"A season ticket cheaply bought
With a dessert of pilfered berries,--
And who so oft my soul hast caught,
With morn and evening voluntaries,--

"Deem me not faithless, if all day
Among my dusty books I linger,
Nor am, like thee, June's pipe to play
With fancy-led, half-conscious finger.

"A bird is singing in my brain,
And bubbling o'er with mingled fancies,
Gay, tragic, rapt,--right heart of Spain
Fed with the sap of old romances.

"I ask no ampler skies than those
His magic music vaults above me,
No falser friends, no truer foes,--
And does not Dona Clara love me?

"Cloaked shapes, a twanging of guitars,
A rush of feet, and rapiers clashing,
Then silence deep with breathless stars,
And overhead a white hand flashing.

"O, music of all moods and climes,
Vengeful, forgiving, sensuous, saintly,
Where still between the Christian chimes
The Moorish cymbal tinkles faintly!

"Bird of to-day, thy songs are stale
To his, my singer of all weathers,
My Calderon, my nightingale,
My Arab soul in Spanish feathers.

"Yes, friend, these singers dead so long,
And still, perhaps, in purgatory,
Give its best sweetness to all song,
To Nature's self her better glory."

HOSPITAL MEMORIES.

II.

In March, the first fresh fragrance of the Southern spring, and the
merry songs of birds in the evergreen-trees, filled the soft air with a
delusive promise that summer was near at hand. But cold, stormy weather
tediously delayed its coming, and resulted calamitously for the soldiers
of the Ninth Army Corps, who came from the bravely borne hardships and
well-earned honors of the siege of Knoxville, as well as for many other
regiments that joined them at Annapolis before starting on the last
campaign of the war. Indeed, throughout the war, it seemed as if the
inception of an expedition was a signal for the elements to lash
themselves into a fury in some remarkable manner. Sleet, snow, and
bitter blasts did their worst for many weeks at this time; and pneumonia
in its most fearful forms, and rheumatism, attacked hundreds in their
unavoidable exposure.

About seventy colored men, many Indians, and scores of others were
brought into the hospital. I think that no one regiment sent more
patients than the First Michigan Sharpshooters, who had come from
Chicago in a