each lodger, has just been opened. The good
time will come, and Mr. Gooze will be put to
confusion yet.

THE RHYME OF THE CALIPH*

THE Caliph Abderàma, in the pleasant South of
Spain,
Long continued, firmly grounded on his people's
love, to reign;
And one day his courtiers left him in his palace hall
alone,
And he fell into deep musings, sitting on his golden
throne.

"Fifty years," he thought, " have vanished since I've
held the royal power,
Standing in the midst of warfare with the calmness
of a tower.
Fifty Winters, fifty Summers, fifty Autumns, fifty
Springs,
Rise like flocks of birds before me, fluttering on
their airy wings.

"I will shut mine eyes in darkness; I will close
up both mine ears;
That my soul may look and listen down the vista of
the years;
For I fain would gather wisdom of the rich and
solemn Past,
And, from many-visaged Action, pluck the central
Truth at last.

"Lo! the visions gather thickly! Through that
length of time my hand
Has been clothed with awful power, and been
honour'd through the land;
The young mothers murmur of me, as they sing
their babes to rest,
Sitting at their open casements, when the sun is in
the West.

"Riches I have had, uncounted—ample  pleasures—
regal state—
Might in all its sumptuous aspects—homage of the
good and great—
And the liquid lays of poets, glittering from the
gorgeous East,
All exalting Abderàma, have I heard at many a feast.

"Round my throne I have assembled grey
philosophers, whose sleep
Brings them fiery revelations from the distant starry
deep;
And my court has shone with warriors of the old
Arabian race,
With their eager souls out-looking in the quick
blood of the face.

"Art and Science, the twin-sisters, speak my praises
near and far;
Learning, from her groves and cloisters, hails me as
a morning star;
And, though threatened by the Faithless, I have
kept my lands entire,
Underneath the sacred lightnings of the Crescent's
silver fire.

"To increase my glory farther, and the largeness of
my joys,
I have caused a wondrous palace in a garden to
arise—
In a garden deep and leafy, where the sparkling
walls are seen
Through the crowding of the tree-trunks, and the
heavy, tremulous green.

"Like a vision in a sunset rise my palace-towers in
air,
And the domes suspended lightly, and the galleries
white and fair,
And the terrace-walks of marble, shadowy dim with
citron bowers,
Where the birds, made faint with perfume, fall
asleep upon the flowers.

"And within, the walls are builded all of lapis
lazuli,
Overwrought with rubies sanguine, and the diamond's
glancing eye ,
And the air is cool'd with fountains, springing from
the metal rich,
Each one with its golden sculptures standing in a
jasper niche.

"Forty thousand silver columns lift the ceiling
sappharine,
Where the lamps of lucid crystal shed a languid light
divine—
Shed a light on orbs of gold, that start and tremble
into view,
Like the constellations kindled in a depth of evening
blue.

"Who so happy as our Caliph?' cry the people.
'Every hour
Is to him a stately vision, full of loveliness and
power—
Lying in a light of jewels—laughing under lips of
love,—
Like a rose-bud deeply reddening to the regal Sun
above.'

"Idle words, and lightly spoken! In that lapse of
fifty years,
I have noted every day which has been free from
doubts and fears—
Every day of perfect pleasure, luscious, lingering,
and serene,
When my soul has seemed a monarch. And the
number is fourteen!

"Better had I been a herdsman, keeping flocks
upon a hill,
Eating the earth's simple produce, drinking water
from the rill!
Better had I been an Arab in the desert's luminous
haze,
Living like a patriarch after Nature's unadulterate
ways!

"Better to have dwelt unlook'd-for in some forest's
shadows dun,
Where the leaves are pierc'd in triumph by the
javelins of the sun!
Better to be born, and die, in some calm nest,
howe'er obscure,
With a vine about the casements, and a fig-tree at
the door!