TO A DEAF AND DUMB LITTLE GIRL.

LIKE a loose island on the wide expanse,
Unconscious floating on the fickle sea,
Herself her all, she lives in privacy;
Her waking life as lonely as a trance,
Doom'd to behold the universal dance,
And never hear the music which expounds
The solemn step, coy slide, the merry bounds,
The vague, mute language of the countenance.
In vain for her I smooth my antic rhyme;
She cannot hear it, all her little being
Concentred in her solitary seeing-

What can she know of beaut [eous] or sublime ?
And yet methinks she looks so calm and good,
God must be with her in her solitude.

THE GOD-CHILD.

I STOOD beside thee in the holy place,
And saw the holy sprinkling on thy brow,

And was both bond and witness to the vow
Which own'd thy need, confirm'd thy claim of grace ;

That sacred sign which time shall not efface
Declared thee His, to whom all angels bow,
Who bade the herald saint the rite allow

To the sole sinless of all Adam's race.
That was indeed an awful sight to see;
And oft, I fear, for what my love hath done,
As voucher of thy sweet communion
In thy [sweet] Saviour's blessed mystery.
Would I might give thee back, my little one,
But half the good that I have got from thee.

TWINS.

BUT born to die, they just had felt the air,
When God revoked the mandate of their doom.
A brief imprisonment within the womb,

Of human life was all but all their share.
Two whiter souls unstain'd with sin or care

Shall never blossom from the fertile tomb ;-
Twin flowers that wasted not on earth their bloom,
So quickly Heaven reclaim'd the spotless pair.

Let man that on his own desert relies,

And deems himself the creditor of God,

Think how these babes have earn'd their paradise,
How small the work of their small period:
Their very cradle was the hopeful grave,

God only made them for His Christ to save.

THE GUERNSEY LILY.

AMARYLLIS SAMIENSIS.

"This plant was brought from Japan, where it was found by Kaemfer and also by Thunberg, who visited that country in 1775. It was first cultivated in the garden of John Morin, at Paris, where it blowed for the first time on the 7th of October, 1634. It was then made known by Jacob Cornutus, under the name of 'Narcissus Japonicus flore rutilo.' After this it was again noticed by John Ray, in 1665, who called it the Guernsey Lily. A ship, returning from Japan, was wrecked on the coasts of Guernsey, and a number of the bulbs of this plant which were on board, being cast on shore, took root in that sandy soil."-Beckman's Inventions, vol. iii.

FAR in the East, and long to us unknown,
A lily bloom'd, of colours quaint and rare;
Not like our lilies, white, and dimly fair,
But clad like Eastern monarch on his throne.
A ship there was by stress of tempest blown,
And wreck'd on beach, all sandy, flat and bare ;-
The storm-god bated of his rage to spare

The queenly flower, foredoom'd to be our own.
The Guernsey fisher, seeking what the sea
Had stolen to aid his hungry poverty,

Starts to behold the stranger from afar,
And wonders what the gorgeous thing might be,
That like an unsphered and dejected star
Gleam'd in forlorn and mateless majesty.

SONNETS AND OTHER POEMS

REFERRING TO THE PERIOD OF

INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD.