And the vessel hurries homeward under sun and under

stars,

She flies, all canvas crowded, or she drifts beneath bare spars,

Till the rattling cordage creak,

And the whistling block shall speak,

And the groaning yards make answer, Lo, the haven that we seek!

The squalors and the splendours that have girt you as you go,

The majesty and meanness, your sons again shall know,
While the grinding hawser slips,
And the falling anchor grips,

And they haul the huddled foresail down in London of the Ships.

From the Cotswolds, from the Chilterns, from your fountains and your springs,

Flow down, O royal river, unpollute of earthly things:
Through the city's dust and din,
Through the city's slime and sin,
Hail us for fighting Englishmen, with all the world to
win!

Then swing us to the surges, through the hurricane to grope,

With iron ills to grapple, with crushing odds to cope:

One with your flood are we,

Blood of your blood we be,

Beating eternal measure still to the pulses of the sea.

May Byron.

My Dream

HAVE a dream-that some day I shall go
At break of dawn adown a rainy street,

A grey old street, and I shall come in the end
To the little house I have known, and stand;
and you,

Mother of mine, who watch and wait for me,
Will you not hear my footstep in the street,
And, as of old, be ready at the door,

To give me rest again? . I shall come home.

H. D. Lowry.

VII. Exile

"Four ducks on a pond,
A grass-bank beyond,
A blue sky of Spring,
White clouds on the wing:
What a little thing

To remember for years

To remember with tears."

Home-Thoughts, from Abroad

H, to be in England now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England sees, some morning unaware,

That the lowest boughs and the brushwood
sheaf

Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England-now!

And after April, when May follows

And the white-throat builds, and all the swallows!
Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge
Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

Blossoms and dewdrops-at the bent spray's edge—
That's the wise thrush: he sings each song twice over
Lest you should think he never could recapture
The first fine careless rapture!

And, though the fields look rough with hoary dew,
All will be gay when noontide wakes anew
The buttercups, the little children's dower
-Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower!

Robert Browning.

Oh! the Oak and the Ash

NORTH country maid up to London had stray'd,

Although with her nature it did not agree; She wept, and she sigh'd, and she bitterly cried,

"I wish once again in the north I could be.

Oh! the oak, and the ash, and the bonny ivy tree,
They flourish at home in my own country.