They come ;

While the white curtains, waving to and fro,
Fan the sick air;

And pityingly the shadows come and go,
With gentle human care,
Compassionate and dumb.

The dusty day is done,

The night begun;

While prayerful watch I keep,
Sleep, love, sleep!

Is there no magic in the touch

Of fingers thou dost love so much?

Fain would they scatter poppies o'er thee now;
Or, with its mute caress,

The tremulous lip some soft nepenthe press
Upon thy weary lid and aching brow;
While prayerful watch I keep,
Sleep, love, sleep!

On the pagoda spire

The bells are swinging,

Their little golden circlet in a flutter

The candles flare

With fresher gusts of air;

The beetle's drone

Turns to a dirge-like, solitary moan;

Night deepens, and I sit, in cheerless doubt alone.

EMILY CHUBBUCK JUDSON.

THE DREAM.

OUR life is twofold; sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed
Death and existence: sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,

And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become

A portion of ourselves as of our time,

And look like heralds of eternity;

They pass like spirits of the past, — they speak
Like sibyls of the future; they have power,

With tales the wooing winds have dared to utter, The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;
Till all are ringing,

As if a choir

They make us what we were not, what they

will,

And shake us with the vision that's gone by,
The dread of vanished shadows. Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? What are they?
Creations of the mind? The mind can make
Substances, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.
I would recall a vision which I dreamed
Perchance in sleep, - for in itself a thought,
A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.

I saw two beings in the hues of youth
Standing upon a hill, a gentle hill,
Green and of a mild declivity, the last
As 't were the cape of a long ridge of such,
Save that there was no sea to lave its base,
But a most living landscape, and the wave
Of woods and cornfields, and the abodes of men
Scattered at intervals, and wreathing smoke
Arising from such rustic roofs; the hill
Was crowned with a peculiar diadem
Of trees, in circular array, so fixed,
Not by the sport of nature, but of man :
These two, a maiden and a youth, were there
Gazing, the one on all that was beneath
Fair as herself, but the boy gazed on her;
And both were young, and one was beautiful;
And both were young, yet not alike in youth.
As the sweet moon on the horizon's verge,
The maid was on the eve of womanhood;

The boy had fewer summers, but his heart
Had far outgrown his years, and to his eye
There was but one beloved face on earth,
And that was shining on him; he had looked
Upon it till it could not pass away;
He had no breath, no being, but in hers;
She was his voice; he did not speak to her,
But trembled on her words; she was his sight,
For his eye followed hers, and saw with hers,
Which colored all his objects; he had ceased
To live within himself: she was his life,
The ocean to the river of his thoughts,
Which terminated all; upon a tone,

his heart

A touch of hers, his blood would ebb and flow,
And his cheek change tempestuously,
Unknowing of its cause of agony.

But she in these fond feelings had no share :
Her sighs were not for him; to her he was
Even as a brother, but no more; 't was much,
For brotherless she was, save in the name
Her infant friendship had bestowed on him;
Herself the solitary scion left

Was traced, and then it faded, as it came;
He dropped the hand he held, and with slow
steps

Retired, but not as bidding her adieu,

For they did part with mutual smiles; he passed
From out the massy gate of that old Hall,
And mounting on his steed he went his way;
And ne'er repassed that hoary threshold more.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The boy was sprung to manhood; in the wilds
Of fiery climes he made himself a home,
And his soul drank their sunbeams; he was girt
With strange and dusky aspects; he was not
Himself like what he had been on the sea
And on the shore he was a wanderer ;
There was a mass of many images
Crowded like waves upon me, but he was
A part of all; and in the last he lay
Reposing from the noontide sultriness,
Couched among fallen columns, in the shade
Of ruined walls that had survived the names
Of those who reared them; by his sleeping side
Stood camels grazing, and some goodly steeds
Were fastened near a fountain; and a man,
when she Clad in a flowing garb, did watch the while,
While many of his tribe slumbered around:
And they were canopied by the blue sky,
So cloudless, clear, and purely beautiful,
That God alone was to be seen in heaven.

Of a time-honored race. It was a name Which pleased him, and yet pleased him not, and why?

Time taught him a deep answer

loved

Another; even now she loved another,
And on the summit of that hill she stood,
Looking afar if yet her lover's steed
Kept pace with her expectancy, and flew.

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
There was an ancient mansion, and before
Its walls there was a steed caparisoned;
Within an antique oratory stood

:

- her native home,

but behold!

A change came o'er the spirit of my dream.
The lady of his love was wed with one
Who did not love her better in her home,
A thousand leagues from his,
She dwelt, begirt with growing infancy,
Daughters and sons of beauty,
Upon her face there was the tint of grief,
The settled shadow of an inward strife,
And an unquiet drooping of the eye,
As if its lid were charged with unshed tears.
What could her grief be? - she had all she loved,
And he who had so loved her was not there
To trouble with bad hopes, or evil wish,
Or ill-repressed affliction, her pure thoughts.
What could her grief be?—she had loved him

not,

THIS life, and all that it contains, to him
Is but a tissue of illuminous dreams
Filled with book-wisdom, pictured thought and
love

That on its own creations spends itself.
All things he understands, and nothing does.

And thrust themselves between him and the Profusely eloquent in copious praise