Sad is the vague and tender dream Deep mourns the soul in anguished pride THE PRAIRIE. THE skies are blue above my head, A glimmering plain in drowsy trance With sleepy summer sounds— The hot cicala's sultry cry, The murmurous dream of bees. The butterfly-a flying flower- And lavishly beneath the sun, Where Autumn's royal feet may tread In verdurous tumult far away Far in the East like low-hung clouds No accent wounds the reverent air, LUCY LARCOM. [Born about 1833.1 Miss Larcom is authoress of a volume of Poems published in 1869]. ROCK AND RILL. "INTO the sunshine out of shade!" Out from her cradle-roof of trees, A pleasant world for running streams At play with all the sweet sky-gleams, A rock has stopped the silent rill, And still he will not let her go: But she may chide and sing, The harebell sees herself no more Yet never she such azure wore, Till wept on by the spray. 1 I must apologize for guessing at a lady's age. My surmise is based partly (but not solely) on the fact that Miss Larcom's poem, Thirty-five, which seems to relate to herself, is printed in her volume dated 1869.—W. M. R. And many a woodland violet Her thoughtful blue eye brimming wet, The rill is blessing in her talk LINES. THOU mayst not rest in any lovely thing, The beauty of the round green world is not Of the world's essence; far within the sky Thou canst not make a pillow for thy head Where out of burning whiteness flows the light- Let beauty sink in light; in central deeps THE ROSE ENTHRONED. Ir melts and seethes, the chaos that shall grow And, ere that fever leaves the granite veins, Built by the warring elements, they rise, The building of the world is not for you, Till Beauty springs from Power. Meanwhile from crumbling rocks and shoals of death Richer and sweeter far than aught before, And ever nobler lives and deaths more grand, For whom or what she plans she knows no more Her desolations wild. |