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COME, SUNSHINE, COME !

FROM THE FRENCH OF CHARLES VINCENT.

Come, Sunshine, come! thee Nature calls! Give to the grape its vermeil hue, Dispel the frost, the cloud, the storm,Come, Sunshine, come! the year renew! The grain lies dormant in the soil,

The bird sings from the withered tree, The ice-bound brook, the buried flowers, Tarry, and watch, and long for thee.

Come, Sunshine, come! the torpid Earth

Beneath thy kisses will awake; Her blush, her bloom, shall truly tellShe loves thee, for thy own love's sake. Lo, at the opened sash, the Poor!

Waiting for thee, their being's sum! Cold their abode, aud scant their storeCome and relieve them, Sunshine, come!

Mountain, and vale, and desert waste,
Prairie, and wood, and sea-bound isle,
Herb, tree, and insect, roof and spire,
Kindle to life beneath thy smile.
Pleasure and love thy coming wait,
Poets and birds thy coming sing;
Thy quickening kiss Creation needs;—

Come, Sunshine, come: we yearn for Spring!

WHEN THE GRASS SHALL COVER ME.

ANONYMOUS (AMERICAN-19TH CENTURY). When the grass shall cover me Head to foot where I am lying,

When not any wind that blows,
Summer bloom or winter snows,
Shall awake me to your sighing:

Close above me as you pass,
You will say, "How kind she was;"
You will say, "How true she was,"
When the grass grows over me.

When the grass shall cover me, Holden close to earth's warm bosom, While I laugh, or weep, or sing, Nevermore for anything,You will find in blade and blossom, Sweet small voices, odorous, Tender pleaders of my cause, That shall speak me as I was,When the grass grows over me.

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My deep wound burns; my pale lips quake in death;
I feel my fainting heart resign its strife;
And reaching now the limit of my life,
Lord, to thy will I yield my parting breath!
Yet many a dream hath charmed my youthful eye,
And must life's fairy visions all depart?
Oh, surely, no! for all that fired my heart
To rapture here shall live with me on high.
And that fair form that won my earliest vow,

That my young spirit prized all else above,
And now adored as freedom, now as love,
Stands in seraphic guise before me now!
And as my failing senses fade away,
It beckons me on high, to realms of endless day!

THE GOING OF MY BRIDE.

ANONYMOUS (BRITISH-19TH CENTURY).

By the brink of the river our parting was fond,
But I whispered the words soft and low;
For a band of bright angels were waiting beyond,
And my bride of a day was to go:

Was to go from our shore, with its headland of years, On a water whose depths were untold;

At the thought of the past the tears gush from her eyes,

And the pulse of her heart makes her white bosom rise.

O sons of green Erin! lament o'er the time
When religion was war, and our country a crime,
When man, in God's image, inverted his plan,
And moulded his God in the image of man ;-

When the int'rest of State wrought the general woe,

And the boat was to float on this River of Tears, The stranger a friend, and the native a foe; Till it blent with an ocean of gold.

Our farewell was brief as the fall of a tear-
The minutes like winged spirits flew,

When my bride whispered low that a shallop drew near,

And the beck of the boatman she knew.

Then I spoke in one kiss all the passion of years,
For I knew that our parting was nigh;
Yet I saw not the end-I was blinded by tears,
And a light had gone out from the sky.

But I caught the faint gleam of an outdrifting sail, And the dip of a silver-tipped oar;

And knew, by the low, rustling sigh of the gale, That a spirit had gone from the shore.

All alone in my grief, I now sit on the sand,
Where so often she sat by my side;
And I long for the shallop to come to the strand,
That again I may sit by my bride.

ERIN.

Dr. William Drennan (1754–1820), author of “Glendalloch, and other Poems" (1815), was one of the ablest writers among the United Irishmen. He was the first to bestow on Ireland the title of "The Emerald Isle." It occurs in the subjoined poem of Erin," esteemed by Moore as "among the most perfect of modern songs."

When Erin first rose from the dark swelling flood, God blessed the dear island, and saw it was good; The emerald of Europe, it sparkled and shone

In the ring of the world the most precious stone. In her sun, in her soil, in her station thrice blessed, With her back toward Britain, her face to the West, Erin stands proudly insular, on her steep shore, And strikes her high harp 'mid the ocean's deep roar.

But when its soft tones seem to mourn and to weep, The dark chain of silence is thrown o'er the deep;

While the mother rejoiced o'er her children op

pressed,

And clasped the invader more close to her breast; When with pale for the body, and pale for the soul, Church and State joined in compact to conquer the

whole;

And as Shannon was stained with Milesian blood, Eyed each other askance and pronounced it was good.

By the groans that ascend from your forefathers' grave,

For their country thus left to the brute and the slave,
Drive the demon of Bigotry home to his den,
And where Britain made brutes now let Erin make
men.

Let my sons like the leaves of the shamrock unite,
A partition of sects from one footstalk of right;
Give each his full share of the earth and the sky,
Nor fatten the slave where the serpent would die.

Alas for poor Erin! that some are still seen Who would dye the grass red from their hatred to green;

Yet, oh! when you're up and they're down, let them live,

Then yield them that mercy which they would not give.

Arm of Erin, be strong! but be gentle as brave! And uplifted to strike, be still ready to save! Let no feeling of vengeance presume to defile The cause of, or men of, the EMERALD ISLE.

The cause it is good, and the men they are true, And the green shall outlive both the orange and blue! And the triumphs of Erin her daughters shall share, With the full-swelling chest and the fair-flowing hair.

Their bosom heaves high for the worthy and brave, But no coward shall rest in that soft-swelling wave; Men of Erin! arise and make haste to be blest,— Rise-Arch of the Ocean, and Queen of the West!

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LINES ON A SKELETON.

The MS. of the following piece was found in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, placed near one of the skeletons, about the year 1807. The secret of its authorship has not been divulged, though a reward was offered for it.

Behold this ruin! Twas a skull,
Once of ethereal spirit full.
This narrow cell was Life's retreat,
This space was Thought's mysterious seat.
What beauteous visions filled this spot,
What dreams of pleasures long forgot!
Nor hope, nor love, nor joy, nor fear,
Have left one trace of record here.

Beneath this mouldering canopy
Once shone the bright and busy eye;
But-start not at the dismal void—
If social love that eye employed;

SONNET: THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN.1
ANONYMOUS (BRITISH-19TH CENTURY).

It is a spectral show-this wondrous world-
And all things in it are a spectral show.
In everything is something else infurled;
And in the known lurks what we cannot know:
And from decay outgrowths stupendous grow;
And naught coheres. The hardest iron hurled
From catapult is not a solid; no!

Its atoms teem with tinier atoms whirled
Within; distinct as they who walk the pave
Of crowded cities, or the stars whose course
We watch at midnight. For in tossing wave,
In dense deposit, or pneumatic source,
We find no substance-naught enduring-save
The mutable results of hidden Force.

1 From "Light Leading unto Light."

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