Dim grew the forest-path: onward they trod; Firm beat their noble hearts, trusting in God! Gray men and blooming maids, high rose their song;

Hear it sweep, clear and deep, ever along : "Pilgrims and wanderers, hither we come; Where the free dare to be,-this is our home!'

Not theirs the glory-wreath, torn by the blast; Heavenward their holy steps, heavenward they past.

Green be their mossy graves! Ours be their fame,
While their song peals along ever the same:
"Pilgrims and wanderers, hither we come ;
Where the free dare to be,-this is our home!

William Hewell.

1804-1881.

SERVE GOD AND BE CHEERFUL.

The motto of an English Bishop of the seventeenth

century.

"" 'Serve God and be cheerful."

The motto

Shall be mine, as the bishop's of old;

On my soul's coat-of-arms I will write it
In letters of azure and gold.

*

"Serve God and be cheerful." Religion

Looks all the more lovely in white; And God is best served by His servant When, smiling, he serves in the light,

And lives out the glad tidings of Jesus
In the sunshine He came to impart,
For the fruit of His word and His Spirit
"Is love, joy, and peace" in the heart.

"Serve God and be cheerful." Live nobly, Do right and do good. Make the best Of the gifts and the work put before you, And to God without fear leave the rest.

William Gilmore Simms.
1806-1870.

THE FIRST DAY OF SPRING.

O Thou bright and beautiful day,
First bright day of the virgin spring,
Bringing the slumbering life into play,
Giving the leaping bird his wing!

Thou art round me now in all thy hues,

Thy robe of green, and thy scented sweets, In thy bursting buds, in thy blessing dews, In every form that my footstep meets.

I hear thy voice in the lark's clear note,
In the cricket's chirp at the evening hour,
In the zephyr's sighs that around me float,
In the breathing bud and the opening flower.

I see thy forms o'er the parting earth,

In the tender shoots of the grassy blade, In the thousand plants that spring to birth, On the valley's side in the home of shade.

I feel thy promise in all my veins,

They bound with a feeling long suppressed, And, like a captive who breaks his chains,

Leap the glad hopes in my heaving breast.

There are life and joy in thy coming spring!
Thou hast no tidings of gloom and death:
But buds thou shakest from every wing,
And sweets thou breathest with every breath.

benry Wadsworth Longfellow.
1807-1882.

SANTA FILOMENA.

Whene'er a noble deed is wrought,
Whene'er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts, in glad surprise,

To higher levels rise.

The tidal wave of deeper souls
Into our inmost being rolls,
And lifts us unawares

Out of all meaner cares.

Honor to those whose words or deeds Thus help us in our daily needs,

And by their overflow

Raise us from what is low!

Thus thought I, as by night I read
Of the great army of the dead,

The trenches cold and damp,
The starved and frozen camp,-

The wounded from the battle-plain,
In dreary hospitals of pain,

The cheerless corridors,
The cold and stony floors.

Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see

Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.

And slow, as in a dream of bliss,

The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls

Upon the darkening walls.

As if a door in heaven should be
Opened and then closed suddenly,
The vision came and went,

The light shone and was spent.

On England's annals, through the long
Hereafter of her speech and song,
That light its rays shall cast
From portals of the past.

A Lady with a Lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good,
Heroic womanhood.

Nor even shall be wanting here
The palm, the lily, and the spear,
The symbols that of yore

Saint Filomena bore.

MEMORIES.

Oft I remember those whom I have known
In other days, to whom my heart was led
As by a magnet, and who are not dead,
But absent, and their memories overgrown
With other thoughts and troubles of my own,
As graves with grasses are, and at their head
The stone with moss and lichens so o'erspread,
Nothing is legible but the name alone.