Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Oh, flittingly, how flittingly, the parlor-shadows thrill, As wittingly, half wittingly, they seem to pulse and pass! And solemn sounds are on the wind that sweeps the haunted hill, And murmurs of a ghostly breath from out the graveyard grass. Let me feel your glowing fingers In a clasp that warms and lingers With the full, fond love of earth, Till the joy of love's completeness In this flush of fireside sweetness, Shall brim our hearts with spirit-wine, outpoured beside the hearth. So steal your little hand in mine, while twilight falters down,— That little hand, that fervent hand, that hand of bonny brown,— The hand which points the path to heaven, yet makes a heaven of earth. A SUMMER MOOD. "Now, by my faith, a gruesome MOOD, for summer!"—Thomas Heyward (1597). Ah ! me, for evermore, for evermore These human hearts of ours must yearn and sigh, While down the dells and up the murmurous shore Nature renews her immortality. The heavens of June stretch calm and bland above, June roses blush with tints of Orient skies, But we, by graves of joy, desire, and love, Mourn in a world which breathes of Paradise ! The sunshine mocks the tears it may not dry, The breezes—tricksy couriers of the air,— Child-roisterers winged, and lightly fluttering by— Blow their gay trumpets in the face of care; And bolder winds, the deep sky's passionate speech, Woven into rhythmic raptures of desire, Or fugues of mystic victory, sadly reach Our humbled souls, to rack, not raise them higher ! The field-birds seem to twit us as they pass With their small blisses, piped so clear and loud; The cricket triumphs o'er us in the grass, And the lark, glancing beamlike up the cloud, Sings us to scorn with his keen rhapsodies: Small t...