Onward they glide,

and now I view

Their iron-armed and stalwart crew;
Joy glistens in each wild blue eye,
Turned to green earth and summer sky;
Each broad, seamed breast has cast aside
Its cumbering vest of shaggy hide;
Bared to the sun and soft warm air,
Streams back the Norsemen's yellow hair.
I see the gleam of ax and spear,
The sound of smitten shields I hear,
Keeping a harsh and fitting time

1

To Saga's chant, and Runic 1 rhyme;
Such lays as Zetland's Skald has sung,
His gray and naked isles among;
Or muttered low at midnight hour
Round Odin's mossy stone of power.
The wolf beneath the Arctic moon
Has answered to that startling rune;
The Gael has heard its stormy swell,
The light Frank 3 knows its summons well;
Iona's sable-stoled 5 Culdee 6

Has heard it sounding o'er the sea,

And swept, with hoary beard and hair,
His altar's foot in trembling prayer!

1 Ru'nic, belonging to runes. Runes were the characters in which the Norse wrote their poems, and the word is also used for the poems themselves.

2 Gael (gale), the early inhabitants of the Scottish Highlands.

8 Frank, an early tribe of western Europe, from which the French have derived their name.

4 I-o'na, an island near the coast of Scotland.

5 sable-stoled, black-robed.

6 Cul-dee', an ancient priest of Scotland.

'Tis past, the 'wildering vision dies
In darkness on my dreaming eyes!
The forest vanishes in air, –
Hill-slope and vale lie starkly bare:
I hear the common tread of men,
And hum of work-day life again:
The mystic relic seems alone
A broken mass of common stone;
And if it be the chiseled limb
Of Berserker or idol grim,
A fragment of Valhalla's Thor,
The stormy Viking's god of war,
Or Praga of the Runic lay,
Or love-awakening Siona,

I know not, - for no graven line,
Nor Druid mark, nor Runic sign,
Is left me here, by which to trace
Its name, or origin, or place.
Yet, for this vision of the Past,
This glance upon its darkness cast,
My spirit bows in gratitude
Before the Giver of all good,

Who fashioned so the human mind,
That, from the waste of Time behind.
A simple stone, or mound of earth,
Can summon the departed forth;
Quicken the Past to life again,
The Present lose in what hath been,
And in their primal freshness show
The buried forms of long ago.
As if a portion of that Thought
By which the Eternal will is wrought,

Whose impulse fills anew with breath
The frozen solitude of Death,

To mortal minds were sometimes lent,
To mortal musings sometimes sent,
To whisper-even when it seems
But Memory's fantasy of dreams

Through the mind's waste of woe and sin,
Of an immortal origin!

XLII. CHARLES KINGSLEY.

English clergyman and college professor. Besides books for older people, he wrote several for boys and girls, and very interesting they are. He loved nature, and used to tramp over the fields, observing the plants and the rocks, and thinking about the wonderful works of the Creator in making this beautiful world. His

books for children are

mostly written about

CHARLES KINGSLEY.

what he saw in the fields and woods. The selection here

given is taken from a volume entitled "Madam How and Lady Why," all of which is well worth reading. Charles Kingsley was born in Holme, Devonshire, 1819, and died at Eversley, Hampshire, in 1875.

XLIII. THE CORAL REEF.

BY CHARLES Kingsley.

CHAPTER I.

Now you want to know what I meant when I talked of

a bit of lime going out to sea and forming part of a

coral island, and then of a limestone rock, and then of a marble statue. Very good. What a curious stone!

here?

Then look at this stone.
Did it come from any place near

No. It came from near Dudley, in Staffordshire, where the soils are worlds and worlds older than they are here, though they were made in the same way as these and all other soils. But you are not listening to me.

Why, the stone is full of shells and bits of coral; and what are these wonderful things coiled and tangled together like the snakes in Medusa's hair in the picture? Are they snakes?

If they are, then they must be snakes who have all one head; for see, they are joined together at their larger ends; and snakes which are branched, too, which no snake ever was.

Yes, I suppose they are snakes. And they grow out of a flower, too; and it has a stalk, jointed, too, as plants sometimes are; and as fishes' backbones are, too. Is it a petrified plant or flower?