Select Poetry.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 244, 22 July 1876, Page 3

Select Poetry.

AMATORY RHYMERS. (by one of them.) You nameless scribe why fly to print, Venting your spleen on printed song? You think there’s something manly in t, That you have put it pretty strong. Perhaps ’tis wit to thus decry The tender feelings of young hearts. " Burns” tried at first, and all must try To find their strong or weaker parts. Why sneer at love, why froth and fret, When " ’prentice han’” presumes to praise, For many bards will sing it yet Like "amateurs" of former days, The simple flower by lonely way, Through scarcely noticed, hardly seen, Will bud and bloom and have its day E’en as tlie rose its gaudy Queen. The eagle soars in peerless flight. The lark on music mounts the sky. Yet humbler birds may yield delight Through rude they sing or lowly ily. Why waste our time on " love-born lay?” Go ask of Homer, minstrel sage ; Or Milton, e’en in sunless clay ; Or Shakspere of immortal page ; Or wayward Byron, passion’s slave ; Burns. Moore, and all the tuneful thiong. Their loves have triumphed o’er the grave For woman is the soul of song. Why write of love, a theme so worn By men who chanced to live of yore . Go ask the Fates why we were born When millions had been born before. Ah ! you are like the gaping throng That cheers success or glory won, But cannot comfort heart less strong, Or credit work sincerely done. UNDER -THE VIOLETS. Her hands are cold: her face is white ; No more her pulses come and go ; Her eyes are shut to life and light, Fold the white vesture, snow on snow, And lay her where the violets blow. But not beneath a graven stone, To plead for tears with alien eyes ; A slenders cross of wood alone Shall say that here a maiden lies In peace beneath the peaceful skies. And gray old trees of hugest limb Shall wheel their circling shadows round To make the scorching sunlignt dim, That drinks the greenness from the ground, And drop their dead leaves on her mound. When o’er their boughs the squirrels run. And through their leaves the robins call, And ripening in the autumn sun. The acorns and the chesnuts fall, Doubt not that she will heed them all. For her the morning choir shall sing Its matins from the branches high, And every minstrel voice of spring That trills beneath the April sky. Shall greet her with it's earliest cry. When turning round their dial track. Eastward the lengthening shadows pass, Her little mourners clad in black. The crickets, sliding through the grass, Shall pipe for her and evening mass. At last, the rootlets of the trees Shall find the prison where she lies, And bear the buried dust they seize In leaves and blossoms to the skies. So may the soul that warmed it rise 1 If any, born of kindlier blood, Should ask, what maiden lies below 7 Say only fhis : A tender bud, That tried to blossom in the snow, Lies withered where the violets .blow. Oliver Wendell Holmes.