MONK'S SONG. [From The Roman.] There went an incense through the land one night, The haughty sun of June had walked, long days, At once lay low, at once ambrosial blood Cried to the moonlight from a thousand fields. And through the land the incense went that night, Old days sang round her, old memorial days; She crowned with tears, they dressed in flowers, all faded-- All through the old man's soul. Voices of eld, Old thoughts that circle like the birds of Even Round the grey spire. Soft sweet regrets, like sunset The old man weeps. His aimless hands the joyless books put by; SONNETS. AMERICA. Men say, Columbia, we shall hear thy guns. To mine, and, clasped, they tread the equal lea Meanwhile our Shakespeare wanders past and dreams Nor force nor fraud shall sunder us? Oh ye Its breathing book; live worthy of that grand Of the great Mother-tongue, and ye shall be And rich as Chaucer's speech, and fair as Spenser's dream. THE COMMON GRAVE. Last night beneath the foreign stars I stood, Dug with her bleeding hands. She neither cried All night she toiled; and at that time of dawn, ENGLAND. [From Balder.] This dear English land! This happy England, loud with brooks and birds, Shining with harvests, cool with dewy trees And bloomed from hill to dell; but whose best flowers Are daughters, and Ophelia still more fair Than any rose she weaves; whose noblest floods The pulsing torrent of a nation's heart; Whose forests stronger than her native oaks Are living men; and whose unfathomed lakes In quiet graveyards willowed seemly round, Through unremembered years, around whose base Perpetual, as around her cliffs the seas That only wash them whiter; and whose mountains Souls that from this mere footing of the earth CHAMOUNI. If Thou hast known anywhere amid a storm Of thunder, when the Heavens and Earth were moved, A gleam of quiet sunshine that hath saved Thine heart; or where the earthquake hath made wreck, Knowest a stream, that wandereth fair and sweet As brooks go singing thro' the fields of home ; Or on a sudden when the sea, distent With windy pride, upriseth thro' the clouds Barbaric, hast, with half-drawn breath, passed by JAMES THOMSON. [JAMES THOMSON, whose father was a seafaring man, was born at Port Glasgow on the 23rd November, 1834. His early career had many vicissitudes. Educated at the Royal Caledonian Asylum, he subsequently entered the Training School, Chelsea, for the purpose of eventually becoming an army schoolmaster. We next find him in a solicitor's office in London; then in America as secretary to a silver mine company; then in Spain as correspondent of the New York World. His first volume, The City of Dreadful Night, and other Poems, some parts of which had previously appeared in The National Reformer, was published in 1880. This was succeeded, in 1881, by Vane's Story, and other Poems. In the same year a volume of prose essays proceeded from his pen; and beside these he has left behind him many posthumous poems and translations. He died June 3rd, 1882.] James Thomson, though his works were few and his death comparatively early, was still one of the remarkable poets of this century. Most of the poets of our time have flirted with pessimism, but through their beautifully expressed sorrow we cannot help seeing that on the whole they are less sad than they seem, or that, like Mr. Matthew Arnold, they have laid hold of a stern kind of philosophic consolation. It was reserved for Thomson to write the real poem of despair; it was for him to say the ultimate word about melancholia: for, of course, it is the result of that disorder which is depicted in The City of Dreadful Night. It was for him to gauge its horrible shapes, to understand its revelations of darkness, as Shelley and others have understood revelations of light. As soon as we have read the opening pages of The City of Dreadful Night, we feel transported to a land of infinite tragedy. It has been contended that because life itself is so tragic, such poems as Thomson's are worse than needless; but the true reason for the existence of this particular poem is given by its author in the following lines : 'Yes, here and there some weary wanderer In that same city of tremendous night, |