d and Devil,
You lured me on, I knew,
And lure me still! soft whiling
The way with hopes beguiling,
While dark Despair sits smiling
Behind the eyes of you!

A SONG FOR OLD AGE.

Now nights grow cold and colder,
And North the wild vane swings,
And round each tree and boulder
The driving snow-storm sings--
Come, make my old heart older,
O memory of lost things!

Of Hope, when promise sung her
Brave songs and I was young,
That banquets now on hunger
Since all youth's songs are sung;
Of Love, who walks with younger
Sweethearts the flowers among.

Ah, well! while Life holds levee,
Death's ceaseless dance goes on.
So let the curtains, heavy
About my couch, be drawn--
The curtains, sad and heavy,
Where all shall sleep anon.

_Tristram And Isolt._

Night and vast caverns of rock and of iron;
Voices like water, and voices like wind;
Horror and tempests of hail that environ
Shapes and the shadows of two who have sinned.

Wan on the whirlwind, in loathing uplifting
Faces that loved once, forever they go,
TRISTAM and ISOLT, the lovers, go drifting,
The sullen laughter of Hell below.

THE BETTER LOT.

Her life was bound to crutches: pale and bent,
But smiling ever, she would go and come:
For of her soul GOD made an instrument
Of strength and comfort to an humble home.

Better a life of toil and slow disease
That LOVE companions through the patient years,
Than one whose heritage is loveless ease,
That never knows the blessedness of tears.

DUSK IN THE WOODS.

Three miles of hill it is; and I
Came through the woods that waited, dumb,
For the cool _Summer_ dusk to come;
And lingered there to watch the sky
Up which the gradual sunset clomb.

A tree-toad quavered in a tree;
And then a sudden whip-poor-will
Called overhead, so wildly shrill,
The startled woodland seemed to see
How very lone it was and still.

Then through dark boughs its stealthy flight
An owl took; and, at sleepy strife,
The cricket turned its fairy fife;
And through the dead leaves, in the night,
Soft rustlings stirred of unseen life.

And in the punk-wood everywhere
The inserts ticked, or bored below
The rotted bark; and, glow on glow,
The gleaming