On toward Heaven the son of Alcmena strides high on
The heads of the Hydra, the spoils of the lion:
And man, conquering Terror, is worshiped by man.

A camp has this world been since first it began!
From his tents sweeps the roving Arabian; at peace,
A mere wandering shepherd that follows the fleece;
But, warring his way through a world's destinies,
Lo from Delhi, from Bagdad, from Cordova, rise
Domes of empiry, dowered with science and art,
Schools, libraries, forums, the palace, the mart!

New realms to man's soul have been conquered. But those,
Forthwith they are peopled for man by new foes!
The stars keep their secrets, the earth hides her own,
And bold must the man be that braves the Unknown!

Not a truth has to art or to science been given,

But brows have ached for it, and souls toiled and striven;

And many have striven, and many have failed,

And many died, slain by the truth they assailed.

But when Man hath tamed Nature, asserted his place

And dominion, behold! he is brought face to face
With a new foe-himself!

Nor may man on his shield

Ever rest, for his foe is forever afield,

Danger ever at hand, till the armèd Archangel

Sound o'er him the trump of earth's final evangel.

II.

Silence straightway, stern Muse, the soft cymbals of pleasure. Be all bronzen these numbers, and martial the measure!

Breathe, sonorously breathe, o'er the spirit in me

One strain, sad and stern, of that deep Epopee

Which thou, from the fashionless cloud of far time,

Chantest lonely, when Victory, pale, and sublime

In the light of the aureole over her head,

Hears, and heeds not the wound in her heart fresh and red

Blown wide by the blare of the clarion, unfold

The shrill clanging curtains of war!

A vision!

And behold

The antique Heraclean seats;

And the long Black Sea billow that once bore those fleets

Which said to the winds, "Be ye, too, Genoese!
And the red angry sands of the chafed Chersonese;
And the two foes of man, War and Winter, allied
Round the Armies of England and France, side by side
Enduring and dying (Gaul and Briton abreast!)
Where the towers of the North fret the skies of the East.

DINNERS.

BY OWEN MEREDITH.

(From "Lucile.")

O HOUR of all hours, the most blessed upon earth,
Blessed hour of our dinners!

The land of his birth;

The face of his first love; the bills that he owes;
The twaddle of friends and the venom of foes;
The sermon he heard when to church he last went;
The money he borrowed, the money he spent;
All of these things a man, I believe, may forget
And not be the worse for forgetting; but yet
Never, never, oh never! earth's luckiest sinner
Hath unpunished forgotten the hour of his dinner!
Indigestion, that conscience of every bad stomach,
Shall relentlessly gnaw and pursue him with some ache
Or some pain; and trouble, remorseless, his best ease,
As the Furies once troubled the sleep of Orestes.

We may live without poetry, music, and art;

We may

live without conscience, and live without heart; We may live without friends; we may live without books; But civilized man cannot live without cooks.

He may live without books,-what is knowledge but grieving?

He may live without hope,

what is hope but deceiving?
what is passion but pining?

He may live without love,
But where is the man that can live without dining?

EACH AND ALL.

BY RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

[RALPH WALDO EMERSON, the eminent American poet, essayist, and lecturer, was born in Boston, May 25, 1803. He came of a long line of ministers; and after graduating from Harvard, taught for a few years, and in 1829 was ordained pastor of the Second Unitarian Church. This office, however, he resigned in 1832, on account of the gradually increasing differences between his own modes of thought and those of his hearers. He then made a brief trip to Europe, during which he became acquainted with Carlyle, and on his return commenced his career as lecturer, meeting with continued success in the United States and England. In 1840, on the establishment of the Dial, the organ of the Transcendentalists, he became a contributor, and from 1842 to 1844 its editor. He died at his home in Concord, Mass., April 27, 1882. His collected works include: “Nature,” “Essays" (two series), “Representative Men,” “English Traits," "Society and Solitude," "Letters and Social Aims," "Poems."]

LITTLE thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown

Of thee, from the hilltop looking down;

The heifer that lows in the upland farm

Far heard, lows not thine ear to charm;

The sexton, tolling his bell at noon,

Deems not that great Napoleon

Stops his horse, and lists with delight

Whilst his files sweep around yon Alpine height;

Nor knowest thou what argument

Thy life to thy neighbor's creed has lent.
All are needed by each one

Nothing is fair or good alone.

