e way," laugh'd the great god Pan,
(Laugh'd while he sat by the river)
"The only way, since gods began
To make sweet music, they could succeed."
Then, dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.

Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan!
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
And the lilies reviv'd, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.

Yet, half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,
Making a poet out of a man:
The true gods sigh for the cost and pain,--
For the reed which grows nevermore again
As a reed with the reeds in the river.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

If little labour, little are our gains;
Man's fortunes are according to his pains.

Herrick

WOLFE AND MONTCALM

The eventful night of the twelfth was clear and calm, with no light but
that of the stars. Within two hours before daybreak thirty boats,
crowded with sixteen hundred soldiers, cast off from the vessels and
floated downward in perfect order with the current of the ebb-tide. To
the boundless joy of the army, Wolfe's malady had abated, and he was
able to command in person. His ruined health, the gloomy prospect of the
siege, and the disaster at Montmorenci, had oppressed him with the
deepest melancholy, but never impaired for a moment the promptness of
his decisions, or the impetuous energy of his action.

He sat in the stern of one of the boats, pale and weak, but borne up to
a calm height of resolution. Every order had been given, every
arrangement made, and it only remained to face the issue. The ebbing
tide sufficed to bear the boats along, and nothing broke the silence of
the night but the gurgling of the river, and the low voice of Wolfe, as
he repeated to the officers about him the stanzas of Gray's "Elegy in a
Country Churchyard," which had recently appeared, and which he had just
received from England. Perhaps as he uttered those strangely
appropriate words:--

"The paths of glory lead but to the grave," the shadows of his own
approaching fate stole with mournful prophecy across his mind.
"Gentlemen," he said, as he closed his recital, "I would rather have
written those lines than take Quebec to-morrow."

As they approached the landing-place, the boats edged closer in towards
the northern shore, and the woody preci