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MARY CANFIELD BALLARD.

Let this be a time to rejoice,

Le the glory o'ershadow the pain; Let us think, were ours the choice,

We would not have our heroes again.

'Tis vain; such reasonings fall

Like lead on our cold, stricken hearts; They are sorrowing, human, through all;

The tear-drop unwillingly starts.

We can not be gay and forget,

We can not be brave and resign; Our country is dear-dearer yet

The boys we have called mine and thine.

ISS MARY CANFIELD BALLARD was

born in Troy, Pa., June 22nd, 1852. On her mother's side Miss Ballard is related to Colonel Ethan Allen, of Revolutionary fame. Her father was a self-made man and accumulated considerable property in Bradford county, Pa. She was sent to the State Normal School when about fourteen years old, but, growing homesick, she returned to her home in Troy, where she finished her education. She is the youngest of a large family, but, her brothers and sisters being married and her father and mother dead, she lives alone. She is devoted to painting, music and literature and has been a prolific contributor to periodicals under the name Minnie C. Ballard ever since she sent her first poem to William Cullen Bryant, who gave it a place in the Evening Post. Her early literary efforts were very ambitious ones. When she was only thirteen years old, she wrote a continued story about a hairpin, managing to introduce an elopement, an angry father, tears, repentance and forgiveness. She also wrote an essay on Sappho. She began to write poems at the age of sixteen, but her first published productions made their appearance when she was twenty-one years old. Since her bow to the public in the poet's corner of the Evening Post, she has contributed occasionally to some thirty periodicals. She has published “Idle Fancies " (Troy, Pa., 1883), for private circulation, and a new edition for the general public (Philadelphia, 1884). J. H.

The day we began as a feast

At evening is changed to a fast; We have loved, we have lost, and the least

We can do is to honor the past.

We lay our fair garlands aside,

And the sound of rejoicing is fled; In the morning “Our Country we cried,

In the evening, “Our beautiful dead."

LET ME GO IN THE GLOAMING.

Let me go ere day is breaking;

In the morning it is light, And I can not lose the sunshine,

Nor depart when life is bright.

When the clouds are dark and heavy,

And the world looks sad and drear, I can long for Heaven's glory

And the beauty drawing near.

DECORATION DAY.

With flowers we cover our dead;

In our hearts we have striven to say The fragrance over them shed

Shall breathe but of glory to-day.

But when morn with all its splendor

Dawns upon the waiting earth, Then my heart is filled with gladness,

And I feel my mortal birth.

ANDREW LANG.

BALLADE OF BLUE CHINA.

A

THERE's a joy without canker or cark,

There's a pleasure eternally new: 'Tis to gloat on the glaze and the mark

Of china that's ancient and blue;

Unchipped all the centuries through It has passed since the chime of it rang,

And they fashioned it, figure and hue, In the reign of the Emperor Hwang.

NDREW LANG was born in Selkirk, March

31st, 1844, and educated in St. Andrew's University and Balliol College, Oxford, and in 1868 elected a Fellow of Merton College of the latter University. He is connected with the Daily News, and a constant contributor to current periodicals. He is remarkable for the variety of his attainments, having distinguished himself both by his graceful and humorous articles on ephemeral subjects and his scholarly contributions to French literature and the science of comparative mythology. His volumes of verse are: Ballads and Lyrics of Old France" (1872); “Ballads in Blue China" (1881); “Helen of Troy” (1882); “Rhymes à la Mode” (1884); and “Grass of Parnassus” (1888). There was also an authorized collection of some of his poems published in this country under the title Ballades and Verses Vain."

H, F. R.

These dragons (their tails, you remark,

Into bunches of gillyflowers grew), When Noah came out of the ark,

Did these lie in wait for his crew ?

They snorted, they snapped and they slew, They were mighty of fin and of fang,

And their portraits Celestials drew In the reign of the Einperor Hwang.

BALLADE OF THE BOOK-HUNTER.

In torrid heats of late July,

In March, beneath the bitter bise, He book-hunts while the loungers fly,

He book-hunts, though December freeze;

In breeches baggy at the knees, And heedless of the public jeers,

For these, for these, he hoards his fees, Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.

