DEATH.

Via Solitaria.

Alone I walk the peopled city,

Where each seems happy with his own, O friends, I ask not for your pityI walk alone.

No more for me yon lake rejoices,
Though wooed by loving airs of June;
O birds, your sweet and piping voices
Are out of tune.

In vain for me the elm-tree arches
Its plumes in many a feathery spray;
In vain the evening's starry marches.
And sunlit day;

In vain your beauty, summer flowers;
Ye can not greet those cordial eyes.
They gaze on others fields than ours-
On other skies.

The gold is rifled from the coffer,

The blade is stolen from the sheath; Life has but one more boon to offer, And that is—Death.

Yet well I know the voice of duty,

And therefore life and health must crave, Though she who gave the world its beauty Is in her grave.

I live, O lost one, for the living

Who drew their earliest life from thee,
And wait until, with glad thanksgiving,
I shall be free.

For life to me is as a station

Wherein apart a traveler stands— One absent long from home and nation, In other lands—

And I, as he who stands and listens,
Amid the twilight's chill and gloom,
To hear, approaching in the distance,
The train for home.

For death shall bring another mating;
Beyond the shadow of the tomb,
On yonder shore, a bride is waiting
Until I come.

In yonder fields are children playing,
And there-O vision of delight!—
I see a child and mother straying
In robes of white.

Thou, then, the longing heart that breakest,
Stealing its treasures one by one,
I'll call thee blessed when thou makest

The parted-one.

O. M. CONOVER.

The Dignity of Death.

Here lies a common man. His horny hands,
Crossed meekly as a maid's upon his breast,
Show marks of toil, and by his general dress
You judge him to have been an artisan.
Doubtless, could all his life be written out,
The story would not thrill nor start a tear;
He worked, laughed, loved and suffered in his time,
And now rests peacefully with upturned face,
Whose look belies all struggles in the past.
A homely tale; yet, trust me, I have seen
The greatest of the earth go stately by,
While shouting multitudes beset the way,
With less of awe. The gap between a king

And me, a nameless gazer in the crowd,

Seemed not so wide as that which stretches now
Betwixt us two-this dead one and myself.
Untitled, dumb and deedless, yet he is
Transfigured by a touch from out the skies
Until he wears, with all-unconscious grace,
The strange and sudden dignity of death.

RICHARD E. BURTON.

The Christian View of Death.

My friends, I hope you do not call that death.

is an autumnal sunset.

ing into a crystal sea.

That

That is a crystalline river pourThat is the solo of human life

overpowered by the Hallelujah chorus. That is a queen's coronation. That is Heaven. That is the way my father