glad
Because the round day was so fair;
While memories of reluctant night
Lurked in the blue dusk of her hair.

Outside, a yellow maple-tree,
Shifting upon the silvery blue
With small innumerable sound,
Rustled to let the sunlight through.

The livelong day the elvish leaves
Danced with their shadows on the floor;
And the lost children of the wind
Went straying homeward by our door.

And all the swarthy afternoon
We watched the great deliberate sun
Walk through the crimsoned hazy world,
Counting his hilltops one by one.

Then as the purple twilight came
And touched the vines along our eaves,
Another Shadow stood without
And gloomed the dancing of the leaves.

The silence fell on my Love's lips;
Her great brown eyes were veiled and sad
With pondering some maze of dream,
Though all the splendid year was glad.

Restless and vague as a gray wind
Her heart had grown, she knew not why.
But hurrying to the open door,
Against the verge of western sky

I saw retreating on the hills,
Looming and sinister and black,
The stealthy figure swift and huge
Of One who strode and looked not back.

B. CARMAN.

Sesostris.

Sole Lord of Lords and very King of Kings,
He sits within the desert, carved in stone;
Inscrutable, colossal, and alone,
And ancienter than memory of things.
Graved on his front the sacred beetle clings;
Disdain sits on his lips; and in a frown
Scorn lives upon his forehead for a crown.
The affrighted ostrich dare not dust her wings
Anear this Presence. The long caravan's
Dazed camels stop, and mute the Bedouins stare.
This symbol of past power more than man's
Presages doom. Kings look--and Kings despair:
Their sceptres tremble in their jewelled hands
And dark thrones totter in the baleful air!

L. MIFFLIN.

NOTES.

American poetry before Bryant was considerable in amount, but, with few
exceptions, it must be looked for by the curious student in the
graveyard of old anthologies. Who now reads "The Simple Cobbler of
Agawam in America," "The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America," "The
Day of Doom," "M'Fingal," or "The Columbiad?" Skipping a generation from
Barlow's death, who reads with much seriousness any one of the group of
poets of which Bryant in his earliest period was the centre: Halleck,
Pierpont, Sprague, Drake, Dana, Percival, All