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HYMN TO THE FLOWERS.

BY HORACE SMITH.

Day-stars! that ope your eyes with morn to twinkle

From rainbow galaxies of earth's creation,
And dew-drops on her lovely altars sprinkle
As a libation!

Ye matin worshippers! who bending lowly
Before the uprisen sun, God's lidless eye,
Throw from your chalices a sweet and holy
Incense on high!

Ye bright mosaics! that with storied beauty
The floor of Nature's temple tessellate,
What numerous emblems of instructive duty
Your forms create!

'Neath cloister'd boughs each floral bell that swingeth,
And tolls its perfume on the passing air,
Makes Sabbath in the fields, and ever ringeth
A call to prayer!

Not to the domes where crumbling arch and column
Attest the feebleness of mortal hand;

But to that fane most catholic and solemn
Which God hath planned!

To that cathedral, boundless as our wonder,
Whose quenchless lamps the sun and moon supply,
Its choir the winds and waves, its organ thunder,
Its dome the sky!

There, as in solitude and shade I wander

Through the lone aisles, or stretched upon the sod, Awed by the silence, reverently ponder

The ways of God,

Your voiceless lips, O flowers, are living preachers,
Each cup a pulpit, and each leaf a book,
Supplying to my fancy numerous teachers
From loneliest nook!

Floral apostles! that in dewy splendor
Weep without sin and blush without a crime,
O, may I deeply learn and ne'er surrender
Your love sublime!

"Thou wast not, Solomon, in all thy glory,
Arrayed," the lilies cry, in robes like ours:"
How vain your grandeur! O, how transitory
Are human flowers!

In the sweet-scented pictures, heavenly Artist! With which thou paintest Nature's wide-spread hall, What a delightful lesson thou impartest

Of love to all!

Not useless are ye, flowers! though made for pleasure, Blooming o'er fields and wave by day and night, From every source your sanction bids me treasure Harmless delight.

Ephemeral sages! what instructers hoary

For such a world of thought could furnish scope? Each fading calyx a memento mori,

Yet fount of hope!

Posthumous glories! angel-like collection! Upraised from seed or bulb interred in earth, Ye are to me a type of resurrection

And second birth.

Were I, O God! in churchless lands remaining, Far from all teachers and from all divines, My soul would find, in flowers of thy ordaining, Priests, sermons, shrines!

A SONG.

BY THOMAS CHURCHYARD.

It is not beauty I demand,

A crystal brow, the moon's despair, Nor the snow's daughter, a white hand, Nor mermaid's yellow pride of hair..

Tell me not of your starry eyes,

Your lips, that seem on roses fed,
Your breasts, where Cupid tumbling lies,
Nor sleeps for kissing of his bed,—

A bloomy pair of vermeil cheeks,
Like Hebe's in her ruddiest hours,
A breath that softer music speaks

Than summer winds a-wooing flowers.
These are but gauds; nay, what are lips?
Coral beneath the ocean-stream,
Whose brink when your adventurer slips,
Full oft he perisheth on them.

And what are cheeks, but ensigns oft,

That wave hot youth to fields of blood? Did Helen's breast, though ne'er so soft, Do Greece or Ilium any good?

Eyes can with baleful ardor burn,

Poison can breathe, that erst perfumed; There's many a white hand holds an urn, With lover's hearts to dust consumed.

For crystal brows, there 's naught within;
They are but empty cells for pride;
He who the Siren's hair would win
Is mostly strangled in the tide.

Give me, instead of beauty's bust,
A tender heart, a loyal mind,
Which with temptation I would trust,
Yet never linked with error find ;—

One in whose gentle bosom I

Could pour my secret heart of woes,
Like the care-burdened honey-fly,
That hides his murmurs in the rose ;-

My earthly comforter! whose love
So indefeasible might be,
That, when my spirit won above,

Hers could not stay, for sympathy.

LOVE FOR ALL.

BY LYDIA MARIA CHILD.

