PHILIP JAMES BAILEY.

1816

bliss :

(BORN at Nottingham, April 22, 1816. He studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1840. In 1839 he published Festus, a poem which treats of the highest theme of philosophy and religion, He wrote other poems also, entitled The Angel World, 1850; The Mystic, 1855: The Age, A Satire, 1858; and The Universal Hymn, 1867.]

For God, being Love, in love created all, LOVE OF GOD AND MAN. As he contains the whole and penetrates.

Seraphs love God, and angels love the LOVE is the happy privilege of the good : mind

We love each other; and these lower Love is the reason of all living things.

lives, A Trinity there seems of principles, Which walk the earth in thousand di. Which represent and rule created life

verse shapes, The love of self, our fellows, and our

According to their reason, love us too: God.

The most intelligent affect us most. In all throughout one common feeling Nay, man's chief wisdom's love — the reigns :

love of God. Each doth maintain, and is maintained The new religion--final, perfect, pureby the other :

Was that of Christ and love. His great All are compatible — all needful; one

command – To life, – to virtue one, - and one to His all-sufficing precept - was't not

love? Which thus together make the power, Truly to love ourselves we must love the end,

God, And the perfection of created Being. To love God we must all his creatures From these three principles doth every love, deed,

To love his creatures, both ourselves and Desire, and will, and reasoning, good

Him. or bad, come;

Thus love is all that's wise, fair, good, To these they all determine

sum and

and happy! scheme: The three are one in centre and in round; Wrapping the world of life as do the skies Our world. Hail! air of love, by which

LIKE AN ISLAND IN A RIVER, we live! How sweet, how fragrant! Spirit, though Like an island in a river

Art thou, my love, to me; Void of gross sign — is scarce a simple And I journey by thee ever essence,

With a gentle ecstasy. Immortal, immaterial, though it be. I arise to fall before thee; One only simple essence liveth — God,- I come to kiss thy feet: Creator, uncreate. The brutes beneath, To adorn thee and adore thee, – The angels high above us, with our- Mine only one, my sweet !

selves, Are but compounded things of mind and And thy love hath power upon me, form.

Like a dream upon a brain; In all things animate is therefore cored For the loveliness which won me, An elemental sameness of existence;

With the love, too, doth remain.

unseen

And my life it beautifieth,

Though love be but a shade, Known of only ere it dieth,

By the darkness it hath made.

Beginning, mean, and end to all things,

God.
The dead have all the glory of the world.

THE END OF LIFE.

GREAT THOUGHTS. We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;

Who can mistake great thoughts? In feelings, not in figures on a dial. They seize upon the mind; arrest, and We should count time by heart-throbs.

search, He most lives,

And shake it; bow the tall soul as by Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts wind; the best.

Rush over it like rivers over reeds, And he whose heart beats quickest lives Which quaver in the current; turn us the longest :

cold, Lives in one hour more than in years do And pale, and voiceless; leaving in the

brain Whose fat blood sleeps as it slips along A rocking and a ringing, - glorious, their veins.

But momentary; madness might it last, Life is but a means unto an end; that And close the soul with Heaven as with end,

a seal.

some

FRANCES BROWNE.

1816

[BORN Jan. 16, 1816, at Stranolar, Donegal County, where her father was the village postmaster. She lost her sight in infancy, but learned many of the lessons of her brothers and sisters. In 1840 she published Songs of Our Land, followed by contributions to the Athenæum and other Magazines. In 1847 she removed from Ireland to Edinburgh. In 1852 she removed to London, and has since contributed to the light literature of the day.]

But one had wilder woe

For a fair face, long ago
Lost in the darker depths of a great

town.

LOSSES.
UPON the white sea-sand

There sat a pilgrim band,
Telling the losses that their lives had

known;
While evening waned away

From breezy cliff and bay,
And the strong tides went out with

weary moan.
One spake, with quivering lip,

Of a fair freighted ship,
With all his household to the deep gone

down;

There were who mourned their

youth

With a most loving ruth,
For its brave hopes and memories ever

green;
And one upon the west
Turned an eye that would not

rest, For far-off hills whereon its joy had been.

1818-1889. (BORN about 1818 in Southwark. At an early age she contributed to various periodicals, and in 1840 published a volume of poems, which at once attracted the attention of the public and stamped her as a writer of merit and originality. Her poems reprinted in a collected form have passed through numerous editions. In 1864 she obtained a literary pension of £100 per annum.]

With truth for my creed, and God for THE OLD ARM CHAIR.

my guide; I LOVE it - I love it, and who shall She taught me

to lisp my earliest dare

prayer, To chide me for loving that old arm As I knelt beside that old arm chair.

chair! I've treasured it long as

a sainted

I sat and watched her many a day, prize

When her eyes grew dim and her locks I've bedewed it with tears, and embalmed

were gray, it with sighs;

And I almost worshipped her when she 'Tis bound by a thousand bands to my

smiled heart,

And turned from her Bible to bless her Not a tie will break, not a link will

child. start.

Years rolled on, but the last one sped Would you learn the spell? a mother

My idol was shattered — my earth star sat there; And a sacred thing is that old arm I learnt how much the heart can bear, chair.

When I saw her die in that old arm

chair. In childhood's hour I lingered near The hallowed seat with listening ear; 'Tis past ! 'tis past! but I gaze on it And gentle words that mother would

now give,

With quivering breath and throbbing To fit me to die, and teach me to live.

brow: She told me shame would never be- 'Twas there she nursed me 'twas there tide,

she died,

fled :

EMILY BRONTË.

with me,

be:

1819-1848. (EMILY BRONTË was born at Hartshead-cum-Clifton, near Leeds, in 1819, and lived at the parsonage at Haworth from 1820 to her death. The monotony of this existence was broken only by a brief attempt to be a governess and by a short stay at Brussels in 1842, all exile from home being excessively painful and hurtful to her. She died of consumption at Haworth on the 19th of December, 1848. She published, in conjunction with her sisters, Poems, by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, in 1846, and, alone, the novel of Wuthering Heights in 1847.] LAST LINES.

STANZAS No coward soul is mine,

OFTEN rebuked, yet always back reNo trembler in the world's storm.

turning troubled sphere :

To those first feelings that were born I see Heaven's glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from And leaving busy chase of wealth and fear.

learning

For idle dreams of things which cannot O God within my breast, Almighty, ever-present Deity! Life – that in me has rest,

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy As I — undying Life — have power in region; thee!

Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;

And visions rising, legion after legion, Vain are the thousand creeds

Bring the unreal world too strangely That move men's hearts: unutterably

vain; Worthless as withered weeds, Or idlest froth amid the boundless main, I'll walk, but not in old heroic traces,

And not in paths of high morality, To waken doubt in one

And not among the half-distinguished Holding so fast by thine infinity;

faces, So surely anchored on

The clouded forms of long-past hisThe stedfast rock of immortality.

tory. With wide-embracing love Thy spirit animates eternal years,

I'll walk where my own nature would Pervades and broods above,

be leading: Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and

It vexes me to choose another guide:

Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are rears.

feeding; Though earth and man were gone,

Where the wild wind blows on the And suns and universes ceased to be,

mountain side. And Thou were left alone, Every existence would exist in Thee.

near.

There is not room for Death,

THE OLD STOIC.
Nor atom that his might could render
void :

RICHES I hold in light esteem,
Thou - Thou art Being and Breath, And Love I laugh to scorn;
And what Thou art may never be de- | And lust of fame was but a dream,
stroyed.

That vanished with the morn: