And perhaps 'twould be best in a later day, When Death comes stalking down the way, To knock at your bosom and see if you're fit, Then, as you wait calmly, just whistle a bit. PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

THE CELESTIAL SURGEON

IF I have faltered more or less
In my great task of happiness;
If I have moved among my race
And shown no glorious morning face;
If beams from happy human eyes
Have moved me not; if morning skies,
Books, and my food, and summer rain
Knocked on my sullen heart in vain :—
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take
And stab my spirit broad awake;
Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,
Choose thou, before that spirit die,
A piercing pain, a killing sin,
And to my dead heart run them in.
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

MY KING HAS FOUND ME

SEE, when a fireship in mid ocean blazes

Lone on the battlements a swimmer stands, Looks for a help, and findeth not, and raises

High for a moment melancholy hands;

Then the sad ship, to her own funeral flaring,
Holds him no longer in her arms, for he
Simple and strong and desolate and daring
Leaps to the great embrace of the sea.

So when around me for my soul's affrighting,
Madly red-litten of the woe within,
Faces of men and deeds of their delighting
Stare in a lurid cruelty of sin,

Thus as I weary me and long and languish, Nowise availing from that pain to part,Desperate tides of the whole great world's anguish Forced thro' the channels of a single heart,

Then let me feel how infinite around me
Floats the eternal peace that is to be,

Rush from the demons, for my King has found me,
Leap from the universe and plunge in Thee!
F. W. H. MYERS

LOOK FORWARD!

FEAR death?-to feel the fog in my throat,
The mist in my face,

When the snows begin, and the blasts denote
I am nearing the place,

The power of the night, the press of the storm,
The post of the foe;

Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,
Yet the strong man must go:

For the journey is done and the summit attained,
And the barriers fall,

Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,
The reward of it all.

I was ever a fighter, so-one fight more,
The best and the last!

I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,
And bade me creep past.

No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers
The heroes of old,

Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrears
Of pain, darkness, and cold.

For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,
The black minute's at end,

And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,
Shall dwindle, shall blend,

Shall change, shall become first a peace out of pain,
Then a light, then thy breast,

O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,

And with God be the rest!

ROBERT BROWNING

Notes

(Boldface figures refer to page numbers)

1. Innisfree, a small lake in Ireland.

wattles, flexible twigs.

2. Little Nell, the chief character in The Old Curiosity Shop. 3. Kent, a county in southeastern England.

4. Malakoff, a center of the siege of Sebastopol during the Crimean War between Russia on the one hand and Turkey with her allies, France, England and Sardinia, 1854–56.

Redan, a tower fortification at Sebastopol.

Severn, Clyde, Shannon, rivers in different sections of the British Isles.

6. The Angler's Song, an anonymous fragment which became known as early as 1603.

7. An Angler's Wish, from Poems of Henry van Dyke, 1911. 9. Gauger, an official of the revenue office who measured the contents of casks.

II. Bivouac, a camp under the open sky.

12. The Scholar-Gipsy, Glanvil writing in 1661 says: "There was very lately a lad in the University of Oxford, who was by his poverty forced to leave his studies there; and at last to join himself to a company of vagabond gipsies. Among these extravagant people by the insinuating subtility of his carriage, he quickly got so much of their love and esteem that they discovered to him their mystery. After he had been a pretty while exercised in the trade, there chanced to ride by a couple of scholars, who had formerly been his acquaintance. They quickly spied out their old friend among the gipsies; and he gave them an account of the necessity which drove him to that kind of life, and told him that the people he went with were not such imposters as they were taken for, but that they had a traditional kind of learning among them, and could do wonders by the power of imagination, their fancy binding