py nature in her hour of love,
Fruits, flowers, and flies, in rainbow-glory bright:
The smile of God glows graciously above,
And genial earth is grateful; day by day
Old faces come again with blossoms gay,
Gemming in gladness meadow, garden, grove:
Haste with thy harvest, then, my softened heart,
Awake thy better hopes of better days,
Bring in thy fruits and flowers of thanks and praise,
And in creation's paean take thy part.

How different in sterner beauty was the landscape not long since! The
energies of universal life prisoned up in temporary obstruction; every
black hedge-row tufted with woolly snow, like some Egyptian mother
mourning for her children; shrubs and plants fettered up in glittering
chains, motionless as those stone-struck feasters before the head of
Gorgon; and the dark-green fir-trees swathed in heavy curtains of
iridescent whiteness. Contrast is ever pleasurable; therefore we need
scarcely apologize for an ice in the dog-days--I mean for this present
unseasonable introduction of dead

WINTER.

As some fair statue, white and hard and cold,
Smiling in marble, rigid, yet at rest,
Or like some gentle child of beauteous mould,
Whose placid face and softly swelling breast
Are fixed in death, and on them bear imprest
His magic seal of peace--so, frozen, lies
The loveliness of nature: every tree
Stands hung with lace against the clear blue skies;
The hills are giant waves of glistering snow;
Rare and northern fowl, now strangely tame to see,
With ruffling plumage cluster on the bough,
And tempt the murderous gun; mouse-like, the wren
Hides in the new-cut hedge; and all things now
Fear starving Winter more than cruel men.

Ay, "cruel men:" that truest epithet for monarch-man must be the tangent
from which my Pegasus shall strike his hoof for the next flight. Who
does not writhe while reading details of cruelty, and who would not
rejoice to find even there somewhat of

CONSOLATION?

Scholar of Reason, Grace, and Providence,
Restrain thy bursting and indignant tears;
With tenderest might unerring Wisdom steers
Through those mad seas the bark of Innocence.
Doth thy heart burn for vengeance on the deed--
Some barbarous deed wrought out by cruelty
On woman, or on famish'd childhood's need,
Yea, on these fond dumb dogs--doth thy heart bleed
For pity, child of sensibility?
Those tears are gracious, a