WE TO SIGH INSTEAD OF SING.

"Rain and rain! and rain and rain!"
Yesterday we muttered
Grimly as the grim refrain
That the thunders uttered:
All the heavens under cloud--
All the sunshine sleeping;
All the grasses limply bowed
With their weight of weeping.

Sigh and sigh! and sigh and sigh!
Never end of sighing;
Rain and rain for our reply--
Hopes half-drowned and dying;
Peering through the window-pane,
Naught but endless raining--
Endless sighing, and, as vain,
Endlessly complaining.

Shine and shine! and shine and shine!
Ah! to-day the splendor!--
All this glory yours and mine--
God! but God is tender!
We to sigh instead of sing,
_Yesterday_, in sorrow,
While the Lord was fashioning
This for our To-morrow!

THE BLOSSOMS ON THE TREES.

Blossoms crimson, white, or blue,
Purple, pink, and every hue,
From sunny skies, to tintings drowned
In dusky drops of dew,
I praise you all, wherever found,
And love you through and through;--
_But_, Blossoms On The Trees,
With your breath upon the breeze,
There's nothing all the world around
As half as sweet as you!

Could the rhymer only wring
All the sweetness to the lees
Of all the kisses clustering
In juicy Used-to-bes,
To dip his rhymes therein and sing
The blossoms on the trees,--
"O Blossoms on the Trees,"
He would twitter, trill and coo,
"However sweet, such songs as these
Are not as sweet as you:--
For you are _blooming_ melodies
The _eyes_ may listen to!"

A DISCOURAGING MODEL.

Just the airiest, fairiest slip of a thing,
With a Gainsborough hat, like a butterfly's wing,
Tilted up at one side with the jauntiest air,
And a knot of red roses sown in under there
Where the shadows are lost in her hair.

Then a cameo face, carven in on a ground
Of that shadowy hair where the roses are wound;
And the gleam of a smile O as fair and as faint
And as sweet as the masters of old used to paint
Round the lips of their favorite saint!

And that lace at her throat--and the fluttering hands
Snowing there, with a grace that no art understands,
The flakes of their touches--first fluttering at
The bow--then the roses--the hair--and then that
Little tilt of the Gainsborough hat.

O what artist on earth with a model like this,
Holding not on his palette the tint of a kiss,
Nor