I thought the sparrow's note from heaven,
Singing at dawn on the alder bough;

I brought him home, in his nest, at even;
He sings the song, but it pleases not now;
For I did not bring home the river and sky;
He sang to my ear they sang to my eye.
The delicate shells lay on the shore;
The bubbles of the latest wave
Fresh pearls to their enamel gave,
And the bellowing of the savage sea
Greeted their safe escape to me.

I wiped away the weeds and foam

I fetched my sea-born treasures home;

But the poor, unsightly, noisome things

Had left their beauty on the shore,

With the sun, and the sand, and the wild uproar.
The lover watched his graceful maid,

As 'mid the virgin train she strayed;

Nor knew her beauty's best attire

Was woven still by the snow-white choir.

At last she came to his hermitage,

Like the bird from the woodlands to the cage;
The gay enchantment was undone —
A gentle wife, but fairy none.

Then I said: "I covet truth;

Beauty is unripe childhood's cheat;

I leave it behind with the games of youth."

As I spoke, beneath my feet

The ground pine curled its pretty wreath,
Running over the club-moss burrs;

I inhaled the violet's breath;

Around me stood the oaks and firs;

Pine cones and acorns lay on the ground;

Over me soared the eternal sky,
Full of light and of deity;

Again I saw, again I heard,

The rolling river, the morning bird;
Beauty through my senses stole -

I yielded myself to the perfect whole.

THE RHODODENDRON:

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,

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.

NATIONAL HYMNS.

BY RICHARD GRANT WHITE.

[RICHARD GRANT WHITE, Shakespearean scholar, critic of music and language, and acute general littérateur, was born at New York in 1821. Of ultra High Church and Tory ancestry, and intended for the church, he studied medicine and then law instead, after graduation from the University of New York, and was called to the bar; but turned to literature, was musical, art, and dramatic critic of the New York Courier and Enquirer 1845-1854, and its editor 1854-1859; helped found and wrote for Yankee Doodle 1846-1847, and the World 1860-1861. He was on the commission to select a national hymn in 1861, and wrote a booklet on its disappointing results; during the war greatly served the national interests abroad by letters to the London Spectator signed "A Yankee"; and continued his political writing by "The New Gospel of Peace according to St. Benjamin (anonymous, 1863) and "The Chronicles of Gotham" (on the Tweed Ring, anonymous, 1871). From about 1860 to 1878 he was chief of the U.S. Revenue Marine Bureau of New York. His voluminous Shakespeare work began in 1852 with a crushing review in Putnam's Magazine of Collier's emendations; he edited two editions of Shakespeare (1857-1865 and 1883), wrote "Shakespeare's Scholar" (1854), an essay on the authorship of Henry VI. (1859), "Memoirs of William Shakespeare" (1865), and many magazine articles. "Words and their Uses" (1870), "Every-Day English" (1881), and magazine work, represent his contributions to this department. "England Without and Within" (travel sketches, 1881), and a novel, "The Fate of Mansfield Humphreys" (1884), were the fruit of a stay in England. He wrote also "The American View of the Copyright Question" (1880), an article on "The Failure of the Public School System in the United States" (1880), and many other things. He died in 1885.]

WE HAVE no national music, as we have no national literature. But to a national hymn, a national music is not essential; for the British (it never was the English) national hymn is the finest in existence, and that was produced in England, which is as barren of melody as America. The germ of the air is not of English growth; but the thing as a whole is of English fabrication. The music, in the present form of its melody and harmony, is in certain points superior even to Haydn's noble air, written for the Austrian national hymn, which a true-born Briton, comparing the two, has naively said, "Wants the manly, majestic, full-hearted boldness of the strains in which we are accustomed to express, not more our respect for our monarch than our own national pride." The words, indeed, are poor enough. Lyrically, they are naught: but they express in strong, blunt language the British national feeling; they denounce the king's enemies roundly, and rate them in good set terms; and they do this in the form of prayer to God. They have thus become, by mingled fitness and association, the