Some spell is on me, for I seem
A memory of the past, a dream
Of happiness remembered dim,
Unto myself that walk the street
Scathed with the city's noontide heat,
With puzzled brain and burning feet.

FEUERBILDER.

The children sit by the fireside
With their little faces in bloom;
And behind, the lily-pale mother,
Looking out of the gloom,

Flushes in cheek and forehead
With a light and sudden start;
But the father sits there silent,
From the firelight apart.

"Now, what dost thou see in the embers?
Tell it to me, my child,"
Whispers the lily-pale mother
To her daughter sweet and mild.

"O, I see a sky and a moon
In the coals and ashes there,
And under, two are walking
In a garden of flowers so fair.

"A lady gay, and her lover,
Talking with low-voiced words,
Not to waken the dreaming flowers
And the sleepy little birds."

Back in the gloom the mother
Shrinks with a sudden sigh.
"Now, what dost thou see in the embers?"
Cries the father to the boy.

"O, I see a wedding-procession
Go in at the church's door,--
Ladies in silk and knights in steel,--
A hundred of them, and more.

"The bride's face is as white as a lily,
And the groom's head is white as snow;
And without, with plumes and tapers,
A funeral paces slow."

Loudly then laughed the father,
And shouted again for cheer,
And called to the drowsy housemaid
To fetch him a pipe and beer.

AVERY.

[NIAGARA, 1853.]

I.

All night long they heard in the houses beside the shore,
Heard, or seemed to hear, through the multitudinous roar,
Out of the hell of the rapids as 'twere a lost soul's cries,--
Heard and could not believe; and the morning mocked their eyes,
Showing, where wildest and fiercest the waters leaped up and ran
Raving round him and past, the visage of a man
Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught
Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught.
Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clung?
Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terror rung.

II.

Under the weltering rapids a boat from the bridge is drowned,
Over the rocks the lines of another are tangled and wound;
And the long, fateful hours of the morning have wasted soon,
As it had been in some blessed trance, and now it is noon.
Hurry, n