Now are the trees all ruefully bereft
Of their brave liveries of green and gold,
No shred of all their pleasant raiment left
To shield them from the wind and nipping cold.
Now is the grass all withered up and dead,
And shrouded in its cerement of the snow;
Now the enfeebled Sun goes soon to bed,
And rises late and carries his head low.
Now is the night magnificent to view
When the Queen Moon appears with cloudless brow;
Now are our spirits cleans'd and born anew
In the clear, quickening atmosphere; and now
We re-make home, and find our hearts' desire
In common talk before the cheerful fire.
THE WINTER AND THE WILDERNESS.
When we who dwell within this province old,
Cloven in twain by the great river's tide,
Gird at inhospitable winter's cold,
And rue the downfall of fair summer's pride;
Or turn our eyes from gazing on the vales
Of lavish verdure and abundant fruit,
To those rough wastes where Nature ever fails,
And tillage spurns a profitless pursuit;
Let us recall that sentence from the hand
Of history's father, laying down his pen,—
Those words of Cyrus, which he made to stand
To all his work as moral and amen;
'Tis not the richest and most fertile land
That always bears the noblest breed of men.[[1]]
[[1]] "Although the work seems unfinished, it concludes with a sentence which cannot have been placed casually at the end, viz., that, as the great Cyrus was supposed to have said, 'It is not always the richest and most fertile country which produces the most valiant men.'"—Commentary on the Work of Herodotus.
THE IMMIGRANTS.
From lands where old abuses sit entrenched
And stern restriction thwarts aspiring merit,
And by gaunt men a meagre dole is wrenched
From the unkind conditions they inherit;
From teeming cities where the ceaseless moan
Of want is burthen to the traffic's hum,
From shrouded mills, and fields they ne'er might own,
From servitude and blank despair, they come.