Look on the dead, and if ye cower and quail To think that ye shall be like them one day— That the cold coffin-worm, with slimy trail, Shall crawl across your forehead, or from play Within your eyeless sockets forth shall stray, To feast upon your rottenness, your hair Shall drip the sick’ning grave-damps, and the gray, Dry dust of the rank sepulchre, for air, Fill up your nostrils—then by the cold grave _forbear_! Think on your last dark hour, when a gaunt form, Spectral and shadowy, shall stoop and set A mystic seal upon you; when the storm Of conscience rages, till its spray has wet Your brow; when, like the doom in Venice met, The walls of your lone chamber seem to close Upon you, crushed and bleeding, dying, yet Never to die—from torments such as those, Would you be free? Withhold—break not the dead’s repose. * * * * * FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGIA. PARAPHRASE. BY RICHARD PENN SMITH. A stalwart blind man trudging through the mud, O’ertook a cripple; side by side they stood. “Cripple, you’re stall’d,” cried Blinky, “in this clay.” Cripple replied, “Can Blinky see his way?” “Not a d—d inch,” the poor blind man replies, “But mount my shoulders, boy, lend me your eyes; Keep them wide open, let their light be mine, Cling to my shoulders, and my legs are thine. And with clear eyes, strong shanks and shoulders good We need no more to travel through this mud.” * * * * * THE BATTLE OF LIFE. BY LEN. A sigh steals down the smiling valley—a gentle sigh of breezes, wafting happiness over the face of nature, and at the sound from out their beds of earth, myriads of things of beauty wake into existence;—meadow and plain and hill-side glisten in fairest verdure—flowers fling their fragrance on the gale—stately trees wave their foliage to the passing wind—while streams beneath dance onward to the ocean—and the dream-like hum that fills the air and swells in chorus to the arch of heaven, tells of the blooming Spring—of the transcendent pleasures of Life.