“Then shall all wars, all discords cease,
And, rounded to perpetual peace,
  The bounteous years shall come and go
Unvexed; and all humanity,
  Nursed to a loftier type, shall grow
Like to that image undefiled,
That fair reflex of Deity,
Who, first, beneath the morning skies
And glowing palms of paradise,
A God-like man, awoke and smiled!”
* * * * Like some weird strain of music, spent
In one full chord, the sweet voice ceased;
A faint white glow smote up the east,
Like wings uplifting—­and a cry
Of winds went forth, as if the night
Beneath the brightening firmament
Had voiced, in hollow prophecy,
The affirmation:  “By and by!”

HOW KATIE SAVED THE TRAIN.

The floods were out.  Far as the bound
Of sight was one stupendous round
  Of flat and sluggish crawling water! 
As, from a slowly drowning rise,
She looked abroad with startled eyes,
  The engineer’s intrepid daughter. 
Far as her straining eyes could see,
The seething, swoolen Tombigbee
  Outspread his turbulent yellow tide;
His angry currents swirled and surged
O’er leagues of fertile lands submerged,
And ruined hamlets, far and wide.

Along a swell of higher ground,
Still, like a gleaming serpent, wound
  The heavy graded iron trail;
But, inch by inch, the overflow
Dragged down the road bed, till the slow
  Back-water crept across the rail. 
And where the ghostly trestle spanned
A stretch of marshy bottom-land,
  The stealthy under current gnawed
At sunken pile, and massive pier,
And the stout bridge hung airily where
  She sullen dyke lay deep and broad.

Above the hollow, droning sound
Of waves that filled the watery round,
  She heard a distant shout and din—­
The levees of the upper land
Had crumbled like a wall of sand,
  And the wild floods were pouring in! 
She saw the straining dyke give way—­
The quaking trestle reel and sway. 
  Yet hold together, bravely, still! 
She saw the rushing waters drown
The piers, while ever sucking down
  The undermined and treacherous “fill!”

Her strong heart hammered in her breast,
As o’er a distant woody crest
  A dim gray plume of vapor trailed;
And nearer, clearer, by and by,
Like the faint echo of a cry,
  A warning whistle shrilled and wailed! 
Her frightened gelding reared and plunged,
As the doomed trestle rocked and lunged—­
  The keen lash scored his silken hide: 
“Come, Bayard!  We must reach the bridge
And cross to yonder higher ridge—­
  For thrice an hundred lives we ride!”

She stooped and kissed his tawny mane,
Sodden with flecks of froth and rain;
  Then put him at the surging flood! 
Girth deep the dauntless gelding sank,
The tide hissed round his smoking flank,
  But straight for life or death she rode! 
The wide black heavens yawned again,
Down came the torrent rushing rain—­
  The icy river clutched her! 
Shrill in her ears the waters sang,
Strange fires from the abysses sprang,
  The sharp sleet stung like whip and spur!