The Christmas Rose.

'Neath snow and wind which join their hostile might,
From wondrous Autumn fades his glowing; dye:
Good-bye, O life, O joy, O flowers good-bye!
And murmuring wood and trembling ray of light.

* * * *

The kindly sanctuary is closed again
The splendid sunsets have o'erspent tbeir glow
Leaves flee away, away, like souls that go
Life-tired and sad with having loved in vain.

Of the high festival no echo stays—
Beneath a farewell sun's yet beauteous power
No more we see the gold chrysanthemum flower
Yield to the cold wind to the garden ways.

Bare sleeps the world beneath the heaven's vast
No gleam reflects the smiling of the sky
And yet, Ah yes, timid and frail and shy
There comes the Christmas Rose to us at last.

Doth she perhaps a child of magic grow ?
She who bath power to blossom in the night;
When all seems dying, opening to the light,
Pale winter rose—born underneath the snow.

* * * *

'Tis not, indeed, the rose of joy and light,
'Tis not that by its power a spell is cast,
But 'tis a flower, and 'tis the very last
Claiming glad greeting in its humble might.

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Thus when hath vanished life's time of glee
When fled forever is the dream's fair guise,
In the cold heart-depths there is that doth rise,
Which fain would smile, and blossoms wistfully.

Nena N. Newall. (After the French of Gabriel Vicaire.)

A Ballad of the Golden Hind.

We have left our love at home dreaming, in a Devon combe,
Of the days before the world was our desire,—
When the froth-flecked toiling team, and the sickle's August gleam
Were the life of which our hearts could never tire.
But we watched the wash of the westward seas,
And the trail of the falling gold,
Till the hunger of soul's unrest was born
For the magic no lips had told.

* * * *

To the rippling flood-tide plash, to the swung oars' feathered-flash,
To the silver of the sail aslant the blue,
And the strange talk on the quay where they go down to the sea,—
We have lost our heart: so seek we luck or rue.
It's a wring of the hand of friend or kin,
Then the race of a clean, keen wake
All astern to the softly-cradling coast
And the fields that our feet forsake.

* * * *

For the sailing seagull's cry, and the quivering fenceless sky,
And the glow where grand Orion wills his bath,
And the combers' rock-flung speech, and the shining Channel reach;—
These be things that win a man's thought from the hearth.
Oh, the pulse of the summer-sun-lit seas,
And the call of the spacious morn !
We will follow the fire of sunset clouds,
We will hide in the mists of dawn !

* * * *

Be the coast-fog creeping blind;—ours, the frolicking fresh wind
Athwart the untamed horses that he rides !
Ours, the music of the spars swinging under stern and stars
As the lithe Hind shakes the sea-pack from her sides.
For the stretch of the drawing cloud aloft,
For the hiss of the baffled crest,—
We have prayed as we prayed for the sapphire South,
And the breath of the waiting West.

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So we chase the Summer south to the flooding Plata-mouth,
And we thread the windy straits,—forlorn—alone;
Taking all and giving naught (for our love of Philip's Court);
Running league-long to the rich sun's island-throne.
To the land aflush with the fragrant flower,
To a glamour of afternoon,
To the languid lift of a lazy swell,
To the thrall of a tropic moon.

* * * *

In the witchery of flight through the deep-arched lustrous night,
We have drained brimm'd draughts of beauty to the lees;
Wooded cove and island creek, sun-searched city, staring peak—
These have bought for our soul's hunger a surcease.
And the hush on a windless, endless sea,
The sights of the utter Pale,—
Have wooed with a wonder all wildly new
Till the wonder is overstate.

* * * *

Out beyond the bounds of grace where we looked life in the face,
He flung to us his gifts of strength and power;
And the bluff health of the breeze, and the secrets of the seas,
We have taken for our deathless English dower.
So we beat and clew from the Southern Cross
To the track of the homeward Wain,
With the love of tide and shoal and send.
And the world for our fighting gain.

* * * *

With a whisper overside when the hazy headlands spied,
With a heart all eager at the wealth before,
Then abeam the oldtime Hoe and the green none else may show,—
It is port and home and Devonfields once more.
But we watch the wash of the westward seas,
Feel the call of the spacious morn.
And a pang for the full free life awakes—
And Ho ! for the cloudy bourne.

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The Undergraduate.

The session past, around the student flies
To lubricate the muscles of his eyes;
Joining his old associates, fondly found,
With them resumes the old uproarious round.
Abandoned now for sport's benign intent
His classic lore, to airy regions sent,
Unheeded 'scapes the dungeons of his brain,
And leaves him quite as ignorantly vain
As when unbroached and grim before him lay
Those ponderous tomes through which to plough his way
Towards that shadowy goal yeleptéd Fame—
The transient exaltation of a name.
One woeful day he worries o'er results;
Once more his scribbled pocketbook consults
To prove beyond all doubt that chances few
Attend his hopes of even scraping through,
Then flings fond expectation to the winds
And in his own domains elation finds.
Who late has laboured in poetic diction
Now wallows nightly in unholy fiction,
Thus bringing welcome respite to a brain
Long tossed upon the scientific main.
He seeks the sultry sands that strew the shore
And ponders while the tumid breakers roar.
He seeks the woods that gird the fertile fields
And o'er the stream the supple angle wields.
On velvet lawns at tennis he will vie
To catch the budding virgin's liquid eye.
With fellow-students cycles o'er the land
And makes the gaping rustic stop and stand.
Slight are his cares with studies laid aside,
And now the dusty shelf he can deride
Whereon, close packed and piled for reach too high,
His "loads of learned lumber" latent lie.
Sweet is the summer, sweet the waning spring
When nature breeds her bliss in everything,
But when brown autumn's mellowing leaves appear,
Comes the long-dreaded tidings of the year
Borne o'er the boundless seas with lightning pace
To tell of exaltation or disgrace.
'Tis then he'll laugh aloud, but inward pine
And drown his troubles in the generous vine.
The smug passee he meets at every turn,
(Though few rejoice whereas the many yearn)

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Ubiquity occasioned, one might guess,
To hear the quailing query and say "Yes."
Though this with modesty, th' observer sees
The flood-tide of suppressed felicities
O'erwhelming that successful candidate,
And, chagrined, holds the harmless "swat" in hate.
Another year of drudgery in store,
Another ramble on the rocky shore
That girds th' immortal isle of classic lore
Then one last blind attack on that Exam.,
Protesting 'tis a case of craven cram
The event of which he does not care a dam.^*
The luckless laggard lounges to his seat,
His information fastened in his feet.
Th' officious supervisor strolls around
And to his steps the silent halls resound.
With cornered eye the candidates he views,
And with his glances consternation brews.
The youth a moment on the paper glares,
Then feels the elevation of his hairs,
For in the dozen questions there's not one
On which he is decided how 'tis done.
A sad fiasco, yet a minor fear
To the horrors he'll experience next year
When failure's spectred form shall reappear.

Vice Versa

I swats and I swats,
'Till for floating blots
I can't tell a goal from a try;
'Till endless equations, and Tully's orations
Are fragments of Liddell and Scott's.

* * * *

I plays and I plays
For I find it pays,
And I give slight thought to November,
I scorn swat capers and burn no tapers,
And find myself capped with B.A's.