SEE, the day begins to break,
And the light shoots like a streak
Of subtle fire; the wind blows cold,
While the morning doth unfold;
Now the birds begin to rouse,
And the squirrel from the boughs
Leaps, to get him nuts and fruit;
The early lark, that erst was mute,
Carols to the rising day
Many a note and many a lay.
Sweet is the breath of morn; her rising sweet,
With charm of earliest birds.
The morning lark, the messenger of day,
Saluted with her song the morning grey;
And soon the sun arose with beams so bright,
That all th' horizon laugh'd, to see the joyous sight.
The sun had long since, in the lap
Of Thetis, taken out his nap;
And, like a lobster boil'd, the morn
From black to red began to turn.
The morn is up again, the dewy morn,
With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom,
Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,
And living as if earth contain'd no tomb-
And glowing into day.
The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
Glorious as e'er I had beheld-in front,
The sea lay laughing at a distance; near
The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn-
Dews, vapours, and the melody of birds,
And labourers going forth to till the fields.
Too curious man! why dost thou seek to know
Events, which, good or ill, foreknown, are woe?
Th' all-seeing power, that made thee mortal, gave
Thee every thing a mortal state should have.
Dryden. Great brains (like brightest glass) crack straight, while
Of stone or wood hold out, and fear not blows;
And we their hoary heads can see,
Whose wit was never their mortality.
I only have relinquished one delight,
To live beneath your more habitual sway.
I love the brooks which down their channels fret,
Ev'n more than when it rippl'd lightly as they;
The innocent brightness of a new-born day
The clouds that gather round the setting sun,
Do take a sober colouring from the eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.
Go to the dull church-yard and see
Those hillocks of mortality,
Where proudest man is only found
By a small hillock on the ground.
THE breath no sooner left his father's body
But that his wildness, mortified in him,
Seemed to die too.
Mortified he was to that degree,
A poorer than himself he would not see.-Dryden.
Suppress thy knowing pride,
Mortify thy learned lust,
Vain are thy thoughts, while thou thyself art dust.
THE mother in her office holds the key of the soul.
They tell us of an Indian tree,
Which, howsoe'er the sun and sky
May tempt its boughs to wander free,
And shoot and blossom wide and high.
Far better loves to bend its arms
Downward again to that dear earth,
From which the life that fills and warms
Its grateful being first had birth.
"Tis thus, though woo'd by flattering friends,
And fed with fame (if fame it be,)
This heart, my own dear mother, bends,
With love's true instinct, back to thee.
My mother's voice! how oft doth creep
Its cadence on my lonely hours,
Like healing sent on wings of sleep,
Or dew on the unconscious flowers.
I might forget her melting prayer,
While pleasure's pulses madly fly;
But in the still unbroken air,
Her gentle tones come stealing by;
And years of sin and manhood flee,
And leave me at my mother's knee.
N. P. Willis.
Sweet is the image of the brooding dove!-
Holy as heaven a mother's tender love!
The love of many prayers, and many tears,
Which changes not with dim declining years,-
The only love, which on this teeming earth,
Asks no return for passion's wayward birth.
My mother! at that holy name
Within my bosom there's a gush
Of feeling, which no time can tame,
A feeling, which, for years of fame,
I would not, could not crush!
SEE! with what constant motion,
Even and glorious as the sun,
Gratiana steers that noble frame,
Soft as her breast, sweet as her voice
That gave each winding law and poise
And swifter than the wings of fame.
On their own axis as the planets run,
And make at once their circle round the sun;
So two consistent motions act the soul,
And one regards itself, and one the whole.
Immediate are the acts of God, more swift
Than time and motion.
Virtue, too, as well as vice, is clad
In flesh and blood so well, that Plato had
Beheld, when his high fancy once embraced
Virtue with colour, speech, and motion graced.
WHY in that rawness left you wife and children, Those precious motives, those strong knots of love, Without leave-taking?
We ask you whence does motive vigour flow.
Dost think those gilt and hollow cones
That front an organ cause the tones?
Ah, no! those pealing notes proceed
From tubes of baser metal hid.
This same remark, we might advance,
Holds good in life's mysterious dance:
In front the pompous pretext find,
But the mean motive skulks behind.
THOUGH sluggards deem it but a foolish chase,
And marvel men should quit their easy chair,
The toilsome way, and long, long league to trace,
Oh, there is sweetness in the mountain air,
And life that bloated ease can never hope to share.
Byron.
Who first beholds the Alps,-that mighty chain
Of mountains, stretching on from east to west,
So massive, yet so shadowy, so ethereal,
As to belong rather to heaven than earth-
But instantly receives into his soul
A sense, a feeling that he loses not
A something that informs him 't is a moment
Whence he may date henceforward and for ever.
Rogers.
By day, by night, in calms, in wintry storms,
When closely viewed, when dimly distant seen,
It matters not; thy endless, giant forms
Start from their base with such majestic mien,
The soul astonished reels. The dazzling sheen
Of thy eternal, trackless, spotless snows,
Well shadows forth the purity, I ween,
The might, the majesty, the fixed repose
Of Him, at whose decree thy gorgeous summits rose!
W. H. Leatham.
MOURNERS-MOURNING.
MOURNERS! is there not
An angel that illumes the house of mourning;
The Spirit of the Dead-a holy image,
Shrined in the soul-for ever beautiful.
They err who say that man to grief is born, That hopeless thousands are but made to mourn; Heaven has not issued such a harsh decreeMan's is the guilt, as man's the misery!
He that lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend.
|