t and mercy darkly through a glass alone!

XV.

"While our childhood fair and sacred.
Sapless doctrines doth rehearse,
And the milk of falsehoods acrid,
Burns our babe-lips like a curse,
Cling we must to godless prophets, as the suckling to the nurse.

XVI.

"As the seed time, so the reaping,
Shame on us who overreach,
While our eyes yet smart with weeping,
Hearts so all our own to teach,
Better they and we lay sleeping where the darkness hath no speech!"

[Footnote 1: Those unacquainted with the forms of the old decorated
Venetian glass will hardly understand the phrase in the text. Those
who know them will feel the accuracy of the picture.]

[Footnote 2: "_Non toccare che brucia_," Tuscan proverb.]

It is impossible for any but those who know--not Florence, but--rural
Tuscany well, to appreciate the really wonderful accuracy and
picturesque perfection of the above scene from a Tuscan afternoon. But
I think many others will feel the lines to be good. In the concluding
stanzas, in which the writer draws her moral, there are weak lines.
But in the first eleven, which paint her picture, there is not one.
Every touch tells, and tells with admirable truth and vividness of
presentation. In one copy of the lines which I have, the name is
changed from Bice to "Flavia," and this, I take it, because of the
entire non-applicability of the latter stanzas to the child, whose
rearing was in her own hands. But the picture of child and nurse--how
life-like none can tell, but I--was the picture of her "baby
Beatrice," and the description simply the reproduction of things seen.

I think I may venture to print also the following lines. They are, in
my opinion, far from being equal in merit to the little poem printed
above, but they are pretty, and I think sufficiently good to do no
discredit to her memory. Like the preceding, they have no title.

I.

"I built me a temple, and said it should be
A shrine, and a home where the past meets me,
And the most evanescent and fleeting of things,
Should be lured to my temple, and shorn of their wings,
To adorn my palace of memories.

II.

"The pearl of the morning, the glow of the noon,
The play of the clouds as they float past the moon,
The most magical tint on the snowiest peak,
They are gone while I gaze, fade before you can speak,
Yet they stay in my palace of memories.

III.

"I stood in t