Of God's great globe, that wondrously
Outrolls a glory of green earth,
And frames it with the restless sea.

Four closer walls of common pine:
And therein lieth, cold and still,
The weary flesh that long hath borne
Its patient mystery of ill.

Regardless now of work to do;
No queen more careless in her state;
Hands crossed in their unbroken calm;
For other hands the work may wait.

Put by her implements of toil;
Put by each coarse, intrusive sign;
She made a Sabbath when she died,
And round her breathes a Rest Divine.

Put by, at last, beneath the lid,
The exempted hands, the tranquil face;
Uplift her in her dreamless sleep,
And bear her gently from the place.

Oft she hath gazed, with wistful eyes,
Out from that threshold on the night;
The narrow bourn she crosseth now;
She standeth in the Eternal Light.

Oft she hath pressed, with aching feet,
Those broken steps that reach the door;
Henceforth with angels she shall tread
Heaven's golden stair forevermore!

FRIEDRICH RUeCKERT.

The last of the grand old generation of German poets is dead. Within ten
years Eichendorff, Heine, Uhland, have passed away; and now the death of
Friedrich Rueckert, the sole survivor of the minor gods who inhabited the
higher slopes of the Weimar Olympus, closes the list of their names.
Yet, although with these poets in time, Rueckert was not of them in the
structure of his mind or the character of his poetical development. No
author ever stood so lonely among his contemporaries. Looking over the
long catalogue, not only of German, but of European poets, we find no
one with whom he can be compared. His birthplace is supposed to be
Schweinfurt, but it is to be sought, in reality, somewhere on the banks
of the Euphrates. His true contemporaries were Saadi and Hariri of
Bosrah.

Rueckert's biography may be given in a few words, his life having been
singularly devoid of incident. He seems even to have been spared the
usual alternations of fortune in a material, as well as a literary
sense. With the exception of a somewhat acridly hostile criticism, which
the _Jahrbuecher_ of Halle dealt out to him for several years in
succession, his reputation has enjoyed a gradual and steady growth since
his first appearance as a poet. His place is now so well defined that
death--which sometimes change