In the old churchyard in the valley, Ben Bolt,
In a corner obscure and alone,

They have fitted a slab of the granite so gray,
And Alice lies under the stone.

Under the hickory tree, Ben Bolt,
Which stood at the foot of the hill,
Together we've lain in the noonday shade
And listened to Appleton's mill.

The mill wheel has fallen to pieces, Ben Bolt,

The rafters have tumbled in;

And a quiet that crawls 'round the walls as you gaze Has followed the olden din.

Do you mind the cabin of logs, Ben Bolt,
At the edge of the pathless wood,

And the button-ball tree with its motley limbs
Which nigh by the doorstep stood?

The cabin to ruin has gone, Ben Bolt,

The tree you would seek for in vain,

And where once the lords of the forest waved
Are grass and the golden grain.

And don't you remember the school, Ben Bolt,
With the master so cruel and grim,
And the shaded nook in the running brook
Where the children went to swim ?

Grass grows on the master's grave, Ben Bolt,
The spring of the brook is dry,

And of all the boys that were schoolmates then,
There are only you and I.

There is change in the things I loved, Ben Bolt;
They have changed from the old to the new:
But I feel in the deeps of my spirit the truth,
There never was change in you.
Twelvemonths forty have passed, Ben Bolt,
Since first we were friends, yet I hail

Your presence a blessing, your friendship a truth,
Ben Bolt of the salt-sea gale!

THE PLACE WHERE MAN SHOULD DIE.

BY MICHAEL JULAND BARRY.1
How little recks it where men lie,

When once the moment's past
In which the dim and glazing eye

Has looked on earth its last,
Whether beneath the sculptured urn
The coffined form shall rest,
Or in its nakedness return

Back to its mother's breast!

Death is a common friend or foe,
As different men may hold,
And at his summons each must go,
The timid and the bold;

But when the spirit, free and warm,
Deserts it, as it must,

What matter where the lifeless form
Dissolves again to dust?

The soldier falls 'mid corses piled
Upon the battle plain,

Where reinless war steeds gallop wild
Above the mangled slain;

But though his corse be grim to see,
Hoof-trampled on the sod,

What recks it, when the spirit free
Has soared aloft to God?

The coward's dying eyes may close
Upon his downy bed,

And softest hands his limbs compose,

Or garments o'er them spread;
But ye who shun the bloody fray,
When fall the mangled brave,
Go-strip his coffin lid away
And see him in his grave!

"Twere sweet indeed to close our eyes
With those we cherish near,

And, wafted upwards by their sighs,
Soar to some calmer sphere:

But whether on the scaffold high,

Or in the battle's van,

The fittest place where man can die

Is where he dies for man!

Published in the Dublin Nation, 1843. Barry was born about 1815.

A NIGHT OF CLEOPATRA'S.

BY THEOPHILE GAUTIER.

(Translated for this work by Forrest Morgan.)

[THEOPHILE GAUTIER: A French writer; born in Tarbes, Hautes-Pyrénées, August 31, 1811; died in Paris, October 23, 1872. He was a traveler in many countries, and wrote several delightful books of travel. He was also a literary and art critic, a prolific dramatist, and the author of many excellent essays. His books include: "Poems" (1830), "Albertus" (1833), "Mademoiselle de Maupin" (1835), "The Loving Dead" (1836), "A Journey in Spain" (1843), "A Night of Cleopatra's" (1845), "Jean and Jeannette " (1846), "Italy' (1852), "Modern Art" and "The Arts in Europe" (1852), "Aria Marcella " (1852), "Constantinople" (1854), "The Tiger Skin" (1854–1855), 'Spirite (1866); and many plays, including "Posthumous Pierrot " (1845), "The Jewess of Constantine” (1846), and “Look but Do Not Touch " (1847).]

66

MEÏAMOUN, Son of Mandoushopsh, was a youth of a strange character: nothing which affected the generality of mortals made any impression upon him; he seemed of a higher raceone might have said the offspring of some divine adultery. His gaze had the piercing steadiness of a falcon's, and a serene majesty sat upon his brow as on a pedestal of marble; a noble disdain curved his upper lip, and inflated his nostrils like those of a fiery horse; although he had almost a young girl's delicate grace, and although Dionysos the effeminate god had not a rounder and more polished bosom, he concealed beneath his soft guise sinews of steel and a Herculean strength,—a singular gift of certain antique natures, that of uniting the beauty of a woman to the power of a man.

As to his hue, we are forced to confess that he was tawny yellow like an orange, a color opposed to the white-and-rose idea we have of beauty; which did not prevent his being a most charming youth, greatly sought after by every sort of woman - yellow, red, coppery, soot-brown, golden, and even by more than one white-skinned Greek.

For all this, do not suppose that Meïamoun was a man of sensual indulgences: the ashes of old Priam, the snows of Hippolytus himself, were not more insensible or more chill; the young neophyte in a white robe, preparing for initiation into the mysteries of Isis, led not a chaster life; the young maiden who freezes at the icy shadow of her mother has not a more timorous purity.

The pleasures of Meïamoun, for a youth so shy of approach, were nevertheless of a singular nature: he set forth tranquilly in the morning with his small buckler of hippopotamus hide, his harpe or sabre with the curved blade, his triangular bow, and his snakeskin quiver filled with barbed arrows; then he plunged into the desert, and put to the gallop his steed with the slender legs, the narrow muzzle, and the disheveled mane, until he found a track of the lioness: it was great sport for him to go and take the little lion-cubs from the mother's belly. In all things he loved nothing but the perilous or the impossible; it gave him fierce pleasure to walk in impracticable paths, to swim in a furious torrent, and he would have chosen to bathe in the Nile precisely at the place of the Cataracts: the abyss called him.

Such was Meïamoun, son of Mandoushopsh.

For some time his humor had become wilder than ever; he buried himself whole months in the ocean of sands, and reappeared only at rare intervals. His uneasy mother leaned vainly from the height of the terrace and questioned the road with tireless vision. After long waiting, a little cloud of dust came awhirl on the horizon. Soon the cloud opened and let Meïamoun be seen, covered with dust, upon his mare as gaunt as a wolf, her eyes red and bloodshot, nostrils quivering, scars on her flanks scars which were not the marks of the spurs. After having hung up in his room some skin of hyena or lion, he set out once more.

And yet no one might have been happier than Meïamoun: he was beloved by Nephté, daughter of the priest Afomouthis, the most beautiful being in the nome of Arsinoïtes. One would need to be Meïamoun not to see that Nephté had charming eyes, set off by corners with an indefinably voluptuous expression, a mouth which sparkled with a ruddy smile, white and translucent teeth, arms of an exquisite roundness, and feet more perfect than the jasper feet of the statue of Isis: assuredly there was not in all Egypt a smaller hand or longer tresses. The charms of Nephté could have been eclipsed only by those of Cleopatra. But who could dream of loving Cleopatra ? Ixion, who was enamored of Juno, pressed naught in his arms but a cloud, and turns his wheel eternally in Hades.

It was Cleopatra whom Meïamoun loved!

He had at first essayed to subdue this foolish passion, he had wrestled body to body with it; but one cannot strangle

VOL. XXIV. -7

love as he strangles a lion, and the most vigorous athletes know nothing to do. The arrow remained in the wound, and he carried it everywhere with him; the image of Cleopatra, radiant and splendid beneath her golden-pointed diadem the only one erect, in her imperial purple, amidst a kneeling peoplesent its rays into his waking times and into his dreams; like the imprudent person who has gazed at the sun and views ever an unseizable spot hovering before him, Meïamoun ever saw Cleopatra. Eagles may contemplate the sun without being dazzled, but what adamantine eyeball can fix itself with impunity on a beautiful woman on a beautiful queen?

His life was to wander about the royal dwellings to breathe the same air with Cleopatra; to kiss upon the sands—a happiness, alas! too rare- the half-obliterated imprint of her foot: he followed the sacred festivals and panegyries, striving to catch one gleam from her eyes, to purloin in its passage one of the thousand aspects of her beauty. Sometimes shame seized on him at this insensate existence; he gave himself up to the chase with redoubled fury, and strove to tame by fatigue the burning of his blood and the transport of his desires.

He had gone to the panegyris of Hermonthis, and in the vague hope of once more seeing the queen for an instant when she disembarked at the Summer Palace, had followed her barge in his skiff, without discomforting himself under the fierce stinging of the sun, through a heat enough to make the panting sphinxes melt in lava sweat upon their red-flushed pedestals.

And then he saw that he had come to the supreme moment, that his life was to be decided then and there, and that he could not die with his secret in his bosom.

It is a strange situation, to love a queen: it is as if one loved a star, yet she, the star, comes every night to sparkle in her place in the heavens; it is a species of mysterious rendezvous; you find her again, you see her, she is not offended by your gaze! O wretchedness! to be poor, unknown, obscure, seated at the very foot of the ladder, and to feel one's heart full of love for something solemn, glittering, and splendid, for a woman whose meanest servant-maid would naught of you! to have your eyes fixed by a doom upon some one who sees you not, who will never see you, to whom you are one wave in the sea rabble just like the others, and who would meet you a thousand times over without recognizing you! not to have, should occasion to speak present itself, any reason to give for so daring