Her thrushes sing in Rathburn bowers, And Rathburn side is gay with flowers; But ne'er like hers, in flower or bird, Was beauty seen or music heard. The distance of the stars is hers; The least of all her worshippers, The dust beneath her dainty heel, She knows not that I see or feel. Oh, proud and calm!--she cannot know Where'er she goes with her I go; Oh, cold and fair!--she cannot guess I kneel to share her hound's caress! Gay knights beside her hunt and hawk, I rob their ears of her sweet talk; Her suitors come from east and west, I steal her smiles from every guest. Unheard of her, in loving words, I greet her with the song of birds; I reach her with her green-armed bowers, I kiss her with the lips of flowers. The hound and I are on her trail, The wind and I uplift her veil; As if the calm, cold moon she were, And I the tide, I follow her. As unrebuked as they, I share The license of the sun and air, And in a common homage hide My worship from her scorn and pride. World-wide apart, and yet so near, I breathe her charmed atmosphere, Wherein to her my service brings The reverence due to holy things. Her maiden pride, her haughty name, My dumb devotion shall not shame; The love that no return doth crave To knightly levels lifts the slave, No lance have I, in joust or fight, To splinter in my lady's sight But, at her feet, how blest were I For any need of hers to die! 1877. THE DEAD FEAST OF THE KOL-FOLK. E. B. Tylor in his Primitive Culture, chapter xii., gives an account of the reverence paid the dead by the Kol tribes of Chota Nagpur, Assam. "When a Ho or Munda," he says, "has been burned on the funeral pile, collected morsels of his bones are carried in procession with a solemn, ghostly, sliding step, keeping time to the deep-sounding drum, and when the old woman who carries the bones on her bamboo tray lowers it from time to time, then girls who carry pitchers and brass vessels mournfully reverse them to show that they are empty; thus the remains are taken to visit every house in the village, and every dwelling of a friend or relative for miles, and the inmates come out to mourn and praise the goodness of the departed; the bones are carried to all the dead man's favorite haunts, to the fields he cultivated, to the grove he planted, to the threshing-floor where he worked, to the village dance-room where he made merry. At last they are taken to the grave, and buried in an earthen vase upon a store of food, covered with one of those huge stone slabs which European visitors wonder at in the districts of the aborigines of India." In the Journal of the Asiatic Society, Bengal, vol. ix., p. 795, is a Ho dirge.