UNSEEN SPIRITS.

  The shadows lay along Broadway,
    ’Twas near the twilight tide—­
  And slowly there a lady fair
    Was walking in her pride. 
  Alone walked she; but, viewlessly,
    Walked spirits at her side.

  Peace charmed the street beneath her feet,
    And Honor charmed the air;
  And all astir looked kind on her,
    And called her good as fair—­
  For all God ever gave to her
    She kept with chary care.

  She kept with care her beauties rare
    From lovers warm and true;
  For her heart was cold to all but gold,
    And the rich came not to woo,
  But honored well are charms to sell,
    If priests the selling do.

  Now walking there was one more fair—­
    A slight girl, lily-pale;
  And she had unseen company
    To make the spirit quail—­
  ’Twixt Want and Scorn she walked forlorn,
    And nothing could avail.

  No mercy now can clear her brow
    For this world’s peace to pray;
  For, as love’s wild prayer dissolved in air,
    Her woman’s heart gave way! 
  But the sin forgiven by Christ in heaven
    By man is cursed alway.

NAHANT.

Here we are, then, in the “Swallow’s Cave.”  The floor descends by a gentle declivity to the sea, and from the long dark cleft stretching outward you look forth upon the Atlantic—­the shore of Ireland the first terra firma in the path of your eye.  Here is a dark pool, left by the retreating tide for a refrigerator; and with the champagne in the midst we will recline about it like the soft Asiatics of whom we learned pleasure in the East, and drink to the small-featured and purple-lipped “Mignons” of Syria—­those fine-limbed and fiery slaves adorable as peris, and by turns languishing and stormy, whom you buy for a pinch of piastres (say 5L 5s.) in sunny Damascus.  Your drowsy Circassian, faint and dreamy, or your crockery Georgian—­fit dolls for the sensual Turk—­is, to him who would buy soul, dear at a penny the hecatomb.

We recline, as it were, in an ebon pyramid with a hundred feet of floor and sixty of wall, and the fourth side open to the sky.  The light comes in mellow and dim, and the sharp edges of the rocky portal seem let into the pearly heaven.  The tide is at half-ebb, and the advancing and retreating waves, which at first just lifted the fringe of crimson dulse at the lip of the cavern, now dash their spray-pearls on the rock below, the “tenth” surge alone rallying as if in scorn of its retreating fellow, and, like the chieftain of Culloden Moor, rushing back singly to the contest.  And now that the waters reach the entrance no more, come forward and look on the sea!  The swell lifts!  Would you not think the bases of the earth rising beneath it?  It falls!  Would you not think the foundation of the deep had given way?  A plain, broad enough