RICHARD REALFE.

BY REUBIE CARPENTER.

His was the poet's heart of strange unrest.

His thoughts were woven thick with midnight dreams,
And golden fantasies, and those vague gleams
Of spirit-light with which the seers are blest.
Pale-featured Sorrow was his constant guest,
And every star of joy whose silvery beams
Fell o'er his path, changed into darkened streams
Of bitter woe within his joyless breast.

At last Love came, and brought with her such pain
As burns the heart like flames of fiercest fire,

And dries up every fount of hope divine;
He, frenzied, desperate, knowing all was vain,
With one last parting moan upon his lyre,
Dashed down Life's goblet, spilled its bitter wine.

THE DREAMER.

BY HELENA MAYNARD RICHARDSON.

Keen is the wind, and steep the pathway grows
To where the shaggy brow o'erlooks the sea.
The clouds hang low. The scudding yachts fast flee
Before the urging breath of breeze which blows

Them wide of port. Saluting, comes or goes

The smoke-stained ship of steam, with deep-voiced key That echoes down the shoreland far and free And dies amid the gathering mist's repose.

Atop the cliff the dreamer lies a-dream :

Beneath, the world of men; its paths diverge;
And all is his to conquer and to claim.
But motionless, and bound in hush supreme
Above the dash and roar of beating surge,

Apart he dreams, and dares to dream of fame.

THE EDITOR'S EVENING.

The Greatest Lyric.

OETRY interprets two things nature and human

nature. Besides these, the muse has no other worlds to discover and reveal. Nature is the objective, visible world; human nature is the subjective, invisible world. The singer of the song sees both; but his vision turns to the one or the other according to his temperament, his disposition, and his habits of culture.

In some cases the poet is the poet of nature. For example, our American Bryant is a nature poet, pure and simple. It were difficult to find in the writings of any other bard so much of nature, so little of human nature. From the day of his first outgoings, when he lay musing by the margin of the meadow and traced the distant flight of the waterfowl, while the heavens were aglow "with the last steps of day," to that far time when the veteran poet composed the “Flood of Years," there is hardly a trace of anything but nature and the influences of nature falling on the heart of man.

On the other hand, Longfellow is the poet of human nature. Though he had a soul most susceptible to the influences of the natural world, he nevertheless chooses the human heart for his realm of delight and interpretation. His poetry is ever illumined with the affections and hopes of humanity. Even in those cases in which he begins with nature he always ends with human nature. Standing by the ocean side he beholds the seaweed drifting. He muses on the autumnal equinox and the gigantic storm-wind that falls on the deep and lashes shoreward the laboring surges. He discovers in vision the far regions of the water-world from which the seaweed comes. He hears the soft waves murmuring on the Bermudian corals and the hoarse breakers roaring on the rock-bound Hebrides. He thinks of the mysterious seastream bearing its unmeasurable volume of warmth from the tropics into the frozen gulfs of the North. But he cannot finish with the sea vision as such; he turns to the poetic an

alogy in life, and the whole force of his thought expends itself in developing the imagery of the invisible empire:

So when storms of wild emotion

Smite the ocean

Of the Poet's soul, ere long

From each cave and rocky fastness

In the vastness

Floats some fragment of a song.

Anon we find a poet who is a singer of both nature and human nature. Of this kind was the late immortal Laureate of England. Tennyson's preeminence rises upon the double abutment of the visible and the invisible world. He blended the two elements in his song; and the imperishable beauty of much of his work depends upon the blending.

It is this happy union of the objective and visible with the subjective and invisible that has given to the "Bugle Song" its strong hold on the sympathy of the English-speaking race, and has brought a virtual consensus of judgment that it is the finest lyric in our language. Note the unconscious ease and beauty with which the elements of the natural and spiritual worlds are mingled in this masterpiece. On what does the splendor fall? Not on mere mountain peaks and cliffs and precipices, but on castle walls. Yonder, on the heights, stood the old castles of the feudal ages, with moats and drawbridges ready for romance or battle. Human interests were there. True enough, the poet's vision falls on "snowy summits," but they are old in story.

