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Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,

At length let up again to feel the puzzle of

puzzles,

And that we call Being.

Walt Whitman.

THE PIPE - PLAYER

Cool, and palm-shaded from the torrid heat,
The young brown tenor puts his singing by,
And sets the twin pipe to his lips to try
Some air of bulrush-glooms where lovers
meet;

O swart musician, time and fame are fleet,
Brief all delight, and youth's feet fain to fly!
Pipe on in peace! To-morrow must we die?
What matter, if our life to-day be sweet!
Soon, soon, the silver paper-reeds that sigh
Along the Sacred River will repeat

The echo of the dark-stoled bearers' feet, Who carry you, with wailing, where must lie Your swathed and withered body, by and by, In perfumed darkness with the grains of

wheat.

Edmund Gosse.

BUGLE SONG

The splendor falls on castle walls
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shakes across the lakes,

And the wild cataract leaps in glory. Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark! O hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going!
O sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying,
dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,

They faint on hill or field or river Our echoes roll from soul to soul, And grow forever and forever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying,

dying.

Alfred Tennyson.

MY OLD GUITAR

By some eastern river thy rosewood grew,
Thy inlaid pearl in the restless sea;
What craftsman moulded thy bosom fair,
Sounding with dreamy melody?

What maiden's fingers have swept thy strings,
In the distant vistas of long ago?
What love-lorn gallant has sung his lay
To thy tuneful cadence sweet and low?

What odors of romance round thee cling,
As each chord swells in thy bosom deep?
Whispering long-forgotten loves,
Thrilling the soul to rest and sleep.

Oh, Muse, who dwells in the hollow shrine
Of my old guitar with its tales of yore,
Grant me the power to wake thy strains
In music sweeter than e'er before.
F. G. Hinsdale.

THE BUGLE

O! wild, enchanting horn!

Whose music up the deep and dewy air Swells to the clouds, and calls on Echo there, 'Till a new melody is born!

Wake, wake again; the night

Is bending from her throne of beauty down, With still stars beaming on her azure crown, Intense, and eloquently bright.

Night, at its pulseless noon!

When the far voice of waters mourns in song, And some tired watch-dog lazily and long Barks at the melancholy moon.

Hark! how it sweeps away, Soaring and dying on the silent sky,

As if some sprite of sound went wandering by, With lone halloo and roundelay!

Swell, swell in glory out!

Thy tones come pouring on my leaping heart, And my stirr'd spirit hears thee with a start As boyhood's old remember'd shout.

O! have ye heard that peal,

From sleeping city's moon-bathed battlements, Or from the guarded field and warrior tents, Like some near breath around you steal?

Or have ye, in the roar

Of sea, or storm, or battle, heard it rise,
Shriller than eagle's clamor, to the skies,
Where wings and tempests never soar?

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No music that of air or earth is born,
Can match the mighty music of that horn,
On midnight's fathomless profound!
Grenville Mellen.

THE FLUTE

Puffed up with luring to her knees
The rabbits from the blackberries,
Quaint little satyrs, and shy and mute,
That limped reluctant to the flute,
She needs must seek the forest's womb
And pipe up tigers from green gloom.

Grouped round the dreaming oaten quill
Those sumptuous savages were still,

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