He held his mission and his range;
  His way and work were all his own;
  And she would give him in exchange
  What she could win and she alone,
  Of life and learning, fresh and strange.

  XXIII.

  While thus she sat in musing mood,
  Determining her life’s emprise,
  The sunlight flushed the distant wood,
  Then, coming closer, filled her eyes,
  And glorified her solitude.

  The clouds were shivered by the lance
  Sped downward by the morning sun,
  And from her heart, in swift advance,
  The shadows vanished, one by one,
  Till more than sunlight filled the manse.

  She closed the volume with a gust
  That sprent the light with powdered gold;
  Then placed it high to hide and rust
  Where, curious and over-bold
  She found it, lying in its dust.

  Her soul was light, her path was plain;
  One shadow only drooped above,—­
  The shadow of a heart and brain
  So charged with overwhelming love
  That it oppressed and gave her pain.

  The modest comb that kept her hair;
  To Philip was a golden crown;
  And every ringlet was a snare,
  And every hat, and every gown
  And slipper, something more than fair.

  His love had glorified her grace,
  And she was his, and not her own,—­
  So wholly his she had no place
  Beside him on his lonely throne,
  Or share in love’s divine embrace.

  And knowing that the coming days
  Would strip her features of their mask,
  That duty then would speak her praise,
  And love become a loyal task,
  Save he should find beneath the glaze

  His fiery love of her had spread,
  Diviner things he had not seen,
  She feared her woman’s heart and head
  Were armed with charms and powers too mean
  To win the boon she coveted.

  But still she saw and held her plan,
  And fear made way for springing hope. 
  If she was man’s, then hers was man: 
  Both held their own in even scope;
  And then and there her life began.

LOVE’S PHILOSOPHIES.

  I.

  A wife is like an unknown sea;—­
  Least known to him who thinks he knows
  Where all the shores of promise be,
  Where lie the islands of repose,
  And where the rocks that he must flee.

  Capricious winds, uncertain tides,
  Drive the young sailor on and on,
  Till all his charts and all his guides
  Prove false, and vain conceit is gone,
  And only docile love abides.

  Where lay the shallows of the maid,
  No plummet line the wife may sound;
  Where round the sunny islands played
  The pulses of the great profound,
  Lies low the treacherous everglade.

  And sailing, he becomes, perforce,
  Discoverer of a lovely world;
  And finds, whate’er may be his course,
  Green lands within white seas impearled,
  And streams of unsuspected source