Stole down the long arcades the dancing girls;

Some with dark-braided tresses, some with sunny curls. Wild waxed the revel.

On an ivory throne

Inlaid with ebony and gems that shone
With a surpassing lustre, sat my lord,
The king Ahasuerus. His great sword
Blazing with diamonds on hilt and blade-
The mighty sword that made his foes afraid-
And the heavy crown his head refused to wear,
More fitly crowned by his own clustering hair,
Lay on a pearl-wrought cushion by his side,
Mute symbol of great Persia's power and pride.
Louder and louder grew the sounds of mirth;
Faster and faster flowed the red wine forth;
Till flushed with pride, and song, and wine,
The king rose up and said, "O nobles mine!
Princes of Persia, Media's hope and pride,
Stars of my kingdom, will ye aught beside?
Speak! and I swear your sovereign's will shall be,
On this fair night to please and honor ye!"
Then rose a shout from out the glittering throng,
Drowning the voice of merriment and song.
Out spoke at last a tongue that should have been
Palsied in foul dishonor there and then:
“O great Ahasuerus! ne'er before

Reigned such a king so blest a people o'er!

What shall we ask? What great and wondrous boon
To crown the hours that fly away too soon?
There is but one. "Tis said that mortal eyes
Never yet gazed in strange, yet sweet surprise,
Upon a face like that of her who wears
Thy signet ring, and all thy glory shares,-
Our fair Queen Vashti. Naught beside
Can fill our cup of happiness and pride."

A murmur ran throughout the startled crowd,
Swelling at last to plaudits long and loud.

Maddened with wine they knew not what they said:
Ahasuerus bent his haughty head,

And for an instant o'er his face there swept
A look his courtiers in their memory kept
For many a day—a look of doubt and pain,
They scarcely caught ere it had passed again.

"My kingly word is pledged." Then to the seven
Iord chamberlains to whom the keys were given:
"Haste ye, and to this noble presence bring
Vashti, the queen, with royal crown and ring."
They did their errand, those old gray-haired men,
Who should have braved the lion in his den,
Or ere they bore such message to their queen,
Or took such words their aged lips between.
"What! I, the daughter of a kingly race,
Step down, unblushing, from my lofty place,
And stand unveiled before the curious eyes
Of the mad rabble that with drunken cries
Were shouting "Vashti! Vashti !"

In wonder and affright,

At the fearful omens of that wild, mad night,
My maidens hung around me as I told

These seven lord chamberlains, so gray and old,
To bear this answer back: "It may not be.
My lord, my king, I cannot come to thee.
It is not meet that Persia's queen, like one
Who treads the market place from sun to sun,
Should bare her beauty to the hungry crowd
Who name her name in accents hoarse and loud.”
With stern, cold looks they left me. Ah! I knew
If my dear lord to his best self were true,
That he would hold me guiltless, and would say,
"I thank thee, Vashti, that thou didst not obey!"
But the red wine was ruling o'er his brain;
The cruel wine that recked not of my pain.
Up from the angry throng a clamor rose;

The flattering sycophants were now my foes;
With slow, wise words, and many a virtuous frown,
One said, "Be the queen from her estate cast down!
Let her not see the king's face evermore,
Nor come within his presence as of yore;
So disobedient wives through all the land
Shall read the lesson, heed and understand."
Up spoke another, eager to be heard,
In royal councils fain to have a word:

"Let this commandment of the king be writ
In the law of the Medes and Persians, as is fit,
The perfect law that man may alter not,
Nor of its bitter end abate one jot."

Alas! the king was wroth. Before his face
I could not go to plead my piteous case;

And, ere the rising of the morrow's sun

My bitter doom was sealed, the deed was done.

Scarce had two moons passed, when one dreary night
I sat within my bower in woeful plight,

When suddenly upon my presence stole

A muffled form, whose shadow stirred my soul,

I knew not wherefore. Ere my tongue could speak,

Or with a cry the brooding silence break,

A low voice murmured, " Vashti !" With a bound
Of half-delirious joy, upon the ground

At the king's feet I fell. Pale and still,
Hushing my heart's cry with an iron will;
"What will the king?" I asked. No answer came,
But to his sad eyes leaped a sudden flame;
And when I saw the anguish in his eyes,
My tortured love burst forth in tears and cries.
Then were his lips unsealed. I cannot tell
All the wild words that I remember well.
Oh! was it joy or was it pain to know
That not alone I wept my weary woe?
Alas! I know not. But I know to-day-

If this be sin, forgive me, Heaven, I pray!-
That though his eyes have never looked on mine
Since that sad night in bower of eglantine,
And fair Queen Esther sits a beauteous bride
In stately Shushan, at the monarch's side,
The king remembers Vashti, even yet,

Breathing her name sometimes with vain regret,
Or murmuring, haply, in a whisper low,
"Woe for the heart that loved me long ago!"

TEMPERANCE.-WENDELL PHILLIPS.

Some men look upon this temperance cause as whining bigotry, narrow asceticism, or a vulgar sentimentality, fit for little minds, weak women, and weaker men. On the contrary, I regard it as second only to one or two others of the primary reforms of this age, and for this reason,-every race has its peculiar temptation; every clime has its specific sin. The tropics and tropical races are tempted to one form of

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sensuality; the colder and temperate regions, and our Saxon blood, find their peculiar temptation in the stimulus of drink and food.

In old times, our heaven was a drunken revel. We relieve ourselves from the over-weariness of constant and exhausting toil by intoxication. Science has brought a cheap means of drunkenness within the reach of every individual. National prosperity and free institutions have put into the hands of almost every workman the means of being drunk for a week, on the labor of two or three hours. With that blood and that temptation, we have adopted democratic institutions, where the law has no sanctions but the purpose and virtue of the masses. The statute-book rests not on bayonets, as in Europe, but on the hearts of the people.

A drunken people can never be the basis of a free government. It is the corner-stone neither of virtue, prosperity, nor progress. To us, therefore, the title deeds of whose estates, and the safety of whose lives, depend upon the tranquillity of the streets, upon the virtue of the masses, the presence of any vice which brutalizes the average mass of mankind and tends to make it more readily the tool of intriguing and corrupt leaders, is necessarily a stab at the very life of the nation. Against such a vice is marshaled the temperance reformation.

That my sketch is no fancy picture, every one of you knows. Every one of you can glance back over your own path, and count many and many a one among those who started from the goal at your side, with equal energy, and perhaps greater promise, who has found a drunkard's grave long before this. The brightness of the bar, the ornament of the pulpit, the hope and blessing and stay of many a family--you know, every one of you who has reached middle life, how often on your path has been set up the warning, "Fallen before the temptations of the streets!" Hardly one house in this city, whether it be full and warm with all the luxury of wealth, or whether it find hard, cold maintenance by the most earnest economy, no matter which,-hardly a house that does not count among sons or nephews some victim of this vice. The skeleton of this warning sits at every board.

The whole world is kindred in this suffering. The country

mother launches her boy with trembling upon the temptations of city life. The father trusts his daughter anxiously to the young man she has chosen, knowing what a wreck intoxication may make of the house-tree they set up. Alas! how often are their worst forebodings more than fulfilled! I have known a case-probably many of you recall some almost equal to it-where one worthy woman could count father, brother, husband, and son-in-law, all drunkards, no man among her near kindred, except her son, who was not a victim of this vice. Like all other appetites, this finds resolution weak when set against the constant presence of temptation.

PATIENT MERCY JONES.-JAMES T. FIELDS.

Let us venerate the bones

Of patient Mercy Jones,

Who lies underneath these stones.

This is her story as once told to me

By him who still loved her, as all men might see,-
Darius, her husband, his age seventy years,

A man of few words, but for her many tears.

Darius and Mercy were born in Vermont;
Both children were christened at baptismal font
In the very same place, on the very same day
(Not much acquainted just then, I dare say).
The minister sprinkled the babies, and said,
"Who knows but this couple some time may be wed,
And I be the parson to join them together,

For weal or for woe, through all sorts of weather!"

Well, they were married, and happier folk

Never put both their heads in the same loving yoke.

They were poor, they worked hard, but nothing could try
The patience of Mercy, or cloud her bright eye.
She was clothed with content as a beautiful robe;
She had griefs,-who has not on this changeable globe?—
But at such times she seemed like the sister of Job.

She was patient with dogmas, where light never dawns,
She was patient with people who trod on her lawns
She was patient with folks who said blue skies were gray,
And dentists and oxen that pulled the wrong way;