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[DEAN MILMAN has remarked that the protection and care afforded by the Church to this blighted race of lepers was among the most beautiful of its offices during the Middle Ages. The leprosy of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was supposed to be a legacy of the crusades, but was in all probability the offspring of meagre and unwholesome diet, miserable lodging and clothing, physical and moral degradation. The services of the Church in the seclusion of these unhappy sufferers were most affecting. The stern duty of looking to the public welfare is tempered with exquisite compassion for the victims of this loathsome disease. The ritual for the sequestration of the leprous differed little from the burial service. After the leper had been sprinkled with holy water, the priest conducted him into the church, the leper singing the psalm 'Libera me domine,' and the crucifix and bearer going before. In the church a black cloth was stretched over two trestles in front of the altar, and the leper leaning at its side devoutly heard mass. The priest, taking up a little earth in his cloak, threw it on one of the leper's feet, and put him out of the church, if it did not rain too heavily; took him to his hut in the midst of the fields, and then uttered the prohibitions: 'I forbid you entering the church. .. or entering the company of others. I forbid you quitting your home without your leper's dress.' He concluded: "Take this dress, and wear it in token of humility; take these gloves, take this clapper, as a sign that you are forbidden to speak to any one. You are not to be indignant at being thus separated from others, and as to your little wants, good people will provide for you, and God will not desert you.' Then in this old ritual follow these sad words: 'When it shall come to pass that the leper shall pass out of this world, he shall be buried in his hut, and not in the churchyard.' At first there was a doubt whether wives should follow their husbands who had been leprous, or remain in the world and marry again. The Church decided that the marriage-tie was indissoluble, and so bestowed on these unhappy beings this immense source of consolation. With a love stronger than this living death, lepers were followed into banishment from the haunts of men by their faithful wives. Readers of Sir J. Stephen's Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography will recollect the description of the founder of the Franciscan order, how, controlling his involuntary disgust, St. Francis of Assisi washed the feet and dressed the sores of the lepers, once at least reverently applying his lips to their wounds.-BouCHER-JAMES.]

This ceremony of quasi-burial varied considerably at different times and in different places. In some cases a grave was dug, and the leper's face was often covered during the service.

TO ULYSSES.1

I.

ULYSSES, much-experienced man,
Whose eyes have known this globe of

ours,

Her tribes of men, and trees, and flowers,

From Corrientes to Japan,

II.

To you that bask below the Line,
I soaking here in winter wet-
The century's three strong eights have

met

To drag me down to seventy-nine

III.

In summer if I reach my day

To you, yet young, who breathe the balm

Of summer-winters by the palm And orange grove of Paraguay,

IV.

I tolerant of the colder time,

Who love the winter woods, to trace On paler heavens the branching grace Of leafless elm, or naked lime,

V.

And see my cedar green, and there

My giant ilex keeping leaf When frost is keen and days are brief— Or marvel how in English air

VI.

My yucca, which no winter quells,

Altho' the months have scarce begun, Has push'd toward our faintest sun A spike of half-accomplish'd bells-

VII.

Or watch the waving pine which here
The warrior of Caprera set,2

1 'Ulysses,' the title of a number of essays by W. G. Palgrave. He died at Monte Video before seeing my poem.

2 Garibaldi said to me, alluding to his barren island, I wish I had your trees.'

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She comes! The loosen'd rivulets run; The frost-bead melts upon her golden hair;

Her mantle, slowly greening in the Sun, Now wraps her close, now arching leaves her bare

To breaths of balmier air;

II.

Up leaps the lark, gone wild to welcome her,

About her glance the tits, and shriek the jays,

Before her skims the jubilant woodpecker,

The linnet's bosom blushes at her gaze, While round her brows a woodland culver flits,

Watching her large light eyes and gracious looks,

And in her open palm a halcyon sits

Patient-the secret splendour of the brooks.

Come, Spring! She comes on waste and wood,

On farm and field: but enter also here, Diffuse thyself at will thro' all my blood, And, tho' thy violet sicken into sere, Lodge with me all the year!

III.

Once more a downy drift against the brakes,

Self-darken'd in the sky, descending

slow !

But gladly see I thro' the wavering flakes

Yon blanching apricot like snow in snow. These will thine eyes not brook in forestpaths,

On their perpetual pine, nor round the beech;

They fuse themselves to little spicy baths, Solved in the tender blushes of the peach;

They lose themselves and die

On that new life that gems the haw-
thorn line;

Thy gay lent-lilies wave and put them by,
And out once more in varnish'd glory
shine
Thy stars of celandine.

IV.

She floats across the hamlet. Heaven lours,

But in the tearful splendour of her smiles

I see the slowly-thickening chestnut

towers.

Fill out the spaces by the barren tiles. Now past her feet the swallow circling flies,

A clamorous cuckoo stoops to meet her hand;

Her light makes rainbows in my closing

eyes,

I hear a charm of song thro' all the land.

Come, Spring! She comes, and Earth is glad

To roll her North below thy deepening

dome,

But ere thy maiden birk be wholly clad, And these low bushes dip their twigs

in foam,

Make all true hearths thy home.

V.

Across my garden! and the thicket stirs, The fountain pulses high in sunnier jets, The blackcap warbles, and the turtle purrs,

The starling claps his tiny castanets. Still round her forehead wheels the woodland dove,

And scatters on her throat the sparks of dew,

The kingcup fills her footprint, and above Broaden the glowing isles of vernal blue.

Hail ample presence of a Queen,

Bountiful, beautiful, apparell'd gay, Whose mantle, every shade of glancing green,

Flies back in fragrant breezes to display
A tunic white as May!

VI.

She whispers, From the South I bring

you balm,

For on a tropic mountain was I born,

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