f fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest.

In the golden lightning
Of the sunken sun,
O'er which clouds are brightening,
Thou dost float and run,
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

The pale purple even
Melts around thy flight;
Like a star of heaven,
In the broad daylight
Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.

All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As, when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.

What thou art we know not;
What is most like thee?
From rainbow-clouds there flow not
Drops so bright to see
As from thy presence showers a rain of melody:--

Like a poet hidden
In the light of thought;
Singing hymns unbidden,
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

Teach us, sprite or bird,
What sweet thoughts are thine:
I have never heard
Praise of love or wine
That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

Chorus hymeneal
Or triumphal chaunt,
Matched with thine, would be all
But an empty vaunt--
A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.

What objects are the fountains
Of thy happy strain?
What fields, or waves, or mountains?
What shapes of sky or plain?
What love of thine own kind? what ignorance of pain?

Teach me half the gladness
That thy brain must know,
Such harmonious madness
From my lips would flow,
The world should listen then, as I am listening now!

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

THE SANDS OF DEE.

I have often had the pleasure of riding across the coast from Chester,
England, to Rhyl, on the north coast of Wales, where stretch "The Sands
of Dee" (Charles Kingsley, 1819-75). These purple sands at low tide
stretch off into the sea miles away, and are said to be full of
quicksands.

"O Mary, go and call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
And call the cattle home,
Across the sands of Dee."
The western wind was wild and dark with foam
And all alone went she.

The western tide crept up along the sand,
And o'er and o'er t