The birds are flinging the tidings
Of a joyful revel up there.

And now for the grand old fountains,
Tossing their silvery spray,

Those fountains so quaint and so many,
That are leaping and singing all day.

Those fountains of strange weird sculpture,
With lichens and moss o'ergrown,
Are they marble greening in moss-wreaths?
Or moss-wreaths whitening to stone?

Down many a wild, dim pathway
We ramble from morning till noon;
We linger, unheeding the hours,
Till evening comes all too soon.

And from out the ilex alleys,
Where lengthening shadows play,
We look on the dreamy Campagna,
All glowing with setting day,-

All melting in bands of purple,
In swathings and foldings of gold,
In ribands of azure and lilac,
Like a princely banner unrolled.

And the smoke of each distant cottage,
And the flash of each villa white,
Shines out with an opal glimmer,
Like gems in a casket of light.

And the dome of old St. Peter's
With a strange translucence glows,
Like a mighty bubble of amethyst
Floating in waves of rose.

In a trance of dreamy vagueness
We, gazing and yearning, behold
That city beheld by the prophet,
Whose walls were transparent gold.

And, dropping all solemn and slowly,
To hallow the softening spell,
There falls on the dying twilight
The Ave Maria bell.

With a mournful motherly softness,
With a weird and weary care,

That strange and ancient city

Seems calling the nations to prayer.

And the words that of old the angel
To the mother of Jesus brought,
Rise like a new evangel,

To hallow the trance of our thought.

With the smoke of the evening incense,
Our thoughts are ascending then
To Mary, the mother of Jesus,
To Jesus, the Master of men.

O city of prophets and martyrs,
O shrines of the sainted dead,

When, when shall the living day-spring

Once more on your towers be spread?

When He who is meek and lowly
Shall rule in those lordly halls,
And shall stand and feed as a shepherd
The flock which his mercy calls, —

O, then to those noble churches,
To picture and statue and gem,
To the pageant of solemn worship,
Shall the meaning come back again.

And this strange and ancient city,

In that reign of his truth and love,
Shall be what it seems in the twilight,
The type of that city above.

Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Rome, the Protestant Burial-Ground.

GRAVE OF KEATS.

PEACE! peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep,

He hath awakened from the dream of life;

'Tis we who, lost in stormy visions, keep

With phantoms an unprofitable strife,

And in mad trance strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. We decay

Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief

Convulse us and consume us day by day,

And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay.

He has outsoared the shadow of our night;
Envy and calumny, and hate and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight,
Can touch him not and torture not again;
From the contagion of the world's slow stain
He is secure, and now can never mourn

A heart grown cold, a head grown gray in vain ; Nor when the spirit's self has ceased to burn, With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

He lives, he wakes, - 't is Death is dead, not he;
Mourn not for Adonais. Thou young dawn,
Turn all thy dew to splendor, for from thee
The spirit thou lamentest is not gone;

Ye caverns and ye forests, cease to moan!
Cease, ye faint flowers and fountains, and thou air,
Which like a mourning veil thy scarf hadst thrown
O'er the abandoned earth, now leave it bare

Even to the joyous stars which smile on its despair!

He is made one with Nature: there is heard His voice in all her music, from the moan Of thunder to the song of night's sweet bird; He is a presence to be felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with never-wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above. Percy Bysshe Shelley.

BUT

THE GRAVE OF KEATS.

UT one rude stone for him whose song
Revived the Greciau's plastic ease,
Till men and maidens danced along
In youth perpetual on his frieze!

Where lies that mould of senses fine
Men knew as Keats awhile ago,
We cannot trace a single sigu

Of all that made his joy below.

There are no trees to talk of him

Who knew their hushes and their swells, Where myriad leaves in forest dim

Build up their cloudy citadels.

No mystic-signalled passion-flowers

Spread their flat discs, while buds more fair Swing like great bells, in frail green towers, To toll away the summer air.

O Mother Earth! thy sides he bound
With far-off Venus' warmer zone,
With statelier sons thy landscape crowned,
Whose chiming voices matched thine own!

O Mother Earth, what hast thou brought
This tender frame that loved thee well?
Harsh grass and weeds alone are wrought
On his low grave's uneven swell.

Maria Lowell.