Of thy majestic fabric, but the eye

O'erteeming, nothing grander can combine.
Than thy sublime but shattered symmetry,

Thou wonder, pride, and awe of all that pass thee by.

Hark! the night's slumberous air is musical

With the low carolling of birds that seem
To hold here an enduring festival :

How do their notes and nature's flowers redeem
The place from stained pollution! if the stream
And reek of blood gushed forth from man and beast,
If Cain-like brethren gloated o'er the steam

Of immolation as a welcome feast,

Ages have cleansed the guilt, the unnatural strife hath ceased.

The white flowers blossom chapleting a ground Whose dust was human, they bloom not the less; Where be the myriads once those seats that crowned? They gazed on thee, broad Moon! but did not bless Thine urn, from which they drank no gentleness: The fight, the hunt, the galley's crashing prow, Such were their morning hopes of happiness, For which they waited with as feverish brow As for some worthless aim our hearts are beating now.

Yet rest forgiveness on their memory!
Life's infancy was theirs, its solemn end
Unknown, they felt not their humanity,

They knew not their vast souls. Lo! how ascend

Tier above tier those benches that extend

In shattered circles, where the Roman sate,

While on his nod, or voice, or finger's bend,

The gladiator read remorseless fate;

Even so might life or death on one slight motion wait!

Along its shattered edges on a sky

Of azure, sharply, delicately traced,

The light bird flits o'er flowers that wave from high,
Where human foot shall nevermore be based:
Grass mantles the arena mid defaced

And broken columns freshly, wildly spread;
And through the hollow windows once so graced
With glittering eyes, faint stars their twinklings shed
Lighting as if with life those sockets of the dead!

So stretches that Titanic skeleton:

Its shattered and enormous circle rent,
And yawning open, arch and covering gone;
As the huge crater's sides hang imminent
Round the volcano whose last flames are spent,
Whose sounds shall nevermore to heaven aspire,
So frowns that stern and desolate monument;
A stage in ruin, an exhausted pyre,

The actors past to dust, forever quenched the fire!

John Edmund Reade.

THE COLISEUM.

YPE of the antique Rome! Rich reliquary

TYPE

Of lofty contemplation left to Time

By buried centuries of pomp and power!

At length, at length, after so many days
Of weary pilgrimage and burning thirst

(Thirst for the springs of lore that in thee lie),
I kneel, an altered and an humble man,
Amid thy shadows, and so drink within
My very soul thy grandeur, gloom, and glory!

Vastness, and age, and memories of eld!
Silence, and desolation, and dim night!

I feel ye now,

I feel ye in your strength,

O spells more sure than e'er Judæan king
Taught in the gardens of Gethsemane !

O charms more potent than the rapt Chaldee
Ever drew down from out the quiet stars!

Here, where a hero fell, a column falls!
Here, where the mimic eagle glared in gold,
A midnight vigil holds the swarthy bat!

Here, where the dames of Rome their gilded hair
Waved to the wind, now wave the reed and thistle!
Here, where on golden throne the monarch lolled,
Glides, spectre-like, unto his marble home,
Lit by the wan light of the hornéd moon,
The swift and silent lizard of the stones!

But stay! these walls, these ivy-clad arcades,

These mouldering plinths, these sad and blackened shafts,
These vague entablatures, this crumbling frieze,
These shattered cornices, this wreck, this ruin,
These stones, - alas! these gray stones,

All of the famed and the colossal left
By the corrosive hours to fate and me?

are they all,

"Not all," the echoes answer me, "not all!
Prophetic sounds and loud arise forever
From us and from all ruin unto the wise,
As melody from Memnon to the sun.

We rule the hearts of mightiest men, we rule
With a despotic sway all giant minds.

We are not impotent,

we pallid stones.

Not all our power is gone, not all our fame,
Not all the magic of our high renown,
Not all the wonder that encircles us,
Not all the mysteries that in us lie,
Not all the memories that hang upon
And cling around about us as a garment,
Clothing us in a robe of more than glory."

Edgar Allan Poe.

IN THE COLISEUM.

YO stand within the Coliseum's walls,

Go

And mid the sunny stillness call again

The Roman multitudes of olden days

Back to their cruel lives athirst for blood,
And place them there in all their ancient state,
Row upon row of fierce expectant eyes,

A palpitating mass of eager zest;
Behold the Emperor in his purple robes,

Who deemed himself a god, set in their midst;
And in the wide arena, war-won men
Grouped, sword in hand, to fight unto the death;
Then in that moment's quiet, when the hush
Of breathless listening quells the restless crowd,

That moment's calm, when those about to die
Salute the Cæsar, think, if in such time
Once long ago there could have sudden flashed
On that great audience a vision clear

Of what their amphitheatre is now,
Á silent ruin overgrown with weeds,

One keen and instant sense of mortal fate,
The transientness of building, empire, man,
Would not an awful, solemn stillness then
Have stolen o'er them, such as reigns within
The shattered circus of their sports to-day?
And moving slowly, softly, one by one,

Would they have gone out, fear-struck to their souls? Or would the whole assembly, smote at once

With this same realizing, madly rise

In all their lusty health, and with one shout
Of terror-clinched conviction echo there

The gladiator's words, "About to die,

O Cæsar, we salute thee,

we - who die!"

THE CIRCUS.

Sarah Bridges Stebbins.

HE pants to stand

In its vast circus, all alive with heads

And quivering arms and floating robes, the air
Thrilled by the roaring fremitus of men,
The sunlit awning heaving overhead,
Swollen and strained against its corded veins,
And flapping out its hem with loud report,
The wild beasts roaring from the pit below,
The wilder crowd responding from above