like this is the very thief of time.  Before you are aware the waves of heat have ceased to form a throbbing air-hive for humming insects, and the cool of early twilight has come on, attended by lengthening shadows.  And so home again along the dewy fields, while an orchestra of crickets chirps a happy end beneath the summer stars to the day that is done.  It is in ways like this that poets renew their souls, the old their youth, and weary hearts, in sweet release from care, gain strength for life.

Literary Monthly, 1887.

QUESTIONINGS

GEORGE L. RICHARDSON ’88

  There are strange complications in it all,
    This life of ours—­had I fourfold the wit
  That as his share to any man doth fall,
    I fear me that I could not fathom it.

  This sorrow bringing laughter, and joy tears,
    Conflicting things we cannot understand;
  This constant longing for great length of years,
    That brings but weary limb and feeble hand;

  Eyes that are dim, and saddened, lowly life;
    These hot-waged wars, squalid with cries of pain,
  This joy in contest and this thirst for strife,
    In which both suffer, and there is no gain;

  Strong love that ere long turns to stronger hate,
    Sin leading into good, good into sin—­
  In very truth do lambs with tigers mate. 
    The world is wide, and strange things are therein.

Fortnight, 1887.

ON BRYANT’S “THANATOPSIS”

GEORGE LYNDE RICHARDSON ’88

  A great thought came to a great singer’s heart,
  Out of the grandeur of the changeless hills—­
  A thought whose greatness e’en in our day fills
  Men’s minds with nobler feeling.  All his art
  He lavished on the poem that he wrought,
  That it might be, through all the years of time,
  An inspiration, to all men, sublime,
  And nor for fault of his hand come to naught. 
  So it hath been.  The singer lieth dead;
  His words live on.  And still the mountains stand,
  And all men say who know them, in that land—­
  And through all ages, it will still be said—­
  Not gold that perisheth, from deep-hid veins,
  They give us, but the thought that aye remains.

Literary Monthly, 1887.

SUMMER SONG[1]

TALCOTT M. BANKS ’90

  Come, friend scholar, cease your bending
    Over books with eager gaze;
  Time it were such work had ending,—­
    Well enough for rainy days. 
  Out with me where sunlight pours,
  Life to-day is out of doors!

  Busy?  Pshaw! what good can reach you
    Frowning o’er that dog-eared page? 
  Yonder rushing brook can teach you
    More than half your Classic Age. 
  Banish Greeks and Siren shores,
  Let your thoughts run out of doors!