Nor time hath changed His hair to white,
    Nor His dear love to spite,
      Fair Ladye. 
  I doubt no doubts:  I strive, and shrive my clay,
  And fight my fight in the patient modern way
  For true love and for thee—­ah me! and pray
    To be thy knight until my dying day,
      Fair Ladye,”
  Said that knightly horn, and spurred away
  Into the thick of the melodious fray.

  And then the hautboy played and smiled,
  And sang like a little large-eyed child,
  Cool-hearted and all undefiled. 
      “Huge Trade!” he said,
  “Would thou wouldst lift me on thy head,
  And run where’er my finger led! 
  Once said a Man—­and wise was He—­
  Never shalt thou the heavens see,
  Save as a little child thou be.”

  Then o’er sea-lashings of commingling tunes
  The ancient wise bassoons,
      Like weird
      Gray-beard
  Old harpers sitting on the wild sea-dunes,
      Chanted runes: 
  “Bright-waved gain, gray-waved loss,
  The sea of all doth lash and toss,
  One wave forward and one across. 
  But now ’twas trough, now ’tis crest,
  And worst doth foam and flash to best,
      And curst to blest.

  “Life!  Life! thou sea-fugue, writ from east to west,
        Love, Love alone can pore
        On thy dissolving score
        Of wild half-phrasings,
          Blotted ere writ,
        And double erasings. 
          Of tunes full fit. 
  Yea, Love, sole music-master blest,
  May read thy weltering palimpsest. 
  To follow Time’s dying melodies through,
  And never to lose the old in the new,
  And ever to solve the discords true—­
      Love alone can do. 
  And ever Love hears the poor-folks’ crying,
  And ever Love hears the women’s sighing,
  And ever sweet knighthood’s death-defying,
  And ever wise childhood’s deep implying,
  And never a trader’s glozing and lying.

  “And yet shall Love himself be heard,
  Though long deferred, though long deferred: 
  O’er the modern waste a dove hath whirred: 
  Music is Love in search of a Word.”

SIDNEY LANIER.

* * * * *

THE BLOUSARD IN HIS HOURS OF EASE.

Bulwer in his last novel said something to the effect that an orang-outang would receive a degree of polish and refinement by ten years of life in Paris.  This statement is not to be taken literally, of course:  I have detected no special polish of manners in the monkeys confined at the Jardin d’Acclimatation in Paris, some of whom are pretty well on in years.  The novelist only sought to make a strong expression of his good opinion of French manners, no doubt.  In observing the blouse wearers of Paris in their hours of ease and relaxation, I have been struck with the great prevalence of a certain unforced courtesy of manner, even among the coarsest.  No one would dream what a howling demon this creature could and did become in the days of the Commune who should see him enjoying himself at his ball, his concert, his theatre or his dinner.