[To be continued.]

* * * * *

GONE.

  A silent, odor-laden air,
  From heavy branches dropping balm;
  A crowd of daisies, milky fair,
  That sunward turn their faces calm,
  So rapt, a bird alone may dare
  To stir their rapture with its psalm.

  So falls the perfect day of June,
  To moonlit eve from dewy dawn;
  With light winds rustling through the noon,
  And conscious roses half-withdrawn
  In blushing buds, that wake too soon,
  And flaunt their hearts on every lawn.

  The wide content of summer’s bloom,
  The peaceful glory of its prime,—­
  Yet over all a brooding gloom,
  A desolation born of time,
  As distant storm-caps tower and loom
  And shroud the sun with heights sublime.

  For they are vanished from the trees,
  And vanished from the thronging flowers,
  Whose tender tones thrilled every breeze,
  And sped with mirth the flying hours;
  No form nor shape my sad eye sees,
  No faithful spirit haunts these bowers.

  Alone, alone, in sun or dew! 
  One fled to heaven, of earth afraid;
  And one to earth, with eyes untrue
  And lips of faltering passion, strayed: 
  Nor shall the strenuous years renew
  On any bough these leaves that fade.

  Long summer-days shall come and go,—­
  No summer brings the dead again;
  I listen for that voice’s flow,
  And ache at heart, with deepening pain;
  And one fair face no more I know,
  Still living sweet, but sweet in vain.

EXPRESSION.

The law of expression is the law of degrees,—­of much, more, and most.

Nature exists to the mind not as an absolute realization, but as a condition, as something constantly becoming.  It is neither entirely this nor that.  It is suggestive and prospective; a body in motion, and not an object at rest.  It draws the soul out and excites thought, because it is embosomed in a heaven of possibilities, and interests without satisfying.  The landscape has a pleasure to us, because in the mind it is canopied by the ideal, as it is here canopied by the sky.

The material universe seems a suspense, something arrested on the point of transition from nonentity to absolute being,—­wholly neither, but on the confines of both, which is the condition of its being perceptible to us.  We are able to feel and use heat, because it is not entirely heat; and we see light only when it is mixed and diluted with its opposite.  The condition of motion is that there be something at rest; else how could there be any motion?  The river flows, because its banks do not.  We use force, because it is only in part that which it would be.  What could we do with unmixed power?  Absolute space is not cognizable to the mind; we apprehend space only when limited and imprisoned in geometrical figures.  Absolute life we can have no conception of; the absolute must come down and incarnate itself in the conditioned, and cease to be absolute, before it comes within the plane of our knowledge.  The unconscious is not knowable; as soon as it is thought, it becomes conscious.