is strong-hold on the Grand River. Old men in Upper Canada yet spin
yarns about the entertainments given by this chief at his hospitable
mansion, where the guests were waited on by negro servants dressed in
liveries of green and gold, and a gigantic Indian with a barrel-organ
used to be stationed in the hall, to enhance the pleasures of the
banquet with sweet music. This condition of things can never exist
again, for which people have reason to be thankful, perhaps; but away
into the past with the Indian and his gauds are vanishing the deer, and
the wild-turkeys, and the creatures that men covet for their fur. Many
of the deep, cold brooks, in which the speckled trout used to abound,
are evaporating to mere threads as the country is cleared. Others have
been poisoned by manufactures or choked up with the _debris_ of
saw-mills, to the extinction of the fish; and Upper Canada, on the
whole, offers but a cheerless prospect now to the blighted young man of
leisure who would forswear society and seek to live primitively in
backwoods solitudes on the produce of his rod and gun.

THE NIGHTINGALE IN THE STUDY.

"Come forth!" my cat-bird calls to me,
"And hear me sing a cavatina,
That, in this old familiar tree,
Shall hang a garden of Alcina.

"These buttercups shall brim with wine
Beyond all Lesbian juice or Massic;
May not New England be divine?
My ode to ripening Summer, classic?

"Or, if to me you will not hark,
By Beaver Brook a thrush is ringing,
Till all the alder-coverts dark
Seem sunshine-dappled with his singing.

"Come out beneath the unmastered sky,
With its emancipating spaces,
And learn to sing as well as I,
Unspoiled by meditated graces.

"What boot your many-volumed gains,
Those withered leaves forever turning,
To win, at best, for all your pains,
A nature mummy-wrapped in learning?

"The leaves wherein true wisdom lies
On living trees the sun are drinking,
Those white clouds drowsing through the skies
Grew not so beautiful by thinking.

"Come out! with me the oriole cries,
Escape the demon that pursues you!
And, hark, the cuckoo weather wise,
Still hiding, further onward wooes you."

"Ah, dear old friend, that, all my days,
Hast poured from that syringa thicket
The quaintly discontinuous lays
To which I hold a season ticket,--