MY KATE

She was not so pretty as women I know,

all your

best made of sunshine and snow

And yet all
Drop to shade, melt to naught in the long-trodden ways,
While she's still remembered on warm and cold days-

My Kate.

Her air had a meaning, her movements a grace;
You turned from the fairest to gaze on her face;
And when you had once seen her forehead and mouth,
You saw as distinctly her soul and her truth-
My Kate.

Such a blue inner light from her eyelids outbroke,
You looked at her silence and fancied she spoke;
When she did, so peculiar yet soft was the tone,
Though the loudest spoke also, you heard her alone-
My Kate.

I doubt if she said to you much that could act
As a thought or suggestion; she did not attract
In the sense of the brilliant or wise; I infer

'Twas her thinking of others, made you think of her— My Kate.

She never found fault with you, never implied Your wrong by her right; and yet men at her side Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town The children were gladder that pulled at her gown—

My Kate.

None knelt at her feet confessed lovers in thrall;

They knelt more to God than they used-that was all:

If

you praised her as charming, some asked what you meant; But the charm of her presence was felt when she went―

My Kate.

The weak and the gentle, the ribald and rude,

She took as she found them, and did them all good;

It always was so with her-see what you have!

She has made the grass greener even here with her grave—

My Kate.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING.

pe-cul'iar, unlike any other. im-plied', meant, but not said. thrall, slavery.

rib'ald,
coarse; rude.
in-fer', conclude.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806-61) was a gifted English poet. Her father was a wealthy London merchant, and gave her the best advantages in education. She began to write verse at the age of ten, and had become famous before she was thirty. She was naturally delicate, and her health was almost ruined by grief for the death of her brother, who was drowned. After that event she had to remain for years in a darkened room. She was married to Robert Browning in 1846 and lived in Italy until her death. "Casa Guidi Windows," a poem about Italy, and "Aurora Leigh, a novel in verse, are two of her most important works. Some of her short poems are exquisitely beautiful. “The Cry of the Children" has done great good in calling the attention of people to the work of young children in mines and factories, and bringing about laws for their protection.

Write a word that means the opposite of pretty, warm, darkest, outer, loud, dull, wise, wrong, baser, sorrowful, unattractive, weak, rough. Write: praise, blame; ask, answer; found, lost; attract, repel; melt, freeze; best, worst; remembered, forgotten; rude, refined; pulled, pushed; silence, noise.

AT LUCERNE

Photographs, casts, and carvings of the Lucerne Lion, all, even the best of them, fall short of expressing the simple grandeur of Thorwaldsen's boldest work. The face of a perpendicular sand-stone cliff was hewn roughly,—not smoothed or polished in any part. Half-way up was quarried a niche, and in this, as in a lair, is a lion nearly thirty feet long.

The splintered shank of a lance projects from his side. The head-broken or bitten off in his mortal throe, lies by the shield of France, which is embossed with the fleur de lys. One huge paw protects the sacred emblem. He has dragged himself, with a final rally of strength, to die upon, while caressing it. He will never move again. The limbs are relaxed, the mighty frame stretched by the convulsion that wrenched away his life.

He is dead,—not daunted; conquered, not subdued. The blended grief and ferocity in his face are human and heroic, not brutal. In the rock above and below the den are cut a Latin epitaph, and the names of twenty-six men. "Helvetiorum fidei ac virtuti.1 Die X Aug. II et III Sept., 1792," begins the inscription.

Who has not read, oft and again, how the Swiss Guard of twenty-six officers and seven hundred and fifty privates were cut to pieces to a man in defence of the royal prisoner of the Tuilleries against the mob thirsting for her blood? In the shop near the monument they show a fac-simile of the king's order to the Guards to be at the palace upon the fatal day. Trailing vines have crept downward from the top and fis1 To the fidelity and bravery of the Helvetii.

sures of the cliff. Tall trees clothe the summit. A pool lies at the base, a slender fountain in the middle. There are always travelers seated upon the benches in front of the railing, guard

ing the water's brink, contemplating the dead monarch. It is the pride of Lucerne.

Around Lake Lucerne, otherwise known as the Lake of the Four Cantons, every rood of ground is memorable in the history of the gallant little Republic. Near it, Arnold Winkelried gathered into his breast the red sheaf of spears upon the battle-field of Sempach, July 9th, 1386.

The Confederate Brethren of Uri, Schyyz, and Unterwalden met at Rütli upon the very border of the lake, on the

night of November 7th, 1307, and swore to give no rest to mind or body until Switzerland should be free.

William Tell was born at Bürglen, a few miles above Flülen. By the time we had re-read Schiller's "William Tell," and visited, with it in hand, Altorf, Küssnacht, and Tell's Platte, we credited the tales of his being and daring almost as devoutly as do the native Switzers.

Küssnacht is but a few miles back from the lake in the midst of a smiling country lying between water and the mountains. A crumbling wall on a hill-side to the left of the road was pointed out to us as the remains of Gessler's Castle. The Hollow Way in which Tell shot him is a romantic lane between steep, grassy banks and overhanging trees. It was by this that Gessler approached the tree behind which Tell lay, concealed, cross-bow in hand.

The exact place of the Tyrant's death is marked by a little chapel. A fresco in the porch depicts the scene described by Schiller. The purple Alpine heather blossoms up to the churchdoor, and maiden-hair ferns fringe the foundation walls.

Tell's Platte or Leap-is marked by a tiny chapel upon the extremest water's edge near Rütli. Its foundations are built into the rock upon which the patriot sprang from Gessler's boat. A great Thanksgiving Mass for Swiss liberty is performed here once in the year, attended by a vast concourse of people in gayly-decorated boats. There is not room on the shelving shore for a congregation.

Altorf is a clean Swiss village where the window curtains are all white, and where the children, clean, too, but generally bare-legged and bare-headed, turn out in a body to gather around the strangers that stop to look at the monument. A very undignified memorial it is of the valiant Liberator.