, gust-swept chambers, bare,
With all the midnight revel gone;

But wanders through the lonesome rooms,
Where harsh the astonished cricket calls,
And, from the hollows of the walls
Vanishing, start unshapen glooms;

And lingers yet, and cannot come
Out of the drear and desolate place,
So full of ruin's solemn grace,
And haunted with the ghost of home.

BUBBLES.

I.

I stood on the brink in childhood,
And watched the bubbles go
From the rock-fretted, sunny ripple
To the smoother tide below;

And over the white creek-bottom,
Under them every one,
Went golden stars in the water,
All luminous with the sun.

But the bubbles broke on the surface,
And under, the stars of gold
Broke; and the hurrying water
Flowed onward, swift and cold.

II.

I stood on the brink in manhood,
And it came to my weary brain,
And my heart, so dull and heavy
After the years of pain,--

That every hollowest bubble
Which over my life had passed
Still into its deeper current
Some heavenly gleam had cast;

That, however I mocked it gayly,
And guessed at its hollowness,
Still shone, with each bursting bubble,
One star in my soul the less.

LOST BELIEFS.

One after one they left us;
The sweet birds out of our breasts
Went flying away in the morning:
Will they come again to their nests?

Will they come again at nightfall,
With God's breath in their song?
Noon is fierce with the heats of summer,
And summer days are long!

O my Life, with thy upward liftings,
Thy downward-striking roots,
Ripening out of thy tender blossoms
But hard and bitter fruits!--

In thy boughs there is no shelter
For the birds to seek again.
The desolate nest is broken
And torn with storms and rain!

LOUIS LEBEAU'S CONVERSION.

Yesterday, while I moved with the languid crowd on the Riva,
Musing with idle eyes on the wide lagoons and the islands,
And on the dim-seen seaward glimmering sails in the distance,
Where the azure haze, like a vision of Indian-Summer,
Haunted the dreamy sky of the soft Venetian December,--
While I moved unwilled in the mellow warmth of the weather,
Breathing air that was full of Old World sadness and beauty
Into my thought came this story of free, wild life in Ohio,
When the land was new, and yet by the Beautiful River
Dwel