less diverting. The stanza containing the distich
ends with a striking piece of realism:

If a storm should come and awake the deep,
What matter? I shall ride and sleep.

This is the course of action usually pursued by sailors during a gale.
The first or second mate goes around and tucks them up comfortably, each
in his hammock, and serves them out an extra ration of grog after the
storm is over.

Barry Cornwall must have had an exceptionally winning personality,
for he drew to him the friendship of men as differently constituted as
Thackeray, Carlyle, Browning, and Forster. He was liked by the best of
his time, from Charles Lamb down to Algernon Swinburne, who caught a
glimpse of the aged poet in his vanishing. The personal magnetism of an
author does not extend far beyond the orbit of his contemporaries. It is
of the lyrist and not of the man I am speaking here. One could wish he
had written more prose like his admirable "Recollections of Elia."

Barry Cornwall seldom sounds a natural note, but when he does it is
extremely sweet. That little ballad in the minor key beginning,

Touch us gently, Time!
Let us glide adown thy stream,
was written in one of his rare moments. Leigh Hunt, though not without
questionable mannerisms, was rich in the inspiration that came but
infrequently to his friend. Hunt's verse is full of natural felicities.
He also was a bookman, but, unlike Barry Cornwall, he generally knew how
to mint his gathered gold, and to stamp the coinage with his own head.
In "Hero and Leander" there is one line which, at my valuing, is worth
any twenty stanzas that Barry Cornwall has written:

So might they now have lived, and so have died;
_The story's heart, to me, still beats against its side_.

Hunt's fortunate verse about the kiss Jane Carlyle gave him lingers on
everybody's lip. That and the rhyme of "Abou Ben Adhem and the Angel"
are spice enough to embalm a man's memory. After all, it takes only a
handful.

DECORATION DAY

HOW quickly Nature takes possession of a deserted battlefield, and goes
to work repairing the ravages of man! With invisible magic hand she
smooths the rough earthworks, fills the rifle-pits with delicate
flowers, and wraps the splintered tree-trunks with her fluent drapery
of tendrils. Soon the whole sharp outline of the spot is lost in
unremembering grass. Where the deadly rifle-ball whis