Through the first and part of the second stanza there is no suggestion that any other than the poet is standing with him and viewing the splendid scene. In the second stanza he introduces Elfland. The element of life, even the life of the Little World, cannot escape his sympathy and discernment. If there are echoes of the actual bugle falling across the lake and returning from cliff and scar, those echoes are not merely the rebound of sound; they must be the little music blown from the horns of Elfland. The Elves blow, and the purple glens reply, and the echoes recede faintly, faintly, into the silence.

Then, in the third stanza, we discover that the poet has not been musing aloud so much as pointing out and interpreting

the scene to another soul beside him. In the beginning of this stanza he addresses that other soul; he tells her that while the echoes of the actual bugle die away into silence while they fade to nothing in the rich sky that overspans the world of sense and sorrow-there are other echoes that do not melt into silence. The voices of the soul, as the syllables of the bugle, flung forth on the infinite air, roll from soul to soul, and grow forever and forever.

There is thus in the Bugle Song a sudden involution of all the visible landscape-of snowy summits and castle walls and lakes and cataracts and cliffs and scars; and there is the equally sudden and beautiful evolution of another world the invisible world of hope and love. The Bugle Song thus enfolds in its drapery the sublimest elements of nature and the purest elements of human nature, and the echo, like that of the soul itself, will continue to resound and fly from the crags and valleys of life through all centuries until our mother tongue shall no longer carry from heart to heart its messages of peace.

"Thrift, Thrift, Horatio."

A patriot in exile went on Bunker Hill day to see the Collis Sacer. He went alone; for solitude, even in the cityful, fits the mind for communion with the great.

The great were not wanting on that sloping hill, in the June meadow, a hundred and twenty-two years ago. There were men in Breed's pasture on that day who wore hunting shirts and belts with powder-horns and leather bags filled with chawed bullets, who, on another planet, would have been gods, not by courtesy, but by right. Being on earth, they were shot and killed in freedom's cause, and for a century at least it seemed that their fame was immortal.

Old Boston was proud of her heroes. She reared an obelisk of granite not unworthy of her patriot dead. The Man of Marshfield, when the writer of this note was still a blinking baby, said some immortal things at the foot of that everlasting shaft. Now the exile went to Bunker Hill to muse on these things, and to drop a possible tear of affection and veneration on the spot where Joe Warren and old Israel

Putnam and Prescott and Gridley and the other heroes fought in the trenches and fell back into immortality.

The exile tried to revoke the greatness and the glory of the event and the actors. He paid his tribute at the foot of the statues of Prescott and Warren, and was permitted by an official to ascend to the top of the monument where the old battered guns are kept. For this privilege he was charged twenty cents! From the top of the obelisk he looked down and saw six fakirs gesticulating in quack-carts just outside of the enclosure. They shouted and vociferated about their fraudulent wares and accursed tricks to a lot of ignoramuses, to whom Bunker Hill signified as much as the Parthenon would signify to as many Bushmen!

Twenty cents for admission! A fakir crying his wares at the base of Bunker Hill! Business is business.

The Pessimist.

It is the fashion to decry pessimism as the shabbiest vice of the civilized life. To be a pessimist is to incur the aversion and contempt of the world. To be an optimist is, according to the rhythm of the age, the highest of the virtues. For this reason they who would avoid censure and they who would gather praise must shun the pessimistic and follow the optimistic gonfalon.

But there are pessimists and pessimists. Old Thersites was a pessimist. His head indicated it. Homer says that the head of Thersites was "piled up behind." The wearer of that head used to go about the Greek camp at Troy finding fault with everything. He criticised Agamemnon, king of men. He mocked at the conduct of the siege. He quarrelled with everybody, even the sutlers and camp-followers. He could not keep the peace, insomuch that the mild-mannered Ulysses was obliged one day to whip him. When the queen of the Amazons was slain Thersites plucked out her eyes; he could not forbear to make even Death worse than it was. He went on in this career of truculent fault-finding and mockery and denunciation of everything and praise of nothing until the soured and terrible Achilles - himself something of a pessimist — got hold of him and killed him.