(Written just after John C. Colt avoided capital punishment,

by suicide.)

to be surrounded by circumstances a little more dangerous and exciting, and perhaps you, who now walk abroad in the sunshine of respectability, might have come under the ban of human laws, as you have into frequent disobedience of the divine; and then that one foul blot would have been regarded as the hieroglyphic symbol of your whole life. Between you and the inmate of the penitentiary, society sees a difference so great, that you are scarcely recognized as belonging to the same species; but there is One who judgeth not as man judgeth.

Every year of my life I grow more and more convinced, that it is wisest and best to fix our attention on the beautiful and good, and dwell as little as possible on the evil and the false. Society has done my spirit grievous wrong, for the last few weeks, with its legal bull-baitings, and its hired murderers. They have made me ashamed of belonging to the When Mrs. Fry spoke at Newgate, she was wont human species; and were it not that I struggled to address both prisoners and visiters as sinners. hard against it, and prayed earnestly for a spirit of When Dr. Channing alluded to this practice, she forgiveness, they would have made me hate my race. Yet feeling thus, I did wrong to them. Most of them meekly replied, In the sight of God, there is not, had merely caught the contagion of murder, and real-perhaps, so much difference as men think.' In the midst of recklessness, revenge, and despair, there is ly were not aware of the nature of the fiend they

often a glimmering evidence that the divine spark is not quite extinguished. Who can tell into what a holy flame of benevolence and self-sacrifice it might have been kindled, had the man been surrounded from his cradle by an atmosphere of love?

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Surely these considerations should make us judge mercifully of the sinner, while we hate the sin with wait for us all. The highest and holiest example tenfold intensity, because it is an enemy that lies in teaches us to forgive all crimes, while we palliate

none.

harbored. Probably there was not a single heart in the community, not even the most brutal, that would not have been softened, could it have entered into confidential intercourse with the prisoner as Dr. Anthon did. All would then have learned that he was a human being, with a heart to be melted, and a conscience to be roused, like the rest of us; that under the turbid and surging tide of proud, exasperated feelings, ran a warm current of human affections, which, with more genial influences, might have flowed on deeper and stronger, mingling its. waters with the river of life. All this each one would have known, could he have looked into the heart of the poor criminal as God looketh. But his whole life was judged by a desperate act, done in the in-tone, is helping to build penitentiaries and prisons, sanity of passion; and the motives and the circumstances were revealed to the public only through the cold barbarisms of the law, and the fierce exaggerations of an excited populace; therefore he seemed like a wild beast, walled out from human sympathies,-not as a fellow-creature, with like passions and feelings as themselves.

Would that we could learn to be kind-always and everywhere kind! Every jealous thought I cherish, every angry word I utter, every repulsive

and to fill them with those who merely carry the
same passions and feelings farther than I do. It is
an awful thought; and the more it is impressed upon
me, the more earnestly do I pray to live in a state
of perpetual benediction.

And rescue universal man from the hunting hell-hounds of his
Love hath a longing and a power to save the gathered world,

doings.'

Carlyle, in his French Revolution, speaking of one And so I return, as the old preachers used to say, of the three bloodiest judges of the Reign of Terror, to my first proposition; that we should think gently says Marat too had a brother, and natural affec-of all, and claim kindred with all, and include all, tions; and was wrapt once in swaddling-clothes, and without exception, in the circle of our kindly symslept safe in a cradle, like the rest of us.' We are pathies. I would not thrust out even the hangman, too apt to forget these gentle considerations when though methinks if I were dying of thirst, I would talking of public criminals. rather wait to receive water from another hand than If we looked into our souls with a more wise hu- his. Yet what is the hangman but a servant of the mility, we should discover, in our own ungoverned law? And what is the law but an expression of anger the germ of murder; and meekly thank God | public opinion? And if public opinion be brutal, that we, too, had not been brought into temptations and thou a component part thereof, art thou not the too fiery for our strength. It is sad to think how hangman's accomplice? In the name of our comthe records of a few evil days may blot out from the mon Father, sing thy part of the great chorus in the memory of our fellow-men whole years of generous truest time, and thus bring this crashing discord into thoughts and deeds of kindness; and this, too, when harmony! each one has before him the volume of his own broken resolutions, and oft-repeated sins. The temptation which most easily besets you, needed, perhaps, to be only a little stronger; you needed only

And if at times, the discord proves too strong for thee, go out into the great temple of Nature, and drink in freshness from her never-failing fountain. The devices of men pass away as a vapour; but

VOICES OF THE TRUE-HEARTED.

