L'ENVOY.

O thou who dwellest in the day,
Behold, I pace amidst the gloom:
Darkness is ever round my way,
With little space for sunbeam room.

Yet Christian sadness is divine,
Even as thy patient sadness was:
The salt tears in our life's dark wine
Fell in it from the saving Cross.

Bitter the bread of our repast;
Yet doth a sweet the bitter leaven:
Our sorrow is the shadow cast
Around it by the light of Heaven.
O Light in light, shine down from Heaven!

* * * * *

PADRAIC COLUM

"_I SHALL NOT DIE FOR YOU_"

(From the Irish)

O woman, shapely as the swan,
On your account I shall not die.
The men you've slain--a trivial clan--
Were less than I.

I ask me shall I die for these:
For blossom-teeth and scarlet lips?
And shall that delicate swan-shape
Bring me eclipse?

Well shaped the breasts and smooth the skin,
The cheeks are fair, the tresses free;
And yet I shall not suffer death,
God over me.

Those even brows, that hair like gold,
Those languorous tones, that virgin way;
The flowing limbs, the rounded heel
Slight men betray.

Thy spirit keen through radiant mien,
Thy shining throat and smiling eye,
Thy little palm, thy side like foam--
I cannot die.

O woman, shapely as the swan,
In a cunning house hard-reared was I;
O bosom white, O well-shaped palm,
I shall not die.

_AN IDYLL_

You stay at last at my bosom, with your beauty
young and rare,
Though your light limbs are as limber as the
foal's that follows the mare,
Brow fair and young and stately where thought
has now begun--Hair
bright as the breast of the eagle when he
strains up to the sun!

In the space of a broken castle I found you on
a day
When the call of the new-come cuckoo went
with me all the way.
You stood by the loosened stones that were
rough and black with age:
The fawn beloved of the hunter in the panther's
broken cage!

And we went down together by paths your
childhood knew--
Remote you went beside me, like the spirit of
the dew;
Hard were the hedge-rows still: sloe-bloom
was their scanty dower--
You slipped it within your bosom, the bloom
that scarce is flower.

And now you stay at my bosom with you
beauty young and rare,
Though your light limbs are as limber as the
foal's that follows the mare;
But always I will see you on paths your childhood
knew,
When remote you went beside me lik