AN EMBER PICTURE.

OW strange are the freaks of memory!

How

The lessons of life we forget,

While a trifle, a trick of color,

In the wonderful web is set,

Set by some mordant of fancy,
And, spite of the wear and tear
Of time or distance or trouble,
Insists on its right to be there.

A chance had brought us together;
Our talk was of matters-of-course;
We were nothing, one to the other,
But a short half-hour's resource.

We spoke of French acting and actors,
And their easy, natural way;

Of the weather, for it was raining
As we drove home from the play.

We debated the social nothings
We bore ourselves so to discuss;
The thunderous rumors of battle
Were silent the while for us.

Arrived at her door, we left her

With a drippingly hurried adieu,

And our wheels went crunching the gravel Of the oak-darkened avenue.

As we drove away through the shadow,
The candle she held in the door

From rain-varnished tree-trunk to tree-trunk
Flashed fainter, and flashed no more;-

Flashed fainter, then wholly faded.

Before we had passed the wood;

But the light of the face behind it

Went with me and stayed for good.

The vision of scarce a moment,

And hardly marked at the time,

It comes unbidden to haunt me,
Like a scrap of ballad-rhyme.

Had she beauty? Well, not what they call so;
You may find a thousand as fair;

And yet there's her face in my memory
With no special claim to be there.

As I sit sometimes in the twilight,

And call back to life in the coals

Old faces and hopes and fancies

Long buried, (good rest to their souls!)

Her face shines out in the embers;
I see her holding the light,

And hear the crunch of the gravel
And the sweep of the rain that night.

"T is a face that can never grow older,
That never can part with its gleam,
'Tis a gracious possession forever,
For is it not all a dream?

TO H. W. L.,

I

ON HIS BIRTHDAY, 27TH FEBRUARY, 1867.

NEED not praise the sweetness of his song,

Where limpid verse to limpid verse succeeds

Smooth as our Charles, when, fearing lest he

wrong

The new moon's mirrored skiff, he slides along,

Full without noise, and whispers in his reeds.

With loving breath of all the winds his name
Is blown about the world, but to his friends
A sweeter sccret hides behind his fame,
And Love steals shyly through the loud acclaim.
To murmur a God bless you! and there ends.

As I muse backward up the checkered years

Wherein so much was given, so much was lost, Blessings in both kinds, such as cheapen tears,— But hush! this is not for profaner ears;

Let them drink molten pearls nor dream the cost.

Some suck up poison from a sorrow's core,

As naught but nightshade grew upon earth's

ground;

Love turned all his to heart's-case, and the more Fate tried his bastions, she but forced a door

Leading to sweeter manhood and more sound.

Even as a wind-waved fountain's swaying shade
Seems of mixed race, a gray wraith shot with sun,
So through his trial faith translucent rayed
Till darkness, half disnatured so, betrayed

A heart of sunshine that would fain o'errun.

Surely if skill in song the shears may stay
And of its purpose cheat the charmed abyss,
If our poor life be lengthened by a lay,
He shall not go, although his presence may,
And the next age in praise shall double this.
Long days be his, and each as lusty-sweet
As gracious natures find his song to be;
May Age steal on with softly-cadenced feet
Falling in music, as for him were meet

Whose choicest verse is harsher-toned than hel