The leaves dance, the leaves sing,
The leaves dance in the breath of the Spring.
I bid them dance,
I bid them sing,
For the limpid glance
Of my ladyling;
For the gift to the Spring of a dewier spring,
For God's good grace of this ladyling!
I know in the lane, by the hedgerow track,
The long, broad grasses underneath

Shrewd winds and shrill — were these the speech of May?
A ragged, slag-grey sky — invested so,
Mary's spoilt nursling! wert thou wont to go?
Or thou , Sun-god and song-god, say
Could singer pipe one timest linnet-lay,
While Song did turn away his face from song?
Or who could be
In spirit or in body hale for long, —

Look how the industrious bee in fragrant May,
When Flora gilds the earth with golden flowers,
Enveloped in her sweet perfumed array,
Doth leave his honey-limed delicious bowers,
More richly wrought than princes' stately towers,
Waving his silken wings amid the air,
And to the verdant gardens makes repair.

First falls he on a branch of sugared thyme,
Then from the marigold he sucks the sweet,
And then the mint and then the rose doth climb,
Then on the budding rosemary doth light,
Till with sweet treasure having charged his feet,

'Tis the summer prime, when the noiseless air
In perfumed chalice lies,
And the bee goes by with a lazy hum
Beneath the sleeping skies:
When the brook is low, and the ripples bright,
As down the stream they go;
The pebbles are dry on the upper side,
And dark and wet below.

The tree that stood where the soil's athirst,
And the mulleins first appear,

Hath a dry and rusty colored bark,

Her ways were gentle while a babe,
With calm and tranquil eye,
That turned instinctively to seek
The blueness of the sky.
A holy smile was on her lip
Whenever sleep was there;
She slept, as sleeps the blossom, hushed
Amid the silent air.

And ere she left with tottling steps
The low-roofed cottage door,
The beetle and the cricket loved
The young child on the floor;
For every insect dwelt secure
Where little Eva played,
And piped for her its blithest song
When she in greenwood strayed.

W ith fair Ceres, Queen of Grain
The reaped fields we roam, roam, roam,
Each country peasant, nymph, and swain
Sing their harvest home, home, home;
Whilst the Queen of Plenty hallows
Growing fields as well as fallows.

Echo, double all our lays,
Make the champians sound, sound, sound
To the Queen of harvest's praise,
That sows and reaps our ground, ground, ground.
Ceres, Queen of Plenty, hallows
Growing fields as well as fallows.

Who died on the wires, and hung there, one of two —
Who for his hours of life had chattered through
Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks accent;
Yet faced unbroken wires; stepped over, and went,
A noble fool, faithful to his stripes — and ended.
But I weak, hungry, and willing only for the chance
Of line — to fight in the line, lay down under unbroken
Wires, and saw the flashes, and kept unshaken.
Till the politest voice — a finicking accent, said:
" Do you think you might crawl through, there; there's a hole:" In the afraid

When I dragged the rotten log
From the bottom of the pool,
It seemed heavy as stone.
I let it lie in the sun
For a month; and then chopped it
Into sections, and split them
For kindling, and spread them out
To dry some more. Late that night,
After reading for hours,
While moths rattled at the lamp —
The saints and the philosophers
On the destiny of man —
I went out on my cabin porch,
And looked up through the black forest
At the swaying islands of stars.
Suddenly I saw at my feet,
Spread on the floor of night, ingots

FROM BOCCACE

While Norman Tancred in Salerno reign'd,
The title of a gracious prince he gain'd;
Till, turn'd a tyrant in his latter days,
He lost the luster of his former praise;
And, from the bright meridian where he stood
Descending, dipp'd his hands in lovers' blood.
This prince, of Fortune's favor long possess'd,
Yet was with one fair daughter only blest;
And blest he might have been with her alone:
But O! how much more happy had he none!

The time I went to see my Sister
Whom I loved unendurably,
The winter-night's
River-wind was so cold that
The sanderlings were crying.