more real the clement minutes of our life. They have created and spread in our world of sentiment the fragrant atmosphere in which love delights.

VIOLETS*

BY LUCY LARCOM

THEY neither toil nor spin;
And yet their robes have won
A splendor never seen within
The courts of Solomon.

Tints that the cloud-rifts hold,
And rainbow-gossamer,
The violet's tender form enfold;
No queen is draped like her.

All heaven and earth and sea

Have wrought with subtlest power,
That clothed in purple she might be―
This little fading flower.

We, who must toil and spin,

What clothing shall we wear?

The glorious raiment we shall win,

Life shapes us, everywhere.

God's inner heaven hath sun,
And rain, and space of sky,
Wherethrough for us his spindles run,
His mighty shuttles fly.

*By permission of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

His seamless vesture white

He wraps our spirits in;
He weaves his finest webs of light
For us, who toil and spin.

EPIGRAM*

BY ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER

(With a handful of Plymouth Mayflowers)
THE Mayflower once filled this shore
With seekers after truth and duty;
And now, each April, fills it o'er

With seekers after hidden beauty.

Would it had taught the Fathers why
Truth without beauty's half a lie;
And would it might to us express
The beauty of their holiness.

THE DAISY'S SONG

(A Fragment)

BY JOHN KEATS

THE sun, with his great eye,
Sees not as much as I;

And the moon, all silver-proud,
Might as well be in a cloud.

* By permission of The Century Co.

And O the spring - the spring!
I lead the life of a king!
Couch'd in the teeming grass,
I spy each pretty lass.

I look where no one dares,

And I stare where no one stares;
And when the night is nigh
Lambs bleat my lullaby.

THE RHODORA*

(On Being asked, Whence is the Flower?)

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON

IN MAY, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the redbird come, his plumes to cool,
And court the flower that cheapens his array.
Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,

*By permission of the publishers, Houghton, Mifflin & Co.

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:*
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew:

But, in my simple ignorance, suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

THE FIRST DANDELION

BY WALT WHITMAN

SIMPLE and fresh and fair from winter's close emerging,

As if no artifice of fashion, business, politics, had ever been,

Forth from its sunny nook of shelter'd grassinnocent, golden, calm as the dawn,

The spring's first dandelion shows its trustful face.

SWEET PEAS

BY JOHN KEATS

HERE are sweet peas, on tiptoe for a flight:
With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white,
And taper fingers catching at all things,

*Compare the chapter on "Beauty," in Emerson's "Nature." “This element (Beauty) I call an ultimate end. No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks beauty. Beauty, in its largest and profoundest sense, is one expression for the universe. The ancient Greeks called the world Beauty."

To bind them all about with tiny rings.
Linger awhile upon some bending planks
That lean against a streamlet's rushy banks,
And watch intently Nature's gentle doings:
They will be found softer than ringdove's cooings.
How silent comes the water round that bend!
Not the minutest whisper does it send
To the o'erhanging sallows: blades of grass
Slowly across the chequer'd shadows pass.

THE STORY OF THE SUNFLOWER

ANONYMOUS

CLYTIE was a beautiful water-nymph in love with Apollo. But, alas! he did not love her. So she pined away, sitting all day on the cold, hard ground, with her unbound tresses streaming over her shoulders. Nine days she sat and tasted neither food nor drink, her own tears and the chilly dew her only food. She gazed on the sun when he rose, and as he passed through his daily course to his setting, she saw no other object, her face turned constantly to him. At last, they say, her limbs rooted to the ground, her face became a sunflower, which turns on its stem so as always to face the sun throughout its daily course; for it retains to that extent the feeling of the nymph from whom it sprang.