No dismal stall escapes his

eye, He turns o'er tomes of low degrees; There soiled romanticists may lie,

Or Restoration comedies;

Each tract that flutters in the breeze For him is charged with hopes and fears;

In moldy novels fancy sees Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs.

“The Ancestor remote of Man,"
Says Darwin, “is th’ Ascidian,"
A scanty sort of water-beast
That, ninety-million years at least
Before Gorillas came to be,
Went swimming up and down the sea.

With restless eyes that peer and

spy, Sad eyes that heed not skies nor trees, In dismal nooks he loves to pry,

Whose motto evermore is Spes.'

But ah! the fabled treasure flees; Grown rarer with the fleeting years,

In rich men's shelves they take their ease, Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs!

Their ancestors the pious praise,
And like to imitate their ways;
How, then, does our first parent live,
What lesson has his life to give ?

ENVOY.

Prince, all the things that tease and please,

Fame, hope, wealth, kisses, cheers and tears, What are they but such toys as these,

Aldines, Bodonis, Elzevirs ?

Th’ Ascidian tadpole, young and gay,
Doth life with one bright eye survey.
His consciousness has easy play;
He's sensitive to grief and pain,
Has tail and spine, and bears a brain,
And everything that fits the state
Of creatures we call vertebrate.

But age comes on; with sudden shock
He sticks his head against a rock!
His tail drops off, his eyes drop in,
His brain's absorbed into his skin;
He does not move, nor feel, nor know
The tidal water's ebb and flow,
But still abides, unstirred, alone,
A sucker sticking to a stone.

IN ITHACA.

And we, his children, truly we
In youth are, like the Tadpole, free.
And where we would we blithely go,
Have brains and hearts, and feel and know.
Then age comes on! To habit we
Affix ourselves and are not free;
Th’ Ascidian's rooted to a rock,
And we are bound-slaves of the clock;
Our rocks are Medicine, Letters, Law;
From these our hearts we can not draw:
Our loves drop off, our hearts drop in,
And daily thicker grows our skin.

'Tis thought Odysseus, when the strife was o'er

With all the waves and wars, a weary while,

Grew restless in his disenchanted isle, And still would watch the sunset, from the shore, Go down the ways of gold, and evermore

His sad heart followed after, mile on mile,

Back to the goddess of the magic wile, Calypso, and the love that was of yore. Thou too, thy heaven gained, must turn thee yet To look across the sad and stormy space,

Years of a youth as bitter as the sea, Ah, with a heavy heart and eyelids wet, Because within a fair forsaken place

The life that might have been is lost to thee.

a

BALLADE OF THE DREAM.

Ah, scarce we live, we scarcely know
The wild world's moving ebb and flow;
The clanging currents' ring and shock,
But we are rooted to the rock.
And thus at ending of his span,
Blind, deaf and indolent, does Man
Revert to the Ascidian.

TWILIGHT ON TWEED.

THREE crests against the saffron sky

Beyond the purple plain; The dear remembered melody

Of Tweed once more again.

Wan water from the border hills,

Dear voice from the old years, Thy distant music lulls and stills,

And moves to quiet tears.

Swift as sound of music fled

When no more the organ sighs, Sped as all old joys are sped,

So your lips, Love, and your eyes,

So your gentle-voiced replies, Mine, one hour, in sleep that seem,

Flit away as slumber flies, Following darkness like a dream. As the scent from roses red,

As the dawn from April skies, As the phantom of the dead,

From the living love that hies,

As the shifting shade that lies On the moonlight-silvered stream,

So you rise, when dreams arise, Following darkness like a dream. Could some witch with woven tread,

Could some spell in fairy wise, Lap about this dreaming head

In a mist of memories,

I should lie like him that lies Where the lights on Latmos gleam,

'Neath Selênê down the skies Following darkness like a dream.

a

Like a loved ghost thy fabled food

Fleets through the dusky lane;
Where Scott, come home to die, has stood,

My feet returning stand.
A mist of memory broods and floats;

The border waters flow;
The air is full of ballad notes

Borne out of long ago,
Old songs that sung themselves to me,

Sweet though a boy's day-dream,
While trout below the blossomed tree

Splashed in the golden stream.

ENVOY.

Sleep, that grants what life denies,

Shadowy bounties and supreme, Bring me back her face, that flies,

Following darkness like a dream.