THE SEA-LIMITS.

ONSIDER the sea's listless chime;

BONS!

Tune's self it is, inaudible,

The murmur of the earth's own shell.

Secret continuance sublime

Is the sea's end: our sight may pass No furlong further. Since time was, This sound hath told the lapse of time.

No quiet, which is death's,—it hath
The mournfulness of ancient life,
Enduring always at dull strife.

As the world's heart of rest and wrath,
Its painful pulse is in the sands.

Last utterly, the whole sky stands,
Grey and not known, along its path.

Listen alone beside the sea,

Listen alone among the woods;
Those voices of twin's solitudes

Shall have one sound alike to thee:

Hark! where the murmurs of thronged men Surge and smile back, and surge again,Still the one voice of wave and tree.

Gather a shell from the strown beach
And listen at its lips: they sigh
The same desire and mystery,
The echo of the whole sea's speech.

And all mankind is thus at heart

Not anything but what thou art : And Earth, Sea, Man, are all in each.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI.

VIOLETS.

PIOLETS, shy violets!

How many hearts with thee compare !
Who hide themselves in thickest green,
And thence unseen,

Ravish the enraptured air

With sweetness, dewy fresh and rare!

Violets, shy violets !

Human hearts to me shall be

Viewless violets in the grass,

And as I pass,

Odours and sweet imagery

Will wait on mine and gladden me !

GEORGE MEREDITH.

THE APOLOGY.

HINK me not unkind and rude

That I walk alone in grove and glen ;

I go to the god of the wood

To fetch his word to men.

Tax not my sloth that I

Fold my arms beside the brook; Each cloud that floated in the sky

Chide me not, laborious band,

For the idle flowers I brought;

Every aster in my hand

Goes home loaded with a thought.

There was never mystery

But 'tis figured in the flowers;

Was never secret history

But birds tell it in the bowers.

One harvest in thy field

Homeward brought the oxen strong;

A second crop thine acres yield,

Which I gather in a song.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON