Ever sleeping with his teeth below the wave;

Woe to him who breaks the sleep!

Woe to them who sail the deep!
Woe to ship and man that fear a shipman's grave!

Hither many a galleon old,

Heavy-keeled with guilty gold,
Fled before the hardy rover smiting sore;

But the sleeper silent lay

Till the preyer and his prey
Brought their plunder and their bones to Roncador.

Be content, О conqueror!

Now our bravest ship of war,
War and tempest who had often braved before,

All her storied prowess past,

Strikes her glorious flag at last
To the formless thing that builded Roncador.

ANDROMEDA.

They chained her fair young body to the cold and cruel stone; The beast begot of sea and slime had marked her for his own; The callous world beheld the wrong, and left her there alone. Base caitiffs who belied her, false kinsmen who denied her,

Ye left her there alone!

My Beautiful, they left thee in thy peril and thy pain;
The night that hath no morrow was brooding on the main :
But, lo! a light is breaking of hope for thee again;
'Tis Perseus' sword a-flaming, thy dawn of day proclaiming

Across the western main : 0 Ireland! O my country! he comes to break thy chain!

THE SKELETON AT THE FEAST.

We summoned not the Silent Guest,

And no man spake his name;
By lips unseen our Cup was pressed,
And mid the merry song and jest,

The Uninvited came.

Wise were they in the days of old,

Who gave the Stranger place;
And when the joyous catch was trolled,
And toasts were quaffed and tales were told,

They looked him in the face.

God save us from the skeleton

Who sittest at the feast! God rest the manly spirit gone, Who sat beside the Silent One,

And dreaded him the least!

AT SEA.

Shall we, the storm-tossed sailors, weep

For those who may not sail again;
Or wisely envy them, and keep

Our pity for the living men?

Beyond the weary waste of sea,

Beyond the wider waste of death,
I strain my gaze and cry to thee

Whose still heart never answereth.

O brother, is thy coral bed

So sweet thou wilt not hear my speech?
This hand, methinks, if I were dead,

To thy dear hand would strive to reach.

I would not, if God gave us choice

For each to bear the other's part,
That mine should be the silent voice,

And thine the silent, aching heart.

Ah, well for any voyage done,

Whate'er its end—or port or reef;
Better the voyage ne'er begun,

For all ships sail the sea of Grief.

THE V-A-S-E.

From the madding crowd they stand apart,-
The maidens four and the Work of Art:

Long they worshiped; but no one broke
The sacred stillness, until up spoke

The Western one from the nameless place, Who blushing said, “What a lovely Vase!"

Over three faces a sad smile flew,
And they edged away from Kalamazoo.

But Gotham's haughty soul was stirred
To crush the stranger with one small word:

Deftly hiding reproof in praise,
She cries, “'T is, indeed, a lovely Vaze!”

But brief her unworthy triumph when
The lofty one from the home of Penn,

With the consciousness of two grandpapas,
Exclaims, “It is quite a lovely Vahs!”

And glances round with an anxious thrill,
Awaiting the word of Beacon Hill.

But the Boston maid smiles courteouslee,
And gently murmurs: “Oh, pardon me!

“I did not catch your remark, because I was so entranced with that charming Vaws!”

Dies erit prægelida

Sinistra quum Bostonia. 1 It will be a very cold day when Boston gets left.

THOMAS W. HAZEN ROLLESTON.

(1857 –) THOMAS W. H. ROLLESTON was born in 1857 near Shinrone, King's County, the youngest son of Charles Rolleston Spunner, Q. C., County Judge of Tipperary. He was educated at St. Columba's College, Rathfarnham, and at Trinity College, Dublin, where he won the Vice-Chancellor's prize for English verse, and was graduated in 1878. He has lived much in Europe, chiefly in Dresden. He has translated Walt Whitman into German and is a critic of great refinement. He has written 'The Teaching of Epictetus' and a ‘Life of Lessing '; has contributed poems to The Academy, The Speaker, and other reviews, and is represented in every modern Irish anthology. Two small volumes of his poems have been issued by The Rhymers' Club. He was first Honorary Secretary of the London Irish Literary Society, and is a Vice-President of the National Literary Society of Dublin. He has edited The Prose Writings of Thomas Davis,'«Selections from Plato,' and Ellen O'Leary's poems.

ON THE COLLOQUY OF THE ANCIENTS.'

From a Lecture on · Imagination and Art in Gaelic Literature.'

Imaginative literature has two themes to deal withMankind and Nature. I do not speak in this connection of purely religious literature, embodying a definite creed, which has a place apart and laws and conditions of its own. But, of course, a literature dealing with mankind must be judged among other things, by the nature of the spiritual laws, if any, which it recognizes as living forces in human society, and to that extent it looks out upon the divine as well as upon the human world.

Now we have in the works I have mentioned a very rich and interesting collection both of the nature poetry of the Gael and of that which deals with humanity. As regards the former-nature poetry—the principal work translated in “Silva Gadelica '—the long prose piece known as the Colloquy of the Ancients'-must have been quite a revelation to many readers. This work is one of the Ossianic cycle of Irish prose romances, but it is rather a collection of tales than an individual work of literary art, and thus illustrates what the explorer will so often meet with-the inability of the Celtic writer to give form and