We see the clouds of summer go and come, Yet what are we? We breathe, we love, we cease: We are Fate's children, very tired; and all I only ask to drink experience deep; Henry Abbey [1842-1911] THE WAYFARER I WILL reach far down in the pit of sorrow With the bitter past I will deck to-morrow. I will turn no cowardly look behind me, But still fare on Till the glow of ultimate joy shall blind me. For I ask no blessing and no forgiving, The gain was mine, Since I learn from all things the truth of living. Helen Huntington [18 BOOKRA As I lay asleep in Italy.-SHELLEY ONE night I lay asleep in Africa, In a closed garden by the city gate; Came wildly thundering at the massive bar, "Open in Allah's name! Wake, Mustapha! In oriental calm the garden lay, Panic and war postponed another day. Charles Dudley Warner [1829-1900] INTO THE TWILIGHT OUT-WORN heart, in a time out-worn, Your mother Eire is always young, Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill: And God stands winding His lonely horn, William Butler Yeats [1865 LIFE WHEN I consider Life and its few years A wisp of fog betwixt us and the sun; A rose choked in the grass; an hour of fears; Ye old, old dead, and ye of yesternight, Chieftains, and bards, and keepers of the sheep, Loose me from tears, and make me see aright Lizette Woodworth Reese [1856 VERS LA VIE The statue by Victor Rosseau in the Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels ANGEL, hast thou betrayed me? Long ago Of which the rumor reached to where we sate In our cool, hidden, dreamless ante-glow. To know why thou with seeming-kindly hands Where all is strange, and very often Fear Unthoughtful shores where thou and Silence are! Arthur Upson [1877-1908] LIFE WE are born; we laugh; we weep; We love; we droop; we die! Why do we live, or die? Who knows that secret deep? Alas, not I! Why doth the violet spring Why do the radiant seasons bring We toil,-through pain and wrong; We love; we lose; and then, ere long, Stone-dead we lie. O life! is all thy song "Endure and-die?" Bryan Waller Procter [1787-1874] PRE-EXISTENCE WHILE sauntering through the crowded street, Some half-remembered face I meet, Albeit upon no mortal shore That face, methinks, has smiled before. Lost in a gay and festal throng, Set to an air whose golden bars In sacred aisles I pause to share When the whole scene which greets mine eyes In some strange mode I recognize, As one whose every mystic part At sunset, as I calmly stand, Familiar as my childhood's home Seems the long stretch of wave and foam. One sails toward me o'er the bay, I can foretell. A prescient lore O swift, instinctive, startling gleams For aye ye vaguely dawn and die, Pierce through the dark, oblivious brain, Thoughts which perchance must travel back Of countless æons; memories far, Unknown, scarce seen, whose flickering grace Paul Hamilton Hayne [1830-1886] ENVOY From "Songs from Vagabondia" I HAVE little care that Life is brief, Success is in the silences Though Fame is in the song. II With the Orient in her eyes, |