With slender notes and more than half suppress'd. Pleased with his solitude, and flitting light From spray to spray, where'er he rests he shakes From many a twig the pendent drops of ice, That tinkle in the wither'd leaves below. Stillness, accompanied with sounds so soft, Charms more than silence. Meditation here
May think down hours to moments. Here the heart May give an useful lesson to the head, And learning wiser grow without his books.
FROM dearth to plenty, and from death to life Is Nature's progress, when she lectures man In heavenly truth; evincing, as she makes The grand transition, that there lives and works A soul in all things, and that soul is God. The beauties of the wilderness are His, That make so gay the solitary place,
Where no eyes see them. And the fairer forms That cultivation glories in are His.
The Lord of all, Himself through all diffused, Sustains and is the life of all that lives.
Nature is but a name for an effect,
Whose cause is God.
Happy who walks with Him! whom what he finds Of flavour or of scent, in fruit or flower, Or what he views of beautiful or grand In Nature, from the broad majestic oak To the green blade that twinkles in the sun, Prompts with remembrance of a present God.
I WOULD not enter on my list of friends
(Though graced with polished manners and fine
Yet wanting sensibility) the man
Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm. An inadvertent step may crush the snail That crawls at evening in the public path; But he that has humanity, forewarn'd, Will tread aside, and let the reptile live. The creeping vermin, loathsome to the sight,
And charged perhaps with venom, that intrudes
A visitor unwelcome into scenes
Sacred to neatness and repose, th' alcove,
The chamber, or refectory, may die :
A necessary act incurs no blame.
Not So, when held within their proper bounds And guiltless of offence, they range the air, Or take their pastime in the spacious field : There they are privileged: And he that hunts Or harms them there, is guilty of a wrong, Disturbs th' economy of Nature's realm, Who when she form'd, design'd them an abode. COWPER.
THE LADDER OF ST. AUGUSTINE.
SAINT AUGUSTINE! well hast thou said, That of our vices we can frame
The low desire, the base design,
That makes another's virtues less; The revel of the treacherous wine,
And all occasions of excess;
The longing for ignoble things; The strife for triumph more than truth; The hardening of the heart, that brings Irreverence for the dreams of youth;
All thoughts of ill; all evil deeds, That have their root in thought of ill; Whatever hinders or impedes
The action of the nobler will ;
All these must first be trampled down Beneath our feet, if we would gain In the bright fields of fair renown The right of eminent domain.
We have not wings, we cannot soar; But we have feet to scale and climb, By slow degrees, by more and more, The cloudy summits of our time.
The heights by great men reached and kept Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept, Were toiling upward in the night.
Standing on what too long we bore With shoulders bent and downcast eyes, We may discern-unseen before- A path to higher destinies.
Nor deem the irrevocable Past As wholly wasted, wholly vain, If, rising on its wrecks, at last To something nobler we attain.
LINES ON THE DEPARTURE OF EMIGRANTS FOR NEW SOUTH WALES.
ON England's shore I saw a pensive band, With sails unfurl'd for earth's remotest strand,
Like children parting from a mother, shed
Tears for the home that could not yield them bread; Grief mark'd each face receding from the view, 'Twas grief to nature honourably true.
But cloud not yet too long, industrious train, Your solid good with sorrow nursed in vain ; For has the heart no interest yet as bland As that which binds us to our native land? The deep-drawn wish, when children crown our
To hear the cherub-chorus of their mirth, Undamp'd by dread that want may e'er unhouse, Or servile misery knit those smiling brows : The pride to rear an independent shed And give the lips we love unborrow'd bread; To see a world, from shadowy forests won, In youthful beauty wedded to the sun; To skirt our home with harvests widely sown, And call the blooming landscape all our own, Our children's heritage, in prospect long. These are the hopes, high-minded hopes and strong, That beckon England's wanderers o'er the brine,
To realms where foreign constellations shine; Where streams from undiscover'd fountains roll, 25 And winds shall fan them from th' Antarctic pole, And what though doom'd to shores so far apart From England's home, that ev'n the home-sick heart Quails, thinking, ere that gulf can be recross'd, How large a space of fleeting life is lost; Yet there, by time, their bosoms shall be changed, And strangers once shall cease to sigh estranged, But jocund in the year's long sunshine roam, That yields their sickle twice its harvest home.
There marking o'er his farm's expanding ring 35 New fleeces whiten and new fruits upspring, The grey-hair'd swain, his grandchild sporting round,
Shall walk at eve his little empire's bound, Emblazed with ruby vintage, ripening corn, And verdant rampart of acacian thorn, While, mingling with the scent his pipe exhales, The orange-groves' and fig-trees' breath prevails ; Survey with pride beyond a monarch's spoil, His honest arm's own subjugated soil;
And summing all the blessings God has given, 45 Puts up his patriarchal prayer to heaven,
That when his bones shall here repose in peace,
The scions of his love may still increase,
And o'er a land where life has ample room,
In health and plenty innocently bloom.
Delightful land, in wildness ev'n benign, The glorious past is ours, the future thine! As in a cradled Hercules, we trace
And all but brute or reptile life is dumb!
Meanwhile, ere arts triumphant reach their goal, 60
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