LIBRAR UNIVE

she changes never. Above all fluctuations of opi- | Nay, verily; for it often humbles me to tears, to nion, and all the tumult of the passions, she smiles think how much I am loved more than I deserve;

ever, in various but unchanging beauty. I have gone to her with tears in my eyes, with a heart full of the saddest forebodings, for myself and all the human race; and lo, she has shown me a babe plucking a white clover, with busy, uncertain little fingers, and the child walked straight into my heart, and prophesied as hopefully as an angel; and I believed her, and went on my way rejoicing. The language of nature, like that of music, is universal; it speaks to the heart, and is understood by all. Dialects belong to clans and sects; tones to the universe. High above all language, floats music on its amber cloud. It is not the exponent of opinion, but of feeling. The heart made it; therefore it is infinite. It reveals more than language can ever utter, or thoughts conceive. And high as music is above mere dialects-winging its godlike way, while verbs and nouns go creeping-even so sounds the voice of Love, that clear, treble-note of the universe, into the heart of man, and the ear of Jehovah.

while thousands, far nearer to God, pass on their
thorny path, comparatively uncheered by love and
blessing. But it came into my heart to tell you how
much these things helped me to be good; how they
were like roses dropped by unseen hands, guiding me
through a wilderness-path unto our Father's man-
sion. And the love that helps me to be good, I
would have you bestow upon all, that all may be-
come good. To love others is greater happiness
than to be beloved by them; to do good is more bles-
sed than to receive. The heart of Jesus was so full
of love, that he called little children to his arms, and
folded John upon his bosom; and this love made
him capable of such divine self-renunciation, that he
could offer up even his life for the good of the world.
The desire to be beloved is ever restless and unsatis-
fied; but the love that flows out upon others is a
perpetual well-spring from on high. This source of
happiness is within the reach of all; here, if not
elsewhere, may the stranger and the friendless satisfy
the infinite yearnings of the human heart, and find
therein refreshment and joy.

Believe me, the great panacea for all the disorders
in the universe, is Love. For thousands of years the
world has gone on perversely, trying to overcome
evil with evil; with the worst results, as the con-
dition of things plainly testifies. Nearly two thou-
sand years ago, the prophet of the Highest proclaim-

when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?' If we have faith in this holy principle, where is it written on our laws or our customs? Write it on thine own life and men reading it

here; a power mightier than coercion. And thus
the individual faith shall become a social faith; and
to the mountains of crime around us, it will say,
Be thou removed, and cast into the depths of the
sea!' and they will be removed; and the places that
knew them shall know them no more.

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In sincere humility do I acknowledge that if I am less guilty than some of my human brothers, it is mainly because I have been beloved. Kind emotions and impulses have not been sent back to me, like dreary echoes, through empty rooms. All round me at this moment are tokens of a friendly heart-warmth. A sheaf of dried grasses brings near the gentle image of one who gathered them for love; a varied group of the graceful lady-fern tells me of summered that evil could be overcome only with good. But rambles in the woods, by one who mingled thoughts of me with all her glimpses of nature's beauty. A rose-bush, from a poor Irish woman, speaks to me of her blessings. A bird of paradise, sent by friendship to warm the wintry hours with thoughts of sun-shall say, lo, something greater than vengeance is ny Eastern climes, cheers me with its floating beauty, like a fairy fancy. Flower-tokens from the best of neighbors, have come all summer long, to bid me a blithe good morning, and tell me news of sunshine and fresh air. A piece of sponge, graceful as if it grew on the arms of the wave, reminds me of Grecian seas, and of Hylas borne away by waternymphs. It was given me for its uncommon beauty; and who will not try harder to be good, for being deemed a fit recipient of the beautiful? A root, which promises to bloom into fragrance, is sent by an old Quaker lady, whom I know not, but who says, I would fain minister to thy love of flowers.' Affection sends childhood to peep lovingly at me from engravings, or stand in classic grace, embodied in the little plaster cast. The far-off and the near, the past and the future, are with me in my humble apartment. True, the mementoes cost little of the world's wealth; for they are of the simplest kind; but they express the universe-because they are thoughts of love, clothed in forms of beauty.

