You may humbly lay your offering Should her mood perchance be gracious, A TRYST WITH DEATH. AM footsore and very weary, But I travel to meet a Friend: But I know that it soon must end. He is travelling fast like the whirlwind, Through the heat of many summers, I know that he will not fail me, On the day of my birth he plighted I have seen him in dreams so often, I have toiled through the sunny woodland, I will not fear at his coming, Although I must meet him alone; He will look in my eyes so gently, And take my hand in his own. Like a dream all my toil will vanish, FIDELIS. OU have taken back the promise Taken back the heart you gave me, Where Love once has breathed, Pride dieth : First to keep the links together, Then to piece the broken chain. But it might not be so freely And the heart that I had taken As my own for evermore. No shade of reproach shall touch you, I am bound by the old promise; It will live. No eyes may see it; Perhaps in some long twilight hour, Like those we have known of old, When past shadows gather round you, And your present friends grow cold, You may stretch your hands out towards me, Ah! you will I know not when I shall nurse my love and keep it Faithfully, for you, till then. A SHADOW. [HAT lack the valleys and mountains Only the sound of a voice, What lack the tender flowers? That I long that they were done? That told of joy and mirth; What lacks my heart, that makes it Only another heart, Tender and all mine own, 8 THE SAILOR BOY. Y Life you ask of? why, you know Full soon my little Life is told; It has had no great joy or woe, For I am only twelve years old. Erelong I hope I shall have been On my first voyage, and wonders seen. Some princess I may help to free From pirates on a far-off sea; Or, on some desert isle be left, Of friends and shipmates all bereft. For the first time I venture forth From our blue mountains of the north. My kinsman kept the lodge that stood Guarding the entrance near the wood, By the stone gateway gray and old, With quaint devices carved about, And broken shields; while dragons bold Glared on the common world without; And the long trembling ivy spray Half hid the centuries' decay. In solitude and silence grand The castle towered above the land: The castle of the Earl, whose name (Wrapped in old bloody legends) came Down through the times when Truth and Right Bent down to armèd Pride and Might. He owned the country far and near; And, for some weeks in every year, (When the brown leaves were falling fast |