Both, heirs to some six feet of sod,
Are equal in the earth at last;
Both, children of the same dear God,
Prove title to your heirship vast
By record of a well-filled past;
A heritage, it seems to me,
Well worth a life to hold in fee.

THE SOWER.

I SAW a Sower walking slow
Across the earth, from east to west;
His hair was white as mountain snow,
His head drooped forward on his breast.

With shrivelled hands he flung his seed,
Nor ever turned to look behind;
Of sight or sound he took no heed;
It seemed he was both deaf and blind.

His dim face showed no soul beneath;
Yet in my heart I felt a stir,
As if I looked upon the sheath
That once had clasped Excalibur.

I heard, as still the seed he cast,
How, crooning to himself, he sung,-
"I sow again the holy Past,
The happy days when I was young.

"Then all was wheat without a tare,
Then all was righteous, fair, and true;
And I am he whose thoughtful care
Shall plant the Old World in the New.

"The fruitful germs I scatter free,
With busy hand, while all men sleep;
In Europe now, from sea to sea,
The nations bless me as they reap."

Then I looked back along his path,
And heard the clash of steel on steel,
Where man faced man, in deadly wrath,
While clanged the tocsin's hurrying peal.

The sky with burning towns flared red,
Nearer the noise of fighting rolled,
And brothers' blood, by brothers shed,
Crept, curdling, over pavements cold.

Then marked I how each germ of truth
Which through the dotard's fingers ran
Was mated with a dragon's tooth
Whence there sprang up an armèd man.

I shouted, but he could not hear;
Made signs, but these he could not see;
And still, without a doubt or fear,
Broadcast he scattered anarchy.

Long to my straining ears the blast
Brought faintly back the words he sung:-
"I sow again the holy Past,

The happy days when I was young."

AN INDIAN-SUMMER REVERIE.

WHAT Visionary tints the year puts on,
When fallen leaves falter through motionless air,
Or nimbly cling, and shiver to be gone!
How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare,
As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills

The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

No more the landscape holds its wealth apart,

Making me poorer in my poverty,

But mingles with my senses and my heart;

My own projected spirit seems to me

In her own reverie the world to steep;

'Tis she that waves to sympathetic sleep, Moving, as she is moved, each field and hill and tree.

How fuse and mix, with what unfelt degrees, Clasped by the faint horizon's languid arms, Each into each, the hazy distances! The softened season all the landscape charms; Those hills, my native village that embay, In waves of dreamier purple roll away, And floating in mirage seem all the glimmering farms. Far distant sounds the hidden chickadee Close at my side; far distant sound the leaves; The fields seem fields of dream, where Memory Wanders like gleaning Ruth; and as the sheaves Of wheat and barley wavered in the eye Of Boaz as the maiden's glow went by,

So tremble and seem remote all things the sense receives.

The cock's shrill trump that tells of scattered corn, Passed breezily on by all his flapping mates,

Faint and more faint, from barn to barn is borne, Southward, perhaps to far Magellan's Straits; Dimly I catch the throb of distant flails; Silently overhead the henhawk sails,

With watchful, measuring eye, and for his quarry waits.

The sobered robin, hunger-silent now, Seeks cedar-berries blue, his autumn cheer; The squirrel on the shingly shagbark's bough, Now saws, now lists with downward eye and ear; Then drops his nut, and, with a chipping bound, Whisks to his winding fastness underground; The clouds like swans drift down the streaming atmosphere.

O'er yon bare knoll the pointed cedar-shadows Drowse on the crisp, grey moss; the ploughman's call Creeps faint as smoke from black, fresh-furrowed meadows;

The single crow a single caw lets fall;

And all around me every bush and tree

Says Autumn's here, and Winter soon will be, Who snows his soft white sleep and silence over all.

The birch, most shy and ladylike of trees,
Her poverty, as best she may, retrieves,
And hints at her foregone gentilities
With some saved relics of her wealth of leaves;
The swamp-oak, with his royal purple on,
Glares red as blood across the sinking sun,
As one who proudlier to a falling fortune cleaves.

He looks a sachem, in red blanket wrapped, Who, 'mid some council of the sad-garbed whites, Erect and stern, in his own memories lapped, With distant eye broods over other sights,

Sees the hushed wood the city's flare replace,
The wounded turf heal o'er the railway's trace,
And roams the savage past of his undwindled rights.

The red-oak, softer-grained, yields all for lost,
And, with his crumpled foliage stiff and dry,
After the first betrayal of the frost,
Rebuffs the kiss of the relenting sky;

The chestnuts, lavish of their long-hid gold,

To the faint Summer, beggared now and old, Pour back the sunshine hoarded 'neath her favouring eye.

The ash her purple drops forgivingly
And sadly, breaking not the general hush;
The maple-swamps glow like a sunset sea,
Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush;

All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze
Of bushes low, as when, on cloudy days,

Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush.

O'er yon low wall, which guards one unkempt zone, Where vines, and weeds, and scrub-oaks intertwine,

Safe from the plough, whose rough, discordant

stone

Is massed to one soft grey by lichens fine,

The tangled blackberry, crossed and re-crossed,

weaves

A prickly network of ensanguined leaves; Hard by, with coral beads, the prim black-alders shine.

Pillaring with flame this crumbling boundary, Whose loose blocks topple 'neath the ploughboy's foot,

Who, with each sense shut fast except the eye, Creeps close and scares the jay he hoped to shoot, The woodbine up the elm's straight stem aspires, Coiling it, harmless, with autumnal fires;

In the ivy's paler blaze the martyr oak stands mute.

Below, the Charles-a stripe of nether sky, Now hid by rounded apple-trees between,

Whose gaps the misplaced sail sweeps bellying by, Now flickering golden through a woodland screen, Then spreading out at his next turn beyond, A silver circle like an inland pond

Slips seaward silently through marshes purple and green.

Dear marshes! vain to him the gift of sight
Who cannot in their various incomes share,
From every season drawn, of shade and light,
Who sees in them but levels brown and bare;
Each change of storm or sunshine scatters free
On them its largesse of variety,

For Nature with cheap means still works her wonders

rare.

In Spring they lie one broad expanse of green, O'er which the light winds run with glimmering feet; Here, yellower stripes track out the creek unseen, There, darker growths o'er hidden ditches meet;

And purpler stains show where the blossoms crowd,
As if the silent shadow of a cloud

Hung there becalmed, with the next breath to fleet.