My skiff is of bark from the white birch-tree,
A butterfly's wing is my sail,
And twisted grasses my cordage be,
Stretched taut by the favoring gale.
My cushions are pearly gossamers frail,
My mast is a tapering reed,
My rudder a blush-rose petal pale,
My ballast of wild-flower seed.
Through forests old and meads remote
We'll sail on the leaf-arched streams,
Down the silver rivers of Fancy float
To the golden sea of dreams.
WILLIAM HOLDEN EDDY. Brown Magazine.
~A Bird's Cradle-Song.~
Weary, weary loves!
Day is o'er and past;
Every drooping lily bell
Chimes good-night at last.
Softly! nursing winds
Swing them to and fro
With the tinkle, tinkle, tinkle of the rivulet below.
Even the willow leaves
Brooding silence keep;
All the great, good world is hushed—
Hushed that you may sleep!
But in heaven two wee, wee stars
Dance and whirl and glow
To the tinkle, tinkle, tinkle of the rivulet below.
EVELYN M. WORTHLEY. Mount Holyoke.
~The Wood Orchid.~
A butterfly, wing-weary, came to find
A sweet seclusion from the amorous wind,
Deep in the pine woods, where the dusky trees
Shut in the forest's sounding silences
With close-twined boughs from which the breeze has blown
The fragrance-breathing fragments of the cone.
Deeply she drank the nectar of repose.
Spreading her downy wings all veined with rose,
Upon the gray-green mosses, cool and dank,
Languished the sprite, and in a swoon she sank,
While a delicious numbness born of death
Stilled the soft wings that stirred with each faint breath.
One summer morning, while the languid breeze
Strayed with a languid murmur thro' the trees,
It breathed a kiss upon a folded pair
Of pink flushed wings—and found them rooted there.