LIFE'S SEESAW

Gin ye find a heart that's weary,
And that needs a brither's hand,
Dinna thou turn from it, dearie;

Thou maun help thy fellowman.
Thou, too, hast a hidden heartache,
Sacred from all mortal ken,
And because of thine own grief's sake
Thou maun feel for ither men.

In this world o' seesaw, dearie,
Grief goes up and joy comes down,
Brows that catch the sunshine cheerie
May tomorrow wear a frown.
Bleak December, dull and dreary,
Follows on the heels of May.
Give thy trust unstinted, dearie,
Thou mayst need a friend some day.

A MOUNTAIN PASTORAL

A couple at a cottage door,

Under the maple trees;

A mountain landscape stretched before,
Behind, beside; and nothing more
The passing traveler sees.

And is there more? The man and maid
Who caught your idle glance
Love's pretty hide-and-seek had played
Before they stood there in the shade,
Reading their own romance.

And he is young and true and strong;
And she is young and wise,

All hopes that to fresh hearts belong
Around their humble doorstone throng;
What more had Paradise?

Green are their waiting fields of toil,
With wildflowers blossoming sweet,
The living wealth no thief can spoil,
The boundless treasures of the soil,
Lie poured out at their feet.

Their neighbors? Not far off are they,
Beyond the bright home hill-
White Face, and Passaconaway,
And old Chocorua, rising gray,
Dreamy, remote, and still.

The future opens fair and wide
Within the young man's eyes;

The mountains bless the sweet girl-bride;
Life is a dream-land glorified.

What more was Paradise?

Lucy Larcom.

SPRING

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how;
Everything is happy now,

Everything is upward striving;

'Tis as easy now for the heart to be true
As for grass to be green or skies to be blue,
'Tis the natural way of living.

Who knows whither the clouds have fled?

In the unscarred heavens they leave no wake
And the eyes forget the tears they have shed,
The heart forgets its sorrow and ache;
The soul partakes the season's youth,

And the sulphurous rifts of passion and woe
Lie deep 'neath a silence pure and smooth,
Like burnt-out craters healed with snow.
James Russell Lowell, in "The Vision of Sir Launfal.”

NIAGARA FALLS

(This, the finest description of Niagara Falls ever written, is from a letter by Edwin Arnold to the London Telegraph, in 1900.)

Before my balcony, the great cataract is thundering, smoking, glittering with green and white rollers and rapids, hurling the waters of a whole continent in splendor and speed over the sharp ledges of the long, brown rock by which Erie, "the Broad," steps proudly down to Ontario, "the Beautiful."

The smaller but very imposing American Falls speaks with the louder voice of the two, because its coiling spirals of twisted and furious flood crash in full impulse of descent upon the talus of massive boulders heaped up at its foot.

The resounding impact of water on rocks, the clouds of water-smoke which rise high in air, and the river below churned into a whirling cream of eddy and surge and backwater, unite in a composite effect, at once magnificent and bewildering.

Far away, Niagara river is seen winding eagerly to its

prodigious leap. You can discern the line of the first breakers, where the river feels the fatal draw of the cataracts, its current seeming suddenly to leap forward, stimulated by mad desire, a hidden spell, a dreadful and irresistible doom.

Far back along the gilded surface of the upper stream, these lines of dancing, tossing, eager, anxious and fateimpelled breakers and billows multiply their white ranks, and spread and close together their leaping ridges into a wild chaos of racing waves as the brink is approached. And then, at the brink, there is a curious pause-the momentary peace of the irrevocable. Those mad upper waters-reaching the great leap are suddenly all quiet and glassy, and rounded and green as the border of a field of rye, while they turn he angle of the dreadful ledge and hurl themselves into the now-white gulf of noise and mist and mystery underneath.

There is nothing more translucently green, nor more perennially still and lovely, than Niagara the greater. At this, her awful brink, the whole architrave of the mair abyss gleams like a fixed and glorious work wrought in polished aquamarine or emerald. This exquisitely colored cornice of the enormous waterfall-this brim of bright tranquility between fervor of rush and fury of plunge— is its principal feature, and stamps it as far more beautiful than terrible. Even the central solemnity and shudderfraught miracle of the monstrous uproar and glory is rendered exquisite, reposeful, and soothing by the lovely rainbows hanging over the turmoil and clamor.

From its crest of chrysoprase and silver, indeed, to its broad foot of milky foam and of its white-stunned waves, too broken and too dazed to begin at first to float away, Niagara appears not terrible, but divinely and deliciously graceful, glad and lovely-a specimen of the splendor of

water at its finest-a sight to dwell and linger in the mind with ineffaceable images of happy and grateful thought, by no means to affect it in seeing or to haunt it in future days of memory with any wild reminiscences of terror or of gloom.

THE STORY OF LIFE

Say! what is life? 'Tis to be born
A hapless babe; to greet the light
With a sharp wail, as if the morn

Foretold a cloudy noon and night;
To weep, to sleep and weep again,
With sunny smiles between; and then;-

And then apace the infant grows

To be a laughing, sprightly boy.
Happy despite his little woes;

Were he but conscious of his joy,
To be, in short, from two to ten,
A merry, moody child; and then;-

And then, in coat and trousers clad,
To learn to say the decalogue:
And break it-an unthinking lad,
With mirth and mischief all agog.

A truant oft; by field and fen
To capture butterflies; and then;-

And then, increased in strength and size,
To be anon, a youth, full grown,