When all green places have been destroyed in the builder’s lust of gain; when all the lands are but mountains of bricks, and piles of wood and iron; when there is no moisture anywhere, and no rain ever falls; when the sky is a vault of smoke, and all the rivers reek with poison; when forest and stream, the moor and meadow, and all the old green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten; when every gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit; when the earth is one vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and know no music but the roar of the furnace; when the old sweet silence of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedgerow bough, and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cushat, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead, and remembered of no man; then the world, like the Eastern king, will perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere; gold that the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them, but mocks them horribly; gold for which their fathers sold peace and health, and holiness and beauty; gold that is one vast grave. OUIDA. MOODS. To give my aching spirit ease Yestreen I wandered out alone; The mourner wind among the trees Made its reiterant moan. I hailed him. “Brother mine,” I said, “Near kinsman in distress and dole, Thou art, in all thy drearihood, The echo of my soul.” Then sudden from the boughs broke forth Mad mirth as though from pipes at play; Meseemed that East and West and North Were out for holiday. And laughter bubbled up behind My dolefulness and over-ran; As shifting as the freaksome wind The many moods of man! CLINTON SCOLLARD. A SONG OF SOLOMON. Love, I have wandered a weary way, A weary way for thee, The East is wan with the smile of the day, Open thy door to me. My hair is wet with the dew of the night, That falls from the cedar tree, The shadows are dark, but the East is light, Open thy door to me. The stones of the road have bruised my feet, The hours till morn are three, Thou that hast spikenard, precious, sweet, Open thy door to me. Stay not thy hand upon the lock, Nor thy fingers on the key, In the breeze before morn the tree tops rock, Open thy door to me.