MIDGES IN THE SUNSHINE

F I could see with a midge's eye

Or think with a midge's brain,

I wonder what I'd say of the world

With all its joy and pain.

Would my seven brief hours of mortal life
Seem as long as seventy years,

As I danced in the flickering sunshine
Amid my tiny peers?

Should I feel the slightest hope or care
For the midges yet to be;

Or think I died before my time
If I died at half-past three,

Instead of living till set of sun

On the breath of the summer wind;

Or deem that the world was made for me

And all my little kind?

Perhaps if I did I'd know as much

Of Nature's mighty plan,

And what it meant for good or ill,

As that larger midge, a man!-Anonymous

NONE

FROM A RECORD

ONE sees the slow and upward sweep
By which the soul from life-depths

deep

Ascends, unless, mayhap, when free, With each new death we backward see The long perspective of our race,

Our multitudinous past lives trace.

William Sharp.

с

SUDDEN LIGHT

HAVE been here before,

But when or how I cannot tell: I know the grass beyond the door, The sweet keen smell,

The sighing sound, the lights around the

shore.

YOU have been mine before,—

How long ago I may not know:

But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turned so,

Some veil did fall,— I knew it all of yore.

HAS this been thus before?

And shall not thus time's eddying flight

Still with our lives our loves restore

In death's despite,

And day and night yield one delight once

more?

Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

OR EVER THE KNIGHTLY YEARS WERE GONE

OR

R ever the knightly years were gone
With the old world to the grave,

I was a king in Babylon

And you were a Christian slave.

I saw, I took, I cast you by,
I bent and broke your pride.
You loved me well, or I heard them lie,
But your longing was denied.

Vaguely I knew that by and by

You cursed your gods and died.

And a myriad suns have set and shone
Since then upon the grave

Decreed by the king in Babylon

To her that had been his slave.

The pride I trampled is now my scathe,
For it tramples me again.

The old resentment lasts like death,