(Heedless that the hawks
Fast behind it follow),
Where among the hyacinths
Butterflies are skimming,
Where among the floating flowers,
The clear stream is brimming.

Hylas, Hylas runs,
Down between the laurels,
Where, beside her nest,
Philomela carols:
Where the shadow dark,
Still doth creeping linger,
Pointing at the stream
With a boding finger.

"Hylas, Hylas," moaned
The fir-trees o'er the river,
Bodingly the wind
Made the ilex shiver.
Boding screams the bird,
From its craggy eyrie,
As the sun uprose,
From the clouds all fiery.

"Hylas, Hylas comes,"
Sing the nymphs together,
As they hear the sound
Of his sandal leather.
"Hylas, Hylas comes,
Fairest child of mortal;
Warn him not, Old Earth,
Or thou, Sun immortal!

"Do not warn him, thrushes,
Do not warn him, snakes,
Green and gold and glistening,
In the myrtle brakes.
Thou, tortoise, do not click
Thy shell against yon boulder,
Lest he turn and toss
The urn from off his shoulder."

Hylas, Hylas comes,
Stooping to the river,
Where the laurel-tree
Just then seems to shiver.
Then the white arms countless
Rise from out the water,
Seizing him with shouts
Of sweet but mocking laughter.

Swiftly down the stream,
With the current gliding,
Bear the nymphs their prize,
With a sweet deriding.
Hylas, Hylas calls,
To the echoing mountain,
All in vain to earth,
To cloud, and sea, and fountain.

Hylas, Hylas, nymphs
With their white arms pinion,
Bearing him along,
To their own dominion;
Crowning him with flowers,
Soothing him with kisses,
Singing to him songs
Of immortal blisses.

So the siren pleasures
Bear away for ever
Victims deep enchanted,
Wretches waking never.
So on Time's dark current,
We, too, swift are gliding,
While upon our raft,
King Death sits deriding.

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER.

"WITHIN so many yards of this Covent Garden
lodging of mine, as within so many yards of
Westminster Abbey, Saint Paul's Cathedral, the
Houses of Parliament, the Prisons, the Courts
of Justice, all the Institutions that govern the
land, I can find—must find, whether I will or
no—in the open streets, shameful instances of
neglect of children, intolerable toleration of the
engenderment of paupers, idlers, thieves, races
of wretched and destructive cripples both in body
and mind, a misery to themselves, a misery to
the community, a disgrace to civilisation, and an
outrage on Christianity. I know it to be a
fact as easy of demonstration as any sum in any
of the elementary rules of arithmetic, that if the
State would begin its work and duty at the
beginning, and would with the strong hand
take those children out of the streets, while
they are yet children, and wisely train them, it
would make them a part of England's glory, not
its shame—of England's strength, not its weakness—
would raise good soldiers and sailors, and
good citizens, and many great men, out of the
seeds of its criminal population. Yet I go on
bearing with the enormity as if it were nothing,
and I go on reading the Parliamentary
Debates as if they were something, and I
concern myself far more about one railway-bridge
across a public thoroughfare, than about a dozen
generations of scrofula, ignorance, wickedness,
prostitution, poverty, and felony. I can slip
out at my door, in the small hours after any
midnight, and, in one circuit of the purlieus of
Covent Garden Market, can behold a state of
infancy and youth, as vile as if a Bourbon sat
upon the English throne; a great police force
looking on with authority to do no more than
worry and hunt the dreadful vermin into
corners, and there leave them. Within the length
of a few streets I can find a workhouse,
mismanaged with that dull short-sighted obstinacy
that its greatest opportunities as to the children
it receives are lost, and yet not a farthing saved
to any one. But the wheel goes round, and
round, and round; and because it goes round—
so I am told by the politest authorities—it goes
well."

Thus I reflected, one day in the Whitsun week
last past, as I floated down the Thames among
the bridges, looking—not inappropriately—at
the drags that were hanging up at certain dirty
stairs to hook the drowned out, and at the
numerous conveniences provided to facilitate
their tumbling in. My object in that
uncommercial journey called up another train of
thought, and it ran as follows:

"When I was at school, one of seventy boys,
I wonder by what secret understanding our
attention began to wander when we had pored