Warm in the great light, as themselves afire,
Thousands are gazing, and all silently!
How to the throbbing glare their hearts reply,
As tossing upward a dim-sparkled plume,
The beautiful swift Fury scares the sky.
The stars look changed on high,

And red the steeples waver from the gloom
Distantly clear over the water swells
The roar: the iron stanchions dribble bright,
And faltering with strong quiver to its fall,
Drops, slowly rushing, the great outer wall.
From lip to lip a wondering murmur goes,
As crouching a dark moment o'er its prey,
Swiftly again upleaps

The wild flame, and exulting madly glows;

The city burns in an enchanted day.

Still the great throng impassioned silence keeps, Like an adoring host in ecstasy.

Did ever vision of the opened sky

Entrance more deeply, or did ever voice
Of a just wrath more terribly rejoice?

The houseless beggar gazing has forgot
His hunger happy lovers' hands relax;
They look no more into each other's eyes.
Wrapt in its mother's shawl

The fretting child no longer cries.

And that soul-piercing flame

Melts out like wax

The prosperous schemer's busy schemes:

The reveller like a visionary gleams.

An aged wandering pair lift up their heads

Out of old memories: to each, to all,

Time and the strong world are no more the same,
But threatened, perishable, trembling, brief,
Even as themselves, an instant might destroy,
With all the builded weight of years and grief,
All that old hope and pleasant usage dear.
Glories and dooms before their eyes appear;
Upon their faces joy,

Within their bosoms fear!

Is it that even now

In all, O radiant Desolation, thou

Far off prefigurest

To each obscurely wounded breast
The dream of what shall be?

And in their hearts they see

Rushing in ardent ruin out of sight

With all her splendour, with her streaming robe Of seas, and her pale peoples, the vast globe

A sullen ember crumble into night?

MISS ALICE BROWN

So far as I am aware, Miss Alice Brown has written only one little book of poetry, The Road to Castaly. It runs to seventy pages, and contains about half a hundred poems. They are partly poems of nature, partly personal and dramatic lyrics; and in both classes of work there are pieces of real and striking merit. Excellent, to my thinking, is Miss Brown's strong and highly cultivated style. Her English is of the best-copious, unaffected, pure. The first poems of the collection, Wood Longing and Pan, are full of an ecstatic sense of the glory and mystery of nature. Sunrise on Mansfield Mountain lends itself better to quotation, and I copy the opening lines:

O swift forerunners, rosy with the race!
Spirits of dawn, divinely manifest

Behind your blushing banners in the sky,
Daring invaders of Night's tenting-ground,-
How do ye strain on forward-bending foot,
Each to be first in heralding of joy!

With silence sandalled, so they weave their way,
And so they stand, with silence panoplied,
Chanting, through mystic symbollings of flame,
Their solemn invocation to the light.

O changeless guardians! O ye wizard firs!
What strenuous philter feeds your potency,
That thus ye rest, in sweet wood-hardiness,
Ready to learn of all and utter naught?

What breath may move ye, or what breeze invite