e."
And I am two-and-twenty,
And oh, 'tis true, 'tis true.

Alfred Edward Housman [1859-1936]

"GRIEVE NOT, LADIES"

Oh, grieve not, Ladies, if at night
Ye wake to feel your beauty going;
It was a web of frail delight,
Inconstant as an April snowing.

In other eyes, in other lands,
In deep fair pools new beauty lingers;
But like spent water in your hands
It runs from your reluctant fingers.

You shall not keep the singing lark
That owes to earlier skies its duty.
Weep not to hear along the dark
The sound of your departing beauty.

The fine and anguished ear of night
Is tuned to hear the smallest sorrow:
Oh, wait until the morning light!
It may not seem so gone to-morrow.

But honey-pale and rosy-red!
Brief lights that make a little shining!
Beautiful looks about us shed--
They leave us to the old repining.

Think not the watchful, dim despair
Has come to you the first, sweet-hearted!
For oh, the gold in Helen's hair!
And how she cried when that departed!

Perhaps that one that took the most,
The swiftest borrower, wildest spender,
May count, as we would not, the cost--
And grow more true to us and tender.

Happy are we if in his eyes
We see no shadow of forgetting.
Nay--if our star sinks in those skies
We shall not wholly see its setting.

Then let us laugh as do the brooks,
That such immortal youth is ours,
If memory keeps for them our looks
As fresh as are the springtime flowers.

So grieve not, Ladies, if at night
Ye wake to feel the cold December!
Rather recall the early light,
And in your loved one's arms, remember.

Anna Hempstead Branch [18

SUBURB

Dull and hard the low wind creaks
Among the rustling pampas plumes.
Drearily the year consumes
Its fifty-two insipid weeks.

Most of the gray-green meadow land
Was sold in parsimonious lots;
The dingy houses stand
Pressed by some stout contractor's hand
Tightly together in their plots.

Through builded banks the sullen river
Gropes, where its houses crouch and shiver.
Over the bridge the tyrant train
Shrieks, and emerges on the plain.

In all the better gardens you may pass,
(Product of many careful Saturdays),
Large red geraniums and tall pampas grass
Adorn the plots and mark the gravelled ways.

Sometimes in the background may be seen
A private summer-house in white or green.
Here on warm nights the daughter brings
Her vacillating clerk,
To talk of small exciting things
And touch his fingers through the