He turns, at last, from his completed score to seek the sympathy of love; but wife and child are lying dead. He gathers to his breast the stark, wan wife with the baby skeleton in her arms. “‘You see you are alive,’ he cried. He rocked them gently to and fro. ‘No, no, my love, you have not died; Nor you, my little fellow; no.’ “Long in his arms he strained his dead, And crooned an antique lullaby; Then laid them on the lowly bed, And broke down with a doleful cry.” Then his own heart broke, at last, and he, too, was dead. “Straightway he stood at heaven’s gate Abashed, and trembling for his sin: I trow he had not long to wait For God came out and led him in. “And then there ran a radiant pair. Ruddy with haste and eager-eyed, To meet him first upon the stair— His wife and child, beatified. “God, smiling, took him by the hand, And led him to the brink of heaven: He saw where systems whirling stand, Where galaxies like snow are driven.” And lo! it was to his own music that the very spheres were moving. “A Ballad of Hell” tells the story of a woman’s love and a woman’s courage. Her lover writes her that he must go to prison, unless he marries, the next day, his cousin whom he abhors. There is no refuge but in death; and by her love he conjures her to kill herself at midnight, and meet him, though it must be in Hell. She waited till sleep had fallen on the house. Then out into the night she went, hurried to the trysting oak, and there she drove her dagger home into her heart, and fell on sleep. She woke in Hell. The devil was quite ready to welcome her; but she answered him only— “‘I am young Malespina’s bride; Has he come hither yet?’” But Malespina had turned coward, when the supreme test came, and he was to marry his cousin on the morrow. For long, and long, she would not believe; but when long waiting brought certainty, at last, she cried— “‘I was betrayed. I will not stay.’” And straight across the gulf between Hell and Heaven she walked:— “To her it seemed a meadow fair; And flowers sprang up about her feet; She entered Heaven; she climbed the stair, And knelt down at the mercy-seat.” Next to these three Ballads I should rank “Thirty Bob A Week.” It is of the solid earth, and has none of the Dantesque weirdness of the Ballads of Hell and Heaven; but it is stronger than either of them in its own way—this monologue of the man who must live on thirty shillings a week, and make the best of it. “But the difficultest go to understand, And the difficultest job a man can do, Is to come it brave and meek, with thirty bob a week, And feel that that’s the proper thing for you.