outh-winds swept downward
from their sky-built thrones, and stooping to the hill-tops, laid
their soft fingers on the expanding buds, stealing a fragrance, and
whispering their heaven-taught melody amongst the gnarled old
branches; then crept stealthily into the valleys below, and drinking
in their rich gush of pleasant sounds, glided back exulting to their
high communion. The merry-voiced waters, freed from their icy fetters,
and sparkling like a sheet of silver sheen, went dancing and leaping
on--on with a winged impetuosity to their ocean home. Anon, the yellow
violets shook off their winter slumbers, and opened their smiling cups
to the arrowy sunshine; then came a wealth of painted flowers, and
soon the life-breathing spring had attained its zenith. A thousand
glad voices rose and swelled amid the forest's leaf-wrought canopy;
its breezes were awake with spicy odors, and the bird warbled as life
were new, and this creation's morn. In the orchards, the peach-trees
were glorious with pink blossoms, sprinkling the tall, waving grass
with rosy flakes at every gush of the wooing zephyr, which, laden with
sweetness, swept sighing across the meadows.

Anon, a spring sunset came on. The lurid disc of the sun wheeled
slowly down to the western horizon. Pile on pile of clouds, heaped up
in gorgeous magnificence, varying from red to purple, and from purple
to gold, gathered fantastically in the sky--now like a molten ocean
with uplifting rocks, and then like toppling steeps whose summits
reached the stars. Gradually the day went down behind the everlasting
hills, and the brilliant hues insensibly died away through all the
variations of the many-tinted rainbow, until only a faint golden
mellowness suffused the western sky, slowly fading into a deep azure
as it approached the zenith. At length twilight, twin sister to the
cold, gray dawn, shrouded the heavens in misty dimness. Universal
silence seemed to pervade the whole face of nature. The voice of the
feathered songsters was hushed in the grove, and the breeze, which all
day long had refreshed the deep woods with its joyous ministrations,
lulled into stillness, as if its kind office were now completed. Then
the brighter stars came out, one by one, and assumed their sapphire
thrones in the vaulted cerulean, and the round, bright front of the
full moon floated over the eastern mountains, whose dark umbrage
glowed with the silver glories of the thronging night--the night whose