You walk the sunny side of Fate;
  The wise world smiles, and calls you great;
  The golden fruitage of success
  Drops at your feet in plenteousness;
  And you have blessings manifold,—­
  Renown, and power, and friends, and gold;
  They build a wall between us twain
  Which may not be thrown down again;—­
  Alas! for I, the long years through,
  Have loved you better than you knew.

  Your life’s proud aim, your art’s high truth
  Have kept the promise of your youth;
  And while you won the crown which now
  Breaks into bloom upon your brow,
  My soul cried strongly out to you
  Across the ocean’s yearning blue,
  While, unremembered and afar,
  I watched you, as I watch a star
  Through darkness struggling into view,
  And loved you better than you knew.

  I used to dream, in all these years,
  Of patient faith and silent tears,—­
  That Love’s strong hand would put aside
  The barriers of place and pride,—­
  Would reach the pathless darkness through,
  And draw me softly up to you. 
  But that is past.  If you should stray
  Beside my grave, some future day,
  Perchance the violets o’er my dust
  Will half betray their buried trust,
  And say, their blue eyes full of dew,
  “She loved you better than you knew.”

* * * * *

COFFEE AND TEA.

Facts, and figures representing facts, are recognized as stubborn adversaries when arrayed singly in an argument; in aggregate, and in generalizations drawn from aggregates, they are often unanswerable.

To the nervous reader it may seem a startling, and to the reformatory one a melancholy fact, that every soul in these United States has provided for him annually, and actually consumes, personally or by proxy, between six and seven pounds of coffee, and a pound of tea; while in Great Britain enough of these two luxuries is imported and drunk to furnish every inhabitant, patrician or pauper, with over a pound of the former, and two of the latter.

Coffee was brought to Western Europe, by way of Marseilles, in 1644, and made its first appearance in London about 1652.  In 1853, the estimated consumption of coffee in Great Britain, according to official returns, was thirty-five million pounds, and in the United States, one hundred and seventy-five million pounds, a year.

Tea, in like manner, from its first importation into England by the Dutch East India Company, early in the seventeenth century, and from a consumption indicated by its price, being sixty shillings a pound, has proportionately increased in national use, until, in 1854, the United States imported and retained for home consumption twenty-five million pounds, and England fifty-eight million pounds.

Two centuries have witnessed this almost incredible advance.  The consumption of coffee alone has increased, in the past twenty-five years, at the rate of four per cent. per annum, throughout the world.