SONGS OF PRAISES, 45.

SONGS OF PRAISES.

By Mrs. A. D. T. WHITNEY.

N a dried old mow, that was once, alas!

A living glory of waving grass,

A cricket made merry one winter’s day,

And answered me this, in a wondrous way,

When I cried, half sharply, “Thou poor old thing!

How canst thou sit in the dark and sing,

While for all thy pleasure of youth thou starv-
est?”

— “I’m the voice of praise that came in with the

harvest !”

I went away to the silent wood,
And down in the deep, brown solitude,
Where nothing blossomed, and nothing stirred,

Up rose the note of a little bird.

“Why carollest thou in the death of the year,
Where nobody travelleth by to hear?” ;
— “Tsing.to God, though there be no comer,
Praise for the past, and the promise of summer!”

I stopped by the brook that, overglassed
With icy sheathing, seemed prisoned fast 5
Yet there whispered up a continual song,

From the life underneath that urged along.

“© blind little brook, that canst not know
Whither thou runnest, why chantest so?”

— “J don’t know what I may find or be,

But I’m praising for this: I am going to see!”

THE TROUBADOURS.

By Grorce Fosrer Barnes.

LACED in the broad
light of our practical
times, the history of
those old days when
the Troubadours
flourished seems like
a story, or, as Na-
poleon would have
said, “a fable agreed
upon.”

The Troubadours
were men who made
the composition and
recitation of poetry
a profession. Many
of them were actors,
and mimics, and jug-
glers, and the pro-

fession was at one time a very lucrative one, its

members frequently retiring from business loaded

 

with gold and valuable goods given them by the
weakhy people whom they had amused. An old
song relates how one of them was paid from the
king’s own long purse with much gold and “ white
monie.”

To be a Troubadour then, was to be a juggler,
a poet, a musician, a master of dancing, a conjurer,
a wrestler, a performer of sleight-of-hand, a boxer,
and a trainer of animals. Their variety of accom-
plishments is indicated by the figures on the front
of a chapel in France, erected by their united
contributions. It was consecrated in September,
1335. One of the figures represented a Trouba-
dour, one a minstrel, and one a juggler, “each
with his various instruments.” Like others occu-
pied in a trade or profession at that time and
since, they bound themselvesinto one great soci-
ety, or “trade union ;” and we are told that they
had aking. It is certain that they often travelled
in companies from place to place in search of