ng singers slumber;
But o'er their silent sister's breast
The wild-flowers, who will stoop to number?
A few can touch the magic string,
And noisy Fame is proud to win them:
Alas for those that never sing,
But die with all their music in them!

Nay, grieve not for the dead alone,
Whose song has told their heart's sad story,--
Weep for the voiceless, who have known
The cross without the crown of glory!
Not where Leucadian breezes sweep
O'er Sappho's memory-haunted billow,
But where the glistening night-dews weep
On nameless sorrow's churchyard pillow.

O hearts that break and give no sign
Save whitening lip and fading tresses,
Till Death pours out his cordial wine,
Slow-dropped from Misery's crushing presses,--
If singing breath or echoing chord
To every hidden pang were given,
What endless melodies were poured,
As sad as earth, as sweet as heaven!"

Souls cry, "Give us a voice;" and nature enters into our yearning
moods. The autumn and the rain grieve with us, and June makes merry
with us as at a festival, and the deep sky gives room for the soaring
of our aspirations, and the solemn night says, "Dream!" And for our
heartache and longing, Tennyson is our voice; for he seems near
neighbor to us. He lay on a bank of violets, and looked into the sky,
and heard poplars pattering as with rain upon the roof. Really, in all
Tennyson's poems you will be surprised at the affluence of his
reference to nature. His custom was to make the moods of nature to be
explanatory of the moods of the soul. Man needs nature as birds need
air, and flowers, and waving trees, and the dear sun. Tennyson will
make appeal to

"The flower in the crannied wall"

by way of silencing the agnostic's prating against God. Hear him:

"Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies--
Hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower,--but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."

Here follow a few, among many, very many, delicious references to the
out-of-door world we name nature, as explanatory of the indoor world we
call soul:

"Who make it seem more sweet to be
The little life on bank and brier,
The bird that pipes his lone desire
And dies unheard within his tree."

"A thousand suns will stream on thee,
A thousand moons will quiver;
But not b