If I looked on the ocean, the rainbow was there;
Thus forming a girdle as brilliant and whole

As the thoughts of the rainbow that circled my soul-
Like the wing of the Deity, calmly unfurled,

It bent from the cloud, and encircled the world.

There are moments, I think, when the spirit receives
Whole volumes of thought on its unwritten leaves;
When the folds of the heart in a moment unclose,
Like the innermost leaves from the heart of a rose;
And thus, when the rainbow had passed from the sky,
The thoughts it awoke were too deep to pass by;
It left my full soul like the wing of a dove,
And fluttering with pleasure, and fluttering with love.
I know that each moment of rapture or pain
But shortens the links in life's mystical chain;

I know that my form, like that bow from the wave,
May pass from the earth and lie cold in the grave;
Yet oh! when death's shadows my bosom encloud-

When I shrink from the thought of the coffin and shroud,
May Hope, like the rainbow, my spirit enfold
In her beautiful pinions of purple and gold.

65.-A MUSICAL INSTRUMENT.

E. B. BROWNING.

What was he doing, the great god Pan,
Down in the reeds by the river?
Spreading ruin and scattering ban,
Splashing and paddling with hoofs of a goat,
And breaking the golden lilies afloat
With the dragon-fly on the river?

He tore out a reed, the great god Pan,
From the deep, cool bed of the river;
The limpid water turbidly ran,
And the broken lilies a-dying lay,
And the dragon-fly had fled away,

Ere he brought it out of the river.

High on the shore sat the great god Pan,
While turbidly flowed the river,
And hacked and hewed as a great god can
With his hard, bleak steel, at the patient reed,
Till there was not a sign of a leaf, indeed,
To prove it fresh from the river.

He cut it short, did the great god Pan,
(How tall it stood in the river!)

Then drew the pith like the heart of a man,

Steadily from the outside ring,

Then notched the poor, dry, empty thing
In holes, as he sate by the river.

"This is the way," laughed the great god Pan,
(Laughed while he sate by the river!)
The only way since gods began

To make sweet music, they could succeed."
Then dropping his mouth to a hole in the reed,
He blew in power by the river.
Sweet, sweet, sweet, O Pan,
Piercing sweet by the river!
Blinding sweet, O great god Pan!
The sun on the hill forgot to die,
The lilies revived, and the dragon-fly
Came back to dream on the river.

Yet half a beast is the great god Pan,
To laugh as he sits by the river,

Making a poet out of a man.

The true gods sigh for the cost and the pain,—
For the reed that grows never more again
As a reed with the reeds of the river.

66. THE TOUCHSTONE.

WM. ALLINGHAM.

A man there came, whence none could tell,
Bearing a touchstone in his hand;
And tested all things in the land

By its unerring spell.

Quick birth of transmutation smote
The fair to foul, the foul to fair;
Purple nor ermine did he spare,
Nor scorn the dusty coat.

Of heirloom jewels, prized so much,
Were many changed to chips and clods,
And even statues of the gods

Crumbled beneath its touch.

Then angrily the people cried,

"The loss outweighs the profit far; Our goods suffice us as they are; We will not have them tried.'

And since they could not so avail
To check this unrelenting guest,
They seized him, saying, "Let him test
How real is our jail!"

But, though they slew him with a sword,
And in the fire his touchstone burned,
Its doings could not be o'erturned,
Its undoings restored.

And when, to stop all future harm,

They strewed its ashes on the breeze,
They little guessed each grain of these
Conveyed the perfect charm.

67.-NORTH AMERICAN INDIANS.

CHARLES SPRAGUE.

Not many generations ago, where you now sit, encircled with all that exalts and embellishes civilized life, the rank thistle nodded in the wind, and the wild fox dug his hole unscared. Here lived and loved another race of beings. Beneath the same sun that rolls over your head, the Indian hunter pursued the panting deer; gazing on the same moon that smiles for you, the Indian lover wooed his dusky mate. Here the wigwam-blaze beamed on the tender and helpless, and the council-fire glared on the wise and daring. Now, they dipped their noble limbs in your sedgy lakes; and now, they paddled the light canoe along your rocky shores. Here they warred; the echoing whoop, the bloody grapple, the defying deathsong, all were here; and when the tiger-strife was over, here curled the smoke of peace.

