SNOW-FLAKES.

SNOW-FLAKES Softly, slowly falling,
Floating, frisking in the wind,
Leaving, with a half-reluctance,
Your aërial home behind.

Speak to me in language gentle;
Tell me, snow-flakes, what you are,
Falling from the dreamy cloudland,
From the mystery afar.

"Like the things of life and nature, Seen with eyesight clear or dim,

What we seem to every gazer,

That we are in truth to him.

"We are but a means of frolic

To the schoolboy at his play; We are curses to the workman Doomed to spend an idle day;

"And to him who skims the surface
Of the things he sees around,
We are but a general whiteness,
Covering the naked ground.

"But to him who, looking deeper,
Sees us truly, as we are,

We are things of form and beauty,
Each a wondrous little star;

"We are showers of heavenly flowers, Falling from the fields of air;

Evanescent indications

Of the perfect beauty there :

"And the lesson we are teaching,
Ere we vanish out of view,
Is to see in men and nature,

Not the seeming, but the true;

"Looking deep below the surface For the beautiful and fair,

With a steadfast faith, and earnest, That the beautiful is there ;

"Looking for a soul of beauty,
Dimly, dimly understood;
Listening to celestial whisperings
Of a universal good-

"Good in men, and good in nature, Good in life, and everything,

In a universe of beauty,

And a never-ending Spring."

THE WINTER STORM.

O SNOW, SO bright, so beautiful!
O wondrously woven dress!
Descending from the loom of heaven
To cover Nature's nakedness.

O forms fantastic! strangely traced By frost upon the window-pane, And wrought to scenes of fairyland, Within the workshop of the brain.

I love you, as I ever love

The beautiful in land and sea, And in the cloudy forms that float In shapes majestic over me.

Dare I rejoice that you are here,
Or wish a beauty to remain,

That saddens creatures bound to me

By brotherhood of life and pain?

Dare I rejoice? No, no! not so !
For many a bird, with drooping wing,
And famine in its sunken eye,

Sits sadly near a leafless hedge,
In silent misery to die.

Dare I rejoice? No, no! not so!
For many a hungry brother man,

With hungry children weeping round,

Sits listless by a dying fire;

Starvation in the frozen ground.

Dare I rejoice? No, no! not so!
For, on the crowded road of life,

Full many a traveller, bowed with age, Will fall and die, who might have gone In peace another easy stage.

Dare I rejoice? No, no! not so!

I dare not sin so great a sin,

And, bannered selfishness unfurled,

In cruel isolation live,

A monster in an empty world.