.

The black ducks mounting from the lake,
The pigeon in the pines,
The bittern's boom, a desert make
Which no false art refines.

Down in yon watery nook,
Where bearded mists divide,
The gray old gods that Chaos knew,
The sires of Nature, hide.

Aloft, in secret veins of air,
Blows the sweet breath of song;
Ah! few to scale those uplands dare,
Though they to all belong.

See thou bring not to field or stone
The fancies found in books;
Leave authors' eyes, and fetch your own,
To brave the landscape's looks.

And if, amid this dear delight,
My thoughts did home rebound,
I should reckon it a slight
To the high cheer I found.

Oblivion here thy wisdom is,
Thy thrift the sleep of cares;
For a proud idleness like this
Crowns all life's mean affairs.

* * * * *

THE GERMAN POPULAR LEGEND OF DOCTOR FAUSTUS.

We doubt whether any popular legend has ever taken deeper root among
the common people and spread farther in the world than the story of Dr.
Faustus and his reckless compact with the Evil One. We do not intend to
compare it, of course, to those ancient traditions which seem to have
constituted a tie of relationship between the most distant nations in
times anterior to history. These are mostly of a mythological
character,--as, for instance, those referring to the existence of
elementary spirits. Their connection with mankind has, in the earliest
times, occupied the imagination of the most widely different races. A
certain analogy we can easily explain by the affinity of human hearts
and human minds. But when we find that exactly the same tradition is
reechoed by the mountains of Norway and Sweden in the ballad of "Sir
Olaf and the Erl-king's Daughter," which the milkmaid of Brittany sings
in the lay of the "Sieur Nann and the Korigan," and in a language
radically different from the Norse,--when, here and there, the same
_forms_ of superstition meet us in the ancient popular poetry of the
Servians and modern Greeks, which were familiar to the Teutonic and
Cambrian races of early centuries,--must we not believe in a primeval
intimate connection between distant nations? are we not compelled to
acknowledge that there must have existed, in those remote times, means
of communication unknown to us?

We repeat, however, that, in calling the legend of Dr. Faustus the most
widely-spread we know of, we