Ah, Rover, by those lustrous eyes
      That follow me with longing gaze,
    Which sometimes seem so human-wise,
      I look for human speech and ways. 
    By your quick instinct, matchless love,
      Your eager welcome, mute caress,
    That all my heart’s emotions move,
      And loneliest moods and hours bless,
    I do believe, my dog, that you
    Have some beyond, some future new.

    Why not?  In heaven’s inheritance
      Space must be cheap where worldly light
    In boundless, limitless expanse
      Rolls grandly far from human sight. 
    He who has given such patient care,
      Such constancy, such tender trust,
    Such ardent zeal, such instincts rare,
      And made you something more than dust,
    May yet release the speechless thrall
    At death—­there’s room enough for all.

Our Continent.

* * * * *

HIS FAITHFUL DOG.

    Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
    Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
    His soul proud science never taught to stray
    Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
    Yet simple nature to his hope has given,
    Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler heaven;
    Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
    Some happier island in the watery waste,
    Where slaves once more their native land behold,
    No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. 
    To be, contents his natural desire,
    He asks no angel’s wing, no seraph’s fire;
    But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
    His faithful dog shall bear him company.

POPE.

* * * * *

THE FAITHFUL HOUND.

A traveller, by the faithful hound,
Half-buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,

                Excelsior!

H. W. LONGFELLOW.

* * * * *

MISCELLANEOUS.

* * * * *

THE SPIDER’S LESSON.

    Robert, the Bruce, in his dungeon stood,
      Waiting the hour of doom;
    Behind him the palace of Holyrood,
      Before him—­a nameless tomb. 
    And the foam on his lip was flecked with red,
    As away to the past his memory sped,
    Upcalling the day of his past renown,
    When he won and he wore the Scottish crown: 
        Yet come there shadow or come there shine,
        The spider is spinning his thread so fine.

    “Time and again I have fronted the tide
      Of the tyrant’s vast array,
    But only to see on the crimson tide
      My hopes swept far away;—­
    Now a landless chief and a crownless king,
    On the broad, broad earth not a living thing
    To keep me court, save this insect small,
    Striving to reach from wall to wall:” 
        For come there shadow or come there shine,
        The spider is spinning his thread so fine.