MEETING AT NIGHT.

  The gray sea and the long black land,
  And the yellow half-moon large and low;
  And the startled little waves that leap
  In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
  As I gain the cove with pushing prow
  And quench its speed in the slushy sand.

  Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
  Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
  A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
  And blue spurt of a lighted match,
  And a voice less loud, through its joys and fears,
  Than the two hearts beating each to each!

WORK AND WORTH.

[From Rabbi Ben Ezra.]

  Not on the vulgar mass
  Called “work” must sentence pass,
    Things done, that took the eye and had the price;
  O’er which, from level stand,
  The low world laid its hand,
    Found straightway to its mind, could value in a trice: 

  But all, the world’s coarse thumb
  And finger failed to plumb,
    So passed in making up the main account;
  All instincts immature,
  All purposes unsure,
    That weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man’s amount: 

  Thoughts hardly to be packed
  Into a narrow act,
    Fancies that broke through language and escaped;
  All I could never be,
  All men ignored in me,
    This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD.

  O, to be in England
  Now that April’s there,
  And whoever wakes in England
  Sees, some morning, unaware,
  That the lowest boughs and the brush-wood sheaf
  Round the elm-tree hole are in tiny leaf,
  While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
  In England—­now!

  And after April, when May follows,
  And the white throat builds, and all the swallows! 
  Hark where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
  Leans to the field and scatters on the clover
  Blossoms and dew-drops—­at the bent spray’s edge—­
  That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,
  Lest you should think he never could recapture
  The first fine careless rapture! 
  And though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
  All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
  The buttercups, the little children’s dower,
  Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!