Why do I mention these things! From vanity?

This hope is coming toward us, with a halo of sunshine round its head; in the light it casts before, let us do works of zeal with the spirit of love. Man may be redeemed from his thraldom! He will be redeemed. For the mouth of the Most High hath spoken it. It is inscribed in written prophecy, and He utters it to our hearts in perpetual revelation. To you, and me, and each of us, He says, Go, bring my people out of Egypt, into the promised land.'

To perform this mission, we must love both the evil and the good, and shower blessings on the just as well as the unjust. Thanks to our Heavenly Father, I have had much friendly aid on my own spiritual pilgrimage; through many a cloud has pierced a sunbeam, and over many a pitfall have I been guided by a garland. In gratitude for this, fain would

With the silent Bush.boy alone by my side:
When the wild turmoil of this wearisome life,
With its scenes of oppression, corruption and strife;
The proud man's frown and the base man's fear,
The scorner's laugh and the sufferer's tear,
And malice, and meanness, and falsehood, and folly,
Dispose me to musing and dark melancholy;
When my bosom is full, and my thoughts are high,
And my soul is sick with the bondman's sigh,—
O, then there is freedom, and joy, and pride,
Afar in the desert alone to ride!
There is rapture to vault on the champing steed,
And to bound away with the eagle's speed,
With the death-fraught firelock in my hand,-
The only law of the desert land!

I help others to be good, according to the small mea- | Afar in the desert I love to ride,
sure of my ability. My spiritual adventures are
like those of the little boy that run away from Pro-
vidence.' When troubled or discouraged, my soul
seats itself on some door-step-there is ever some
one to welcome me in, and make a nice little bed'
for my weary heart. It may be a young friend,
who gathers for me flowers in summer, and grasses,
ferns, and red berries in the autumn; or it may
be sweet Mary Howitt, whose mission it is to turn
the sunny side of things to human eyes;' or Charles
Dickens, who looks with such deep and friendly
glance into the human heart, whether it beats be-
neath embroidered vest, or tattered jacket; or the
serene and gentle Fenelon; or the devout Thomas
á Kempis; or the meek-spirited John Woolman; or
the eloquent hopefulness of Channing; or the cathe-
dral tones of Keble, or the saintly beauty of Raphael, | Afar in the desert I love to ride,
or the clear melody of Handel. All speak to me
with friendly greeting, and have somewhat to give
my thirsty soul. Fain would I do the same, for
all who come to my door-step, hungry, and cold,
spiritually or naturally. To the erring and the
guilty, above all others, the door of my heart shall
never open outward. I have too much need of mercy.
Are we not all children of the same Father? and
shall we not pity those who among pit-falls lose
their way home?

AFAR IN THE DESERT.

BY THOMAS PRINGLE.

Afar in the desert I love to ride,
With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side:
When the sorrows of life the soul o'ercast,
And, sick of the present, I cling to the past;
When the eye is suffused with regretful tears,
From the fond recollections of former years;
And shadows of things that have long since fled
Flit over the brain, like ghosts of the dead:
Bright visions of glory, that vanished too soon,
Day-dreams, that departed ere manhood's noon;
Attachments, by fate or by falsehood reft;
Companions of early days, lost or left;
And my native land, whose magical name
Thrills to the heart like electric flame;
The home of my childhood; the haunts of my prime;
All the passions and scenes of that rapturous time
When the feelings were young and the world was new,
Like the fresh bowers of Eden unfolding to view;
All, all now forsaken, forgotten, forgone;
And I, a lone exile, remembered by none;
My high aims abandoned, my good acts undone,
Aweary of all that is under the sun;-

