If I were a dead leaf thou mightest bear;
       If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
     A wave to pant beneath thy power, and share
       The impulse of thy strength, only less free
     Than thou, O uncontrollable! if even
       I were as in my boyhood, and could be
     The comrade of thy wanderings over heaven,
       As then, when to outstrip thy skiey speed
     Scarce seemed a vision,—­I would ne’er have striven
       As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need. 
     Oh lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! 
       I fall upon the thorns of life!  I bleed! 
     A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
     One too like thee—­tameless, and swift, and proud.

     Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: 
       What if my leaves are falling like its own? 
     The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
       Will take from both a deep autumnal tone,
     Sweet though in sadness.  Be thou, Spirit fierce,
       My spirit!  Be thou me, impetuous one! 
     Drive my dead thoughts over the universe,
       Like withered leaves, to quicken a new birth;
     And, by the incantation of this verse,
       Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
     Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind! 
       Be through my lips to unawakened earth
     The trumpet of a prophecy!  O Wind,
     If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

 PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.

 WHAT MAKES A HOLIDAY?

What is it makes a holiday?  Some people want Paris, some Monte Carlo, one man cannot be satisfied without big game to hunt, another must have a grouse moor.  The student has his sailing boat, the young wage-earner his bicycle, three girl friends look forward to their week in a Hastings boarding-house.  Almost anything may be “a change”; most things, to someone or other, are “a holiday.”  What does it all mean?

The sands of West Sussex are wide and free, firm and smooth for walking with bare feet, lovely with little shells and sea-worm curves and ripple marks and the pits of razor-shells.  Above them are the slopes of shingle, gleaming with all colours in the September sun.  Farther up again, the low, brown crumbling cliffs crowned with green wreaths of tamarisk.  The sea comes creeping up, or else the wind raises great white breakers; if the waves are quiet, old breakwaters, long ago broken themselves, smashed fragments here and there of concrete protections put by man, gaps in the cliff and changes in the coast-line, remind us of the vast force behind the gentle and persistent lap of water.  The beach itself reminds us of it; there a flint and here a rounded pebble made out of brick or glass, worn down from man’s rubbish to sea’s proof of power.

Over it all are the children, brown-legged and bare-headed. (Is it something in the weather this year that has given us the particular red-brown,