its masses that prayed
For the daily bread that so seldom came;
With its lives whom sinning could never degrade,
Till the canker of want brought guilt and shame.
Gone one more year, with its noble souls
Who raised up the weary in hours of need;
With its crowds that started for wished-for goals,
And drooped by the way, broken-hearted indeed.

Gone one more year, with its wearisome woes;
Its pleasures hoped for--never seen:
Its swallow-winged friends: its fair-faced foes:
Its sorrow which happiness might have been:
Its cant and its cunning: its craft and crime:
Its loves and its hates: its hopes and fears:
Its lives that, reaching tow'rds heights sublime,
Fell short of the mark in a sea of tears.

Gone one more year, to tell all the rest
How wise the old world had gotten of late:
How fools still flourish, by wealth caressed:
How the noble of mind meet a pauper's fate;
How the infidel heart, accursed, defies
All hopes of Heaven--all fears of hell:
How the saintly preach from the book of lies,
And scoff at the truths which Saviours tell.

How the pious who poison the poor man's food
In shoddy and shop grow golden and grand:
How the rent-roll harbours the stolen rood--
The emblazoned escutcheon the bloody hand:
How women and men to the altar hie,
And swear to the promise they rarely keep;
How Vice, a shameless and living lie,
Gets honours which Virtue never can reap.

Gone one more year: there is no return.
Press onward, still onward, for weal or woe.
Beat heart: throb brain: hot eyelids burn:
Man's troubles and trials who cares to know?
Birth, marriage, and death: death, marriage, and birth,
Are the treadmill steps of this wheel of strife;
Cloak, draught, and a crust--then a hole in the earth:
And the struggle for these is the story of life.

So sang the bells in the belfry old,
Or so it seemed to me they sang;
And the year died out as the moments rolled,
Still o'er its bier the joy-bells rang:
'Twas mourning an instant, merriment then,
And the ghastly shroud where the old year lay--
How like is the humour of bells and men--
Became swaddling-clothes for the New Year's Day.

BEAUTIFUL BARBARA.

Beautiful Barbara--Barbara bright,
As bright and as fresh as the dainty dawn,
What is it disturbeth her bosom white,
As the breeze into billows kisseth t