THE KNIGHT OF ST. JOHN.
ERE down yon blue Carpathian hills
The sun shall sink again,
Farewell to life and all its ills,
Farewell to cell and chain.

These prison shades are dark and cold,-
But, darker far than they,
The shadow of a sorrow old
Is on my heart alway.

For since the day when Warkworth wood
Closed o'er my steed and I,
An alien from my name and blood,
A weed cast out to die,

--

When, looking back in sunset light,
I saw her turret gleam,

And from its casement, far and white,
Her sign of farewell stream,

Like one who, from some desert shore,
Doth home's green isles descry,
And, vainly longing, gazes o'er
The waste of wave and sky;

So from the desert of my fate
I gaze across the past;

Forever on life's dial-plate

The shade is backward cast!

I've wandered wide from shore to shore,
I've knelt at many a shrine:
And bowed me to the rocky floor
Where Bethlehem's tapers shine;

And by the Holy Sepulchre

I've pledged my knightly sword To Christ, his blessed Church, and her, The Mother of our Lord.

Ah me! upon another's breast
Those golden locks recline;

I see upon another rest

The glance that once was mine.

"O faithless priest!-O perjured knight !"

I hear the Master cry;

"Shut out the vision from thy sight, Let Earth and Nature die.

"The Church of God is now thy spouse,
And thou the bridegroom art;
Then let the burden of thy vows
Crush down thy human heart!"

In vain! This heart its grief must know,
Till life itself hath ceased,

And falls beneath the selfsame blow
The lover and the priest !

O pitying Mother! souls of light,
And saints, and martyrs old!
Pray for a weak and sinful knight,
A suffering man uphold.

Then let the Paynim work his will,
And death unbind my chain,
Ere down yon blue Carpathian hill
The sun shall fall
again.

THE HOLY LAND.

FROM LAMARTINE.

I HAVE not felt, o'er seas of sand,
The rocking of the desert bark ;
Nor laved at Hebron's fount my hand,
By Hebron's palm-trees cool and
dark;

Nor pitched my tent at even-fall,

On dust where Job of old has lain, Nor dreamed beneath its canvas wall, The dream of Jacob o'er again.

One vast world-page remains unread;

How shine the stars in Chaldea's sky, How sounds the reverent pilgrim's tread,

How beats the heart with God so nigh!

How round gray arch and column lone The spirit of the old time broods, And sighs in all the winds that moan Along the sandy solitudes !

In thy tall cedars, Lebanon,

I have not heard the nations' cries, Nor seen thy eagles stooping down Where buried Tyre in ruin lies. The Christian's prayer I have not said In Tadmor's temples of decay, Nor startled, with my dreary tread, The waste where Memnon's empire lay.

Nor have I, from thy hallowed tide,

O Jordan! heard the low lament, Like that sad wail along thy side

Which Israel's mournful prophet sent !

Nor thrilled within that grotto lone Where, deep in night, the Bard of Kings

Felt hands of fire direct his own, And sweep for God the conscious strings.

I have not climbed to Olivet,

Nor laid me where my Saviour lay, And left his trace of tears as yet

By angel eyes unwept away; Nor watched, at midnight's solemn time, The garden where his prayer and

groan, Wrung by his sorrow and our crime, Rose to One listening ear alone.

I have not kissed the rock-hewn grot Where in his Mother's arms he lay Nor knelt upon the sacred spot

Where last his footsteps pressed the clay;

Nor looked on that sad mountain head, Nor smote my sinful breast, where

wide

His arms to fold the world he spread, And bowed his head to bless-and died!

PALESTINE.

BLEST land of Judæa ! thrice hallowed of song,

Where the holiest of memories pilgrimlike throng;

In the shade of thy palms, by the shores of thy sea,

On the hills of thy beauty, my heart is with thee.

With the eye of a spirit I look on that shore,

Where pilgrim and prophet have lingered before;

With the glide of a spirit I traverse the sod

Made bright by the steps of the angels of God.

Blue sea of the hills!-in my spirit I

hear