Creep in our ears: soft stillness, and the night, Become the touches of sweet harmony.

CURRENT POEMS.

IBID, Merchant of Venice.

TWO EPITAPHS.

ON DR. JOHNSON.

HERE lies poor Johnson; reader have a care;
Tread lightly, lest you rouse a sleeping bear.
Religious, moral, generous and humane
He was; but self-sufficient, rude and vain;
Ill-bred and overbearing in dispute;

A scholar, and a Christian, and a brute.
Would you know all his wisdom and his folly,
His actions, sayings, mirth and melancholy?
Boswell and Thrale, retailers of his wit,
Will tell you how he wrote and talked and coughed
and spit.
SOAME JENYNS.

ON SOAME JENYNS.

HERE lies poor Jenyns, whose good taste and wit
In Johnson emphasized the "cough and spit,"
Held cheap the sweetness of that monarch mind,
And found delight in mocking at the rind;
Rude was the Doctor, yet in kindly wise;
In Jenyns, sooth, the case is otherwise,
For he, whom Jenyns rudely called a "brute
Is all that makes important this dispute;
Well had it been for Jenyns, if his art
Supplied such lack of manners with such heart!
ROWLAND B. MAHANY.

But when God threw it down to us that strayed,

It dropt with lamentation,

And ever since its sweetness shade

With sighs for its first station.

INGELOW, A Cottage in a Chine.

The soul of music slumbers in the shell,
Till waked and kindled by the master's spell;
And feeling hearts, touch them but rightly, pour
A thousand melodies unheard before.

ROGERS, Human Life.

But those sweet sounds are doubly sweet
In the still nights of June,

When song and silence seem to meet

Beneath the quiet moon;

Oh, then the spirit of music roves

With a delicate step through the myrtle groves!

And where is that discourteous wight

Who would not linger through the night,
Listening ever, lone and mute,

To the murmur of his mistress' lute?

PRAED, The Troubadour.

-Life, April 30, 1891.

THE MERRYTHOUGHT.

KING COLIN and his gracious Queen
(A goodlier couple ne'er was seen,
Devoted, young, and fair)
Were never known to disagree
So perfect was the harmony
Between the loving pair.

But, as it chanced, one hapless day, While at the royal table they

Were dining, well content, The butler placed before the King A roasted fowl-a luscious thing, Of richness redolent.

King Colin smiled, as well he might; He had an honest appetite

As honest monarchs ought,— And to his wife said he, "What part Do you perfer, my dearest heart?' Said she, "The Merrythought!"