ld have a breezy reminder of the country in it. Not all
the arts of all the modernists,--not "Maud," with its garden-song,--not
the caged birds of Killingworth, singing up and down the
village-street,--not the heather-bells out of which the springy step of
Jean Ingelow crushes perfume,--shall make me forget the old, sweet, even
flow of the "Deserted Village."

Down with it, my boy, from the third shelf! G-O-L-D-S-M-I-T-H--a worker
in gold--is on the back.

And I sit reading it to myself, as a fog comes weltering in from the
sea, covering all the landscape, save some half-dozen of the
city-spires, which peer above the drift-like beacons.

* * * * *

THE REAPER'S DREAM.

The road was lone; the grass was dank
With night-dews on the briery bank
Whereon a weary reaper sank.
His garb was old,--his visage tanned;
The rusty sickle in his hand
Could find no work in all the land.

He saw the evening's chilly star
Above his native vale afar;
A moment on the horizon's bar
It hung,--then sank as with a sigh:
And there the crescent moon went by,
An empty sickle down the sky.

To soothe his pain, Sleep's tender palm
Laid on his brow its touch of balm,--
His brain received the slumberous calm;
And soon, that angel without name,
Her robe a dream, her face the same,
The giver of sweet visions, came.

She touched his eyes: no longer sealed,
They saw a troop of reapers wield
Their swift blades in a ripened field:
At each thrust of their snowy sleeves,
A thrill ran through the future sheaves,
Bustling like rain on forest-leaves.

They were not brawny men who bowed
With harvest-voices rough and loud,
But spirits moving as a cloud:
Like little lightnings in their hold,
The silver sickles manifold
Slid musically through the gold.

Oh, bid the morning-stars combine
To match the chorus clear and fine
That rippled lightly down the line,--
A cadence of celestial rhyme,
The language of that cloudless clime,
To which their shining hands kept time!

Behind them lay the gleaming rows,
Like those long clouds the sunset shows
On amber meadows of repose:
But like a wind the binders bright
Soon followed in their mirthful might,
And swept them into sheaves of light.

Doubling the splendor of the plain,
There rolled the g