OUR LAND.
A ship sailed over the blue, salt sea,
For a man, Columbus called,
Had thought that the world was round, and he
Of the old ideas had palled.
So, in fourteen hundred and ninety-two,
He sailed across from Spain,
And found our continent so new--
The "land beyond the main." [{219}]
But jealousies and rivalries
And bickerings begun,
And Christopher Columbus now
With grief was overborne.
Americus Vespucius soon
Our shores came sailing round,
And stole the naming of the land
Columbus sought and found;
While he, Columbus, lay in chains,
And died in sore distress;
Yet won for us who tread his land,
A lasting blessedness.
* * * * *
Young I-know is saucy and pert,
And thinks himself wondrously wise;
But I-know, the second, steps in all so curt,
And you'd think that each might lose his eyes.
SIGNS OF THE ZODIAC.
THE annual path of the Sun,
The Ecliptic is called, as we see,--
And a belt, eight degrees, on each side,
The Zodiac ever will be.
The principal planets all seem
To move in the zodiac lines,
While the belt, of itself, is cut up
Into twelve equal parts, called the Signs.
And these signs were first named, we are told,
From their fancied resemblance to beasts,
Which astronomers thought they could see
In the stars, from the West to the East.