Yet who had thought a brow so fair,
  From guile so seeming free,
A voice so sweet, so winning rare,
  So treacherous could be?

Who would have dreamed a form that seemed
  Proud Honor’s templed shrine,
Could hold within an urn of sin
  A soul so false as thine?

Nor strange ’twould be, if ne’er again,
  Till age had wasted youth,
That heart betrayed by such as thou,
  Could trust in human truth.

But go! and though thy wiles no more
  Will move my heart to strife,
Canst glad thy vain soul with the thought
  That thou hast wrecked a life.

LIGHT BEYOND.

Is your heart bowed down with sorrow;
  Does your lot the hardest seem;
Think you of a brighter morrow,
  Of a fairer future dream.

Have your prospects all been blighted;
  Has each promise proved a snare;
Deepest wrongs are sometime righted,
  Never yield you to despair.

Has the slanderer’s tongue unsparing
  Ruthless tarnished with its stain;
Was your good name worth the wearing—­
  Go and win it back again.

Would you rest where sunshine lingers;
  You must toil the darkness through;
Only work with willing fingers,
  Only live you brave and true.

Never care or trouble borrow,
  “Trouble’s real if it seems”—­
Ever see a bright to-morrow,
  Though you see it but in dreams.

A NEGLECTED “WOMAN’S RIGHT.”

I have listened to this cry of “Woman’s Rights,” this clamoring for the ballot, for redress for woman’s wrongs, and I could but think, amid it all, that there is one “woman’s right”—­the right that could make the widest redress for woman’s wrongs—­which she holds in her own hands and does not exercise.  It is the right to defend, to uplift and ennoble womankind; to be as lenient to a plea for mercy from a fallen woman as though that plea had come from the lips of a fallen man; to throw around her also the broad mantle of charity, and if she would try to reform, give her a chance.  Far be it from any honest woman to countenance the abandoned wretch who plies an unholy calling in defiance of all morality, for her very breath is contamination; but why should you greet with smiles and warmest handclasps of friendship the man who pays his money for her blackened soul?  When two human beings ruled by the same mysterious nature, have yielded to temptations and fallen, what is this monster of social distinction that excuses the sin of one as a folly or indiscretion, while it makes that of the other a crime, which a lifetime cannot retrieve?  It is a strange justice that condones the fault of one while it condemns the other even to death; that gives to one, when dead, funeral rite and Christian burial and to the other the Morgue and a dishonored grave, simply because one is a strong