It filled the purple grapes that lay
    And drank the splendors of the sun
  Where the long summer’s cloudless day
    Is mirrored in the broad Garonne;
  It pictures still the bacchant shapes
    That saw their hoarded sunlight shed,—­
  The maidens dancing on the grapes,—­
    Their milk-white ankles splashed with red.

  Beneath these waves of crimson lie,
    In rosy fetters prisoned fast,
  Those flitting shapes that never die,
    The swift-winged visions of the past. 
  Kiss but the crystal’s mystic rim,
    Each shadow rends its flowery chain,
  Springs in a bubble from its brim,
    And walks the chambers of the brain.

  Poor Beauty! time and fortune’s wrong
    No form nor feature may withstand,—­
  Thy wrecks are scattered all along,
    Like emptied sea-shells on the sand;—­
  Yet, sprinkled with this blushing rain,
    The dust restores each blooming girl,
  As if the sea-shells moved again
    Their glistening lips of pink and pearl.

  Here lies the home of school-boy life,
    With creaking stair and wind-swept hall,
  And, scarred by many a truant knife,
    Our old initials on the wall;
  Here rest—­their keen vibrations mute—­
    The shout of voices known so well,
  The ringing laugh, the wailing flute,
    The chiding of the sharp-tongued bell.

  Here, clad in burning robes, are laid
    Life’s blossomed joys, untimely shed;
  And here those cherished forms have strayed
    We miss awhile, and call them dead. 
  What wizard fills the maddening glass? 
    What soil the enchanted clusters grew,
  That buried passions wake and pass
    In beaded drops of fiery dew?

  Nay, take the cup of blood-red wine,—­
    Our hearts can boast a warmer glow,
  Filled from a vintage more divine,—­
    Calmed, but not chilled by winter’s snow! 
  To-night the palest wave we sip
    Rich as the priceless draught shall be
  That wet the bride of Cana’s lip,—­
    The wedding wine of Galilee!

CHILD-LIFE BY THE GANGES.

We are told—­and, being philosophers, we will amuse ourselves by believing—­that there are towns in India, somewhere between Cape Comorin and the Himalayas, wherein everything is butcha,—­that is, “a little chap”; where inhabitants and inhabited are alike in the estate of urchins; where little Brahmins extort little offerings from little dupes at the foot of little altars, and ring little bells, and blow little horns, and pound little gongs, and mutter little rigmaroles before stupid little Krishnas and Sivas and Vishnus, doing their little wooden best to look solemn, mounted on little bulls or snakes, under little canopies; where little Brahminee bulls, in all the little insolence of their little sacred privileges, poke their little noses into the little rice-baskets of pious little maidens in