class="x-ebookmaker-pageno" title="[Pg 398]"/>Farewell!—and think no more of me!

'Though gold be gone and hope departed,
And nought remain save love for me,
Thou ne'er shalt leave me broken-hearted,
For I will share my life with thee!

'Thou deem'st me but a wanton maiden,
The plaything of thy idle hours;
But laughing streams with gold are laden,
And sweets are hidden 'neath the flowers.

'E'en outcasts may have heart and feeling,
E'en such as I be fond and true;
And love, like light, in dungeons stealing,
Though bars be there, will still burst through.'

PICTURES FROM THE NORTH.

It is worth while to live in the city, that we may learn to love the country; and it is not bad for many, that artificial life binds them with bonds of silk or lace or rags or cobwebs, since, when they are rent away, the Real gleams out in a beauty and with a zest which had not been save for contrast.

Contrast is the salt of the beautiful. I wonder that the ancients, who came so near it in so many ways, never made a goddess of Contrast. They had something like it in ever-varying Future—something like it in double-faced Janus, who was their real 'Angel of the Odd.' Perhaps it is my ignorance which is at fault—if so, I pray you correct me. The subtle Neo-Platonists must have apotheosized such a savor to all æsthetic bliss. Mostly do I feel its charm when there come before me pictures true to life of far lands and lives, of valley and river, sea and shore. Then I forget the narrow office and the shop-lined street, the rattling cars and hurried hotel-lodgment, and think what it would be if nature, in all her freshness and never-ending contrasts, could be my ever-present.

I thought this yesterday, in glancing over an old manuscript in my drawer, containing translations, by some hand to me unknown, of sketches of Sweden by the fairy-story teller Hans Christian Andersen. Reader, will they strike you as pleasantly as they did me? I know not. Let us glance them over. They have at least the full flavor of the North, of the healthy land of frost and pines, of fragrant birch and of sweeter meadow-grass, and simpler, holier flowers than the rich South ever showed, even in her simplest moods.

The first of these sketches sweeps us at once far away over the Northland: