When the wind blows high and the snow falls fast And we hear the wassailer's roar,

My friend and I, with a right good-will

We bolt the chamber door;

I smile at him and he smiles at me
In a dreamy calm profound,

Till his heart leaps up in the midst of him,
With a comfortable sound.

His warm breath kisses my thin gray hair
And reddens my ashen cheeks;

He knows me better than you all know,
Though never a word he speaks, -
Knows me as well as some had known
Were things- not as things be;

But hey, what matters? - my friend and I
Are capital company.

At the dead of night, when the house is still,

He opens his pictures fair;

Faces that are, that used to be,

And faces that never were:

My wife sits sewing beside my hearth,

My little ones frolic wild,

Though - Lilian 's married these twenty years,
And I never had a child.

But hey, what matters when those who laugh,
May weep to-morrow, and they

Who weep be as those that wept not—all
Their tears long wiped away?

I shall burn out like you, my friend,

With a bright warm heart and bold, That flickers up to the last - then drops Into quiet ashes cold.

And when you flicker on me, old friend,
In the old man's elbow-chair,

EQUINOCTIAL.

Or something easier still, where we
Lie down, to rise up fair,

And young, and happy-why then, my friend,
Should other friends ask of me,

Tell them I lived and loved and died,

In the best of all company.

463

DINAH MARIA MULOCK CRAIK.

ΤΗ

Equinoctial.

HE sun of life has crossed the line; The summer-shine of lengthened light Faded and failed - till, where I stand,

'Tis equal day and equal night.

One after one, as dwindling hours,
Youth's glowing hopes have dropped away,
And soon may barely leave the gleam
That coldly scores a winter's day.

I am not young I am not old;

The flush of morn, the sunset calm, Paling, and deepening, each to each, Meet midway with a solemn charm.

One side I see the summer fields,

Not yet disrobed of all their green; While westerly, along the hills,

Flame the first tints of frosty sheen.

Ah! middle-point, where cloud and storm
Make battle-ground of this my life!
Where, even-matched, the night and day
Wage round me their September strife.

I bow me to the threatening gale:
I know, when that is over-past,
Among the peaceful harvest days

An Indian Summer comes at last!

MRS. A. D. T. WHITNEY.

WE

Our Autumns.

VE, too, have autumns when our leaves Drop loosely through the dampened air, When all our good seems bound in sheaves, And we stand reaped and bare.

Our seasons have no fixed return,
Without our will they come and go;
At noon our sudden summers burn,
Ere sunset all is snow.

But each day brings less summer cheer,
Crimps more our ineffectual spring;
And something earlier, every year,

Our singing birds take wing.

As less the olden glow abides,

And less the chillier heart aspires,

With drift-wood beached in past spring tides
We light our sullen fires.

By the pinched rushlight's starving beam
We cower, and strain our wasted sight,
To stitch youth's shroud up, seam by seam,
In the long Arctic night.

It was not so we once were young-
When spring, to womanly summer turning,
Her dew-drops on each grass-blade strung,
In the sunshine burning.

We trusted then, aspired, believed

That earth could be re-made to-morrow;

Ah, why be ever undeceived?

Why give up faith for sorrow?

THE CANE-BOTTOMED CHAIR. 465

O, thou whose days are yet all spring,
Trust, blighted once, is past retrieving;
Experience is a dumb, dead thing;

The victory's in believing.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

IN

The Cane-bottomed Chair.

N tattered old slippers that toast at the bars,
And a ragged old jacket perfumed with cigars,
Away from the world and its toils and its cares,
I've a snug little kingdom up four pair of stairs.

To mount to this realm is a toil, to be sure,
But the fire there is bright, and the air rather pure;
And the view I behold on a sunshiny day
Is grand through the chimney-pots over the way.

This snug little chamber is crammed in all nooks
With worthless old knick-knacks and silly old books,

And foolish old odds and foolish old ends,

Cracked bargains from brokers, cheap keepsakes from friends.

Old armor, prints, pictures, pipes, china (all cracked),
Old rickety tables, and chairs broken-backed;

A twopenny treasury, wondrous to see;

What matter? 't is pleasant to you, friend, and me.

No better divan need the Sultan require,

Than the creaking old sofa that basks by the fire;
And 't is wonderful, surely, what music you get
From the rickety, ramshackle, wheezy spinet.

That praying-rug came from a Turcoman's camp;
By Tiber once twinkled that brazen old lamp;
A Mameluke fierce yonder dagger has drawn:
'T is a murderous knife to toast muffins upon.

Long, long, through the hours, and the night, and the chimes,
Here we talk of old books, and old friends, and old times;
As we sit in a fog made of rich Latakie,

This chamber is pleasant to you, friend, and me.

But of all the cheap treasures that garnish my nest,
There's one that I love and I cherish the best :
For the finest of couches that 's padded with hair,
I never would change thee, my cane-bottomed chair.

'T is a bandy-legged, high-shouldered, worm-eaten seat,
With a creaking old back, and twisted old feet;
But since the fair morning when Fanny sat there,
I bless thee and love thee, old cane-bottomed chair.

If chairs have but feeling, in holding such charms,
A thrill must have passed through your withered old arms;
I looked, and I longed, and I wished in despair;

I wished myself turned to a cane-bottomed chair.

It was but a moment she sat in this place,

She'd a scarf on her neck, and a smile on her face!

A smile on her face, and a rose in her hair,

And she sat there, and bloomed in my cane-bottomed chair.

And so I have valued my chair ever since,

Like the shrine of a saint, or the throne of a prince;
Saint Fanny, my patroness sweet I declare,
The queen of my heart and my cane-bottomed chair.

When the candles burn low, and the company's gone,
In the silence of night as I sit here alone
I sit here alone, but we yet are a pair
My Fanny I see in my cane-bottomed chair.

She comes from the past and revisits my room;
She looks as she then did, all beauty and bloom;
So smiling and tender, so fresh and so fair,
And yonder she sits in my cane-bottomed chair.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY.