ESSAYS IN VERSE.

Evening Post, Volume LXXXI, Issue 83, 8 April 1911, Page 13

ESSAYS IN VERSE.

THE HOUSE OF THE YEARS. Life's room, in childhood, Beems a bound' less place, Full of strange corners and adventurous space ; _ Youth finds it wider yet, a home of dreams With shining casements lit by rainbow gleams ; While riper yearß bring firelight on the hearth, Content niid welcome, love and work and mirth, Until the walls draw nearer and more near, Ant l age beholds them, suddenly and clear, How email the room 1 and how each thing recalls Some memory that breathes within the t walls — Here joy stood smiling, garlanded with • flowers, Here sorrow sate through long and intimate hours ; The mirror 1 " depths glimpse with a shadowy host That Waver, melt, and in the dusk arelost; The fire burns low and quivers on the floorYet, as an unseen hand sets wido the door, Lo I through its arch, as to the child, appears The beckoning vision of immortal years. — Priseilla Leonard. New York Outlook, THE FADED FLOWER. Here is a littlo flower that I found in a letter old : 1 A withered and faded blossom, but a sweetness all untold Clings to the crumbling petals that a breath would turn to dust, Like a thought from a vanished summer that a true heart holds in trust. A memory sweet as the dreams are that come in the time- of Juno, When life is a beautiful poem Bet to a sweeter tune Than ever the voice of a singer that has lived or died has sung — The song that is born of the gladness that is ours when the heart is young. Who gathered the flower, I wonder, in the summer long ago? Was it sent as a lover's message? Not you nor I may know. But true to its trust, the blossom holds in its withered heprt The thought that will haunt it with sweetness till its petals fall apart. — Ebeti E. Rexford. "Pansies and Rosemary.' TWILIGHT. The stealthy, creeping twilight round me falling, , . The sun's last kiss to earth when day is doad, 4 The harsh notes of the curlew wildly calling, The last warm tints of sunset, paled and fled. Then in the twilight gloom, the shadows creeping , From out the ranges tall, and grim, ana grey, Bring back to me the dreams that have been sloeping — Bright visions from the Land of Yesterday. The darkness falls, and still I sit here dreaming ; The Present fades, I n-m a boy again, And on a winter's night with stars agleaming, I race across the frosty moonlit plain. With face aglow, and pulses wildly leaping. I chaso the bmmbies down the mountain track — Ah, tell me that my boyhood's only BleepThat I can live again those days out back. Ah, no, my youth is spent, and ago is creeping \ To linger liko the twilight dim and grey. ' I Awhile, and then to lull me into sloeping, And take mo from my bushland-home awny. —Ida Wiggan. Sydney Mail.