odland bowers,
A heaven-built house of prayer;

My fellow-worshippers, the gay,
Free songsters of the grove,
Who to the closing eye of day
Warble their hymns of love.
The low and dulcet lyre of spring,
Swept by the vagrant breeze,
Borne far on echo's spreading wing
Stirs all the budding trees--

Again I catch the cuckoo's note
That faintly murmurs near,
The mingled melodies that float
To rapture's listening ear.
While April like a virgin pale
Retreats with modest grace,
And blushing through her tearful veil
Just shows her cherub face.

'Tis but a momentary gleam
From those young laughing eyes,
Yet, like a meteor's passing beam,
It lights up earth, and skies:
But, ere the sun exhales the dew
That sparkles on the grass,
Dark clouds flit o'er the smiling blue,
Like shadows o'er a glass.

But ah! upon the musing mind
Those varied smiles and tears,
Like words of love but half defined,
Give birth to hopes and fears.
The joyful heart one moment bounds,
Then feels a sudden chill,
Whispering in vague uncertain sounds
Presentiments of ill.

When dire disease an arrow sent,
And thrilled my breast with pain,
My mind was like a bow unbent,
Or harp-strings after rain;
I could not weep--I could not pray,
Nor raise my thoughts on high,
Till light from heaven, like April's ray,
Broke through the stormy sky!

YOUTH AND AGE.

YOUTH.

Pilgrim of life! thy hoary head
Is bent with age, thine eye
Looks downward to the silent dead,
Wreck of mortality!--
The friends who flourished in thy day
Have sought their narrow home;
Their spirits whisper, "Come away!"--

AGE.

My soul replies, I come.--
I tread the path I trod a child,
The fields I loved of yore;
The flowers that 'neath my footsteps smiled
Now meet my gaze no more.
I stand beneath this giant oak!
It was an aged tree,
Hollowed by time's resistless stroke,
When life was green with me.
Its lofty head it proudly rears
To greet the summer sky,
Whilst, bending with the weight of years,
I feebly totter by.
And hushed are all the thousand songs
That filled these branches high:
Echo no more for me prolongs
The woodland minstrelsy.
Silence has gathered round life's hall;
My friends are in the clay;
I hear no more the footsteps fall,
That cheered my early day;
I see no more the faces dear,
Which shone around my hearth:
Bereft of all--I sojourn here--
Still happy, thoug