Keep your pride and your cheer, for we need them not here, And for me far too dear they would prove, For gold is but gloss, and possessions are dross, And gain is all loss, without love. Yon severing tide is not fordless or wide,-- The soul's blue abysses our homesteads divide: Down through the still river they deepen forever, Like the skies it reflects from above. Still my brother thou art, though our lives lie apart, Path from path, heart from heart, more and more. Oh, I have not forgot,--oh, remember you not Our room in the cot by the shore? And a night soon will come, when the murmur and hum Of our days shall be dumb evermore, And again we shall lie side by side, you and I, Beneath the green cover you helped to lay over Our honest old father of yore. * * * * * A HALF-LIFE AND HALF A LIFE. "On garde longtemps son premier amant, quand on n'en prend point de second." _Maximes Morales du Duc de la Rochefoucauld._. It is not suffering alone that wears out our lives. We sometimes are in a state when a sharp pang would be hailed almost as a blessing,--when, rather than bear any longer this living death of calm stagnation, we would gladly rush into action, into suffering, to feel again the warmth of life restored to our blood, to feel it at least coursing through our veins with something like a living swiftness. This death-in-life comes sometimes to the most earnest men, to those whose life is fullest of energy and excitement It is the reaction, the weariness which they name Ennui,--foul fiend that eats fastest into the heart's core, that shakes with surest hand the sands of life, that makes the deepest wrinkles on the cheeks and deadens most surely the lustre of the eyes. But what are the occasional visits of this life-consumer, this vampire that sucks out the blood, to his constant, never-failing presence? There are those who feel within themselves the power of living fullest lives, of sounding every chord of the full diapason of passion and feeling, yet who have been so hemmed around, so shut in by adverse and narrowing circumstances, that never, no, not once in their half-century of years which stretch from childhood to old age, have they been free to breathe out, to speak aloud the heart that was in them. Ever the same wasting indifference to the things that are, the same ill-repressed longing for the things that might be. Long days of wearisome repetition of duties in which there is no life, followed by restless nights, when Imagination seizes the reins in her own hands, and paints the out-blossoming of those germs of happiness and fulness of being of whose existence within us we carry about always the aching consciousness.