Here, too, they worshiped; and from many a dark bosom went up a fervent prayer to the Great Spirit. He had not written his laws for them on tables of stone, but he had traced them on the tables of their hearts. The poor child of Nature knew not the God of Revelation, but the God of the Universe he acknowledged in everything around him. He beheld him in the star that sank in beauty behind his lonely dwelling; in the sacred orb that flamed on him from his mid-day throne; in the flower that snapped in the morning breeze; in the lofty pine that defied a thousand whirlwinds; in the timid warbler that never left its native grove; in the fearless eagle whose untired pinion was wet in clouds; in the worm that crawled at his feet; and in his own matchless form, glowing with a spark of that light, to whose mysterious source he bent in humble, though blind, adoration.

And all this has passed away. Across the ocean came a pilgrim bark, bearing the seeds of life and death. The former

were sown for you; the latter sprang up in the path of the simple native. Two hundred years have changed the character of a great continent, and blotted forever from its face a whole peculiar people. Art has usurped the bowers of nature, and the anointed children of education have been too powerful for the tribes of the ignorant. Here and there a stricken few remain; but how unlike their bold, untamable progenitors! The Indian of falcon glance and lion bearing, the theme of the touching ballad, the hero of the pathetic tale, is gone! and his degraded offspring crawls upon the soil where he walked in majesty, to remind us how miserable is man, when the foot of the conqueror is on his neck.

As a race, they have withered from the land. Their arrows are broken, their springs are dried up, their cabins are in the dust. Their council-fire has long since gone out on the shore, and their war-cry is fast fading to the untrodden West. Slowly and sadly they climb the distant mountains, and read their doom in the setting sun. They are shrinking before the mighty tide which is pressing them away; they must soon hear the roar of the last wave which will settle over them forever. Ages hence, the inquisitive white man, as he stands by some growing city, will ponder on the structure of their disturbed remains, and wonder to what manner of persons they belonged. They will live only in the songs and chronicles of their exter minators. Let these be faithful to their rude virtues as men, and pay due tribute to their unhappy fate as a people.

68.-DIRGE.

HOWARD WORCESTER GILBERT.

Of thy stream, Amelete, who reaches the shore,
O'er the mountains shall wearily wander no more,
But blissfully deeming his sorrows are past,
He shall gladly lie down by thy waters at last.
He shall drink of that draught of oblivion deep.
And shall fall, as at evening, serenely to sleep,
And for aye, from the regions of light and of day
He shall fade in the land of the shadow away,
Like the mist, as it melts in the blue of the sky,
Or the wave that dissolves on the shore with a sigh;
Like the dying away of the wind on the wold,
And the ending at evening a tale that is told.

And whether the spirit be only a breath
Sleeping, also, at last, in the quiet of death,

Or, whether beyond the oblivious stream,

It abandons the land of the shadow and dream,

And afar, on the peaceful Elysian plain,
Embraces the friend of its bosom again,

Still we know, as they knew,-on that rock we rest sure-
That 'tis better forever to strive and endure.

We will lay them to rest with their glorious mien,
And chaunt o ci the mortal, our tenderest threne,—

We will weep o'er their beauty, as mortals must weep,
Knowing we, too, shall follow and enter that sleep,

In the hope that at last, on some radiant shore,
We shall meet them again and be severed no more.

69.-THE AIR AND SEA.

M. F. MAURY.

The atmosphere forms a spherical shell, surrounding the earth to a depth unknown to us, by reason of its growing tenuity, as it is released from the pressure of its own superincumbent mass. Its upper surface cannot be nearer than fifty, and scarcely more remote than five hundred miles. It surrounds us on all sides, yet we see it not; it presses on us with a load of fifteen pounds on every square inch of surface of our bodies, or from seventy to one hundred tons on us in all, yet we do not so much as feel its weight. Softer than the finest down, more impalpable than the finest gossamer, it leaves the cob-web undisturbed, and scarcely stirs the lightest flower that feeds on the dew it supplies; yet it bears the fleets of nations on its wings around the world, and crushes the most refractory substances with its weight. When in motion, its force is sufficient to level with the earth the most stately forests and stable buildings, to raise the waters of the ocean into ridges like mountains, and dash the strongest ships to pieces like toys. It warms and cools by turns the earth and the living creatures that inhabit it. It draws up vapors from the sea and land, retains them dissolved in itself or suspended in cisterns of clouds, and throws them down again as rain or dew, when they are required. It bends the rays of the sun from their path to give us the aurora of the morning and twilight of evening; it disperses and refracts their various tints to beautify the approach and the retreat of the