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 miscal 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felt and known In darkness and in light, from herb and stone, Spreading itself where'er that Power may move Which has withdrawn his being to its own; Which wields the world with never-wearied love, Sustains it from beneath, and kindles it above.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 Grecian'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 sign

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.

TWO GRAVES AT ROME.

NAINTS and Cæsars are here,

a world,

Rulers by love and by fear,

Those who in purple and gold
Pranked and lorded it here;

Those who in sackcloth and shame
Elected their limbs to enfold,

Scornful of pleasure and fame:
Ah, they had their reward!
There is something else that I seek

On the flowery sward,

By the pile of Cestius here!

Is it but two stones like the rest
Fondly preserving a name
Elsewhere unheeded of fame,
Set here by love, and left
To gather gray, like the rest?
- Psha! 'Tis the fate of man!
We are wretched, we are bereft
Of all that gave life its plan,
The sunbeam and treasure of yore;
We lay it in earth and are gone;
Then, as before,

We laugh and forget like the rest.

A transient name on the stone,
A transient love in the heart;

We have our day and are gone :

- But it is not so with these!
There is life and love in the stone;
Names of beauty and light
Over all lands and seas

They have gone forth in their might:
Warmer and higher beats

The general heart at the words
Shelley and Keats:

There is life and love in the stone!

He with the gleaming eyes

And glances gentle and wild,
The angel eternal child;

His heart could not throb like ours,
He could not see with our eyes
Dimmed with the dulness of earth,
Blind with the bondage of hours;
Yet none with diviner mirth
Hailed what was noble and sweet;
The blood-tracked journey of life,
The way-sore feet,

None have watched with more human eyes.

And he who went first to the tomb,

Rejoice, great souls of the dead!
For none in that earlier Rome
Took a bolder and lordlier heart
To the all-receiving tomb:
No richer, more equable eye,
No tongue of more musical art