Let us be patient! These severe afflictions

Not from the ground arise

But oftentimes celest al benedictions

Assume this dark disguise.

We see but dimly through the mists and vapors;
Amid these earthly damps

What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers
May be heaven's distant lamps.

There is no Death! What seems so is transition;
This life of mortal breath

Is but a suburb of the life elysian,
Whose portal we call Death,

She is not dead, -the child of our affection,-
But gore unto that school

Where she no longer needs our poor protection,
Aid Christ himself doth rule.

In that great cloister's stillness and seclusion, By guardian angels led,

Safe from temptation, safe from sin's pollution, She lives, whom we call dead.

Day after day, we think what she is doing In those bright realms of air;

Year after year, her tender steps pursuing,
Behold her grown more fair.

Thus do we walk with her and keep unbroken
The bond which nature gives,

Thinking that our remembrance, though unspoken,
May reach her where she lives.

Not as a child shall we again behold her;
For when with raptures wild

In our embrace we again enfold her,
She will not be a child:

But a fair maiden, in her Father's mansion, Clothed with celestial grace;

And beautiful with all the soul's expansion Shall we behold her face.

And though, at times, impetuous with emotion
And anguish lo..g suppressed,

The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean,
That cannot be at rest,-

We will be patient, and assuage the feeling
We may not wholly stay;

By silence sanctifying, not concealing,
The grief that must have way.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

And now with noiseless step sweet memory comes
And leads me gently through her twilight ;
What poet's tuneful lyre has ever sung realms
Or delicatest pencil e er portrayed

The enchanted shadow land where memory dwells?
It has its valleys, cheerless, lone and drear,
Dark, shaded, mournful, cypress tree;
And yet its sunlit mountain tops are bathed
In heaven's own blue. Upon its craggy cliffs
Robed in the dreamy light of distant years,
Are clustered joys serene of other days.
Upon its gently sloping hillsides bend
The weeping willows o'er the sacred dust
Of dear departed ones; yet in that land,
Where'er our footsteps fall upon the shore,
They that were sleeping rise from out the dust
Of death's long, silent years, and round us stand
As erst they did before the prison tomb
Received their clay within its voiceless halls.
The heavens that bend above that land are hung
With clouds of various hues. Some dark and chill,

Surcharged with sorrow, cast their sombre shade

Upon the sunny, joyous land below.

Others are floating though the dreamy air,
White as the falling snow, their margins tinged
With gold and crimson hues; their shadows fall
Upon the flowery meads and sunny slopes,
Soft as the shadow of an angel's wing.
When the rough battle of the day is done,
And evening's peace falls gently on the heart,
I bound away, across the noisy years,
Unto the utmost verge of memory's land,
Where earth and sky in dreamy distance meet,
And memory dim with dark oblivion joins ;
Where woke the first remembered sound that fell
Upon the ear in childhood's early morn;
And, wandering thence along the rolling years,

I see the shadow of my former self,

Gliding from childhood up to man's estate;

The path of youth winds down through many a vale,
And on the brink of many a dread abyss.
From out whose darkness comes no ray of light,
Save that a phantom dances o'er the gulf
And beckons toward the verge. Again the path
Leads o'er the summit where the sunbeams fall:
And thus in light and shade, sunshine and gloom,
Sorrow and joy this life-path leads along.

-James Abram Garfield.

I

HAVE had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.

I have been laughing, I have been carousing, Drinking late, sitting late, with my bosom cronies; All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.