With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side:
Away, away from the dwellings of men,
By the wild deer's haunt, by the buffalo's glen;
By the valleys remote where the oribi plays,
Where the gnu, the gazelle, and the hartebeest graze,
And the kudu and eland unhunted recline
By the skirts of gray forests o'erhung with wild-vine;
Where the elephant browses at peace in his wood,
And the river-horse gambols unscared in the flood,
And the mighty rhinoceros wallows at will
In the fen where the wild ass is dinking his fill.

Afar in the desert I love to ride,

With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side:
O'er the brown karroo, where the fleeting cry
Of the springbok's fawn sounds plaintively,
And the timorous quagga's shrill-whistling neigh
Is heard by the fountain at twilight gray;
Where the zebra wantonly tosses his mane,
With wild hoof scouring the desolate plain;
And the fleet footed ostrich over the waste
Speeds like a horseman who travels in haste,
Hieing away to the home of her rest,
Where she and her mate have scooped their nest,
Far hid from the pitiless plunderer's view
In the pathless depths of the parched karroo.

Afar in the desert I love to ride,
With the silent Bush-boy alone by my side :
Away, away, in the wilderness vast,
Where the white man's foot hath never passed,
And the quivered Coranna or Bechuan
Hath rarely crossed with his roving clan ;
A region of emptiness, howling and drear,
Which man hath abandoned from famine and fear;
Which the snake and the lizard inhabit alone,
With the twilight bat from the yawning stone;
Where grass, nor herb, nor shrub takes root,

With that sadness of heart which no stranger may Save poisonous thorns that pierce the foot;

scan,

I fly to the desert afar from man!

And the bitter melon, for food and drink,

s the pilgrim's fare by the salt lake's brink;

A region of drought, where no river glides,
Nor rippling brook with osiered sides;
Where sedgy pool, nor bubbling fount,
Nor tree, nor cloud, nor misty mount,
Appears to refresh the aching eye;

But the barren earth, and the burning sky,
And the blank horizon, round and round,
Spread, void of living sight or sound.

And here, while the night-winds round me sigh,
And the stars burn bright in the midnight sky,
As I sit apart by the desert stone,
Like Elijah at Horeb's cave alone,

A still small voice comes through the wild,
Like a father consoling his fretful child,
Which banishes bitterness, wrath and fear,
Saying,-MAN Is distant, but God is near!

THE AWAKENING OF ENDYMION.

Lone upon a mountain, the pine-trees wailing round him,

Lone upon a mountain the Grecian youth is laid; Sleep, mystic sleep, for many a year has bound him, Yet his beauty, like a statue's, pale and fair, is undecayed,

When will he awaken?

When will he awaken? a loud voice hath been crying

Night after night, and the cry has been in vain; Winds, woods, and waves found echoes for replying, But the tones of the beloved ones were never heard again.

When will he awaken?

Asked the midnight's silver queen.

Never mortal eye has looked upon his sleeping; Parents, kindred, comrades haye mourned for him

as dead;

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Yes, he has awakened

For the midnight's happy queen!

By day the gathered clouds have had him in their What is this old history, but a lesson given,

keeping,

And at night the solemn shadows round his rest are shed.

When will he awaken?

Long has been the cry of faithful Love's imploring; Long has Hope been watching with soft eyes fixed above;

When will the Fates, the life of life restoring,
Own themselves vanquished by much-enduring
Love?

When will he awaken?

Asks the midnight's weary queen.

How true love still conquers by the deep strength of truth,

How all the impulses, whose native home is heaven, Sanctify the visions of hope, and faith, and youth?

"T is for such they waken!

When every worldly thought is utterly forsaken, Comes the starry midnight, felt by life's gifted

few;

Then will the spirit from its earthly sleep awaken To a being more intense, more spiritual, and true. So doth the soul awaken,

Like that youth to night's fair queen!

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