Their light steps thrill to the wild wood strains,
And youth is abroad in my green domains.

But ye! ye are changed since I met you last!
There is something bright from your features past!
There is that come over your brow and eye
Which speaks of a world where the flowers must die!
Ye smile, but your smile has a dimness yet;
—Oh, what have ye looked on since last we met?
Ye are changed, ye are changed !—and I see not here
All whom I saw in the vanished year!

There were graceful heads, with their ringlets bright,
Which tossed in the breeze with a play of light;
There were eyes, in whose glistening laughter lay
No faint remembrance of dull decay!

I know whence the shadow comes o'er you now:
Ye have strewn the dust on the sunny brow;
Ye have given the lovely to earth's embrace;
She hath taken the fairest of beauty's race;
With their laughing eyes and their festal crown,
They are gone from among you in silence down!
They are gone from among you, the young and fair!
Ye have lost the gleam of their shining hair!
But I know of a land where there comes no blight;
I shall meet them there, with their eyes of light:
Where death midst the beams of the morn may dwell
I tarry no longer! Farewell! Farewell!

The summer is coming, on soft wings borne;
Ye may press the grape, ye may bind the corn!
For me I depart to a brighter shore;

Ye are marked by death, ye are mine no more:

I

go

where the loved that have left you dwell,

And the flowers are not death's: Fare ye well! Farewell!

NOTES.-Mrs. HEMANS was born in Liverpool, 1793, and died in Dublin, 1835, being in her 42nd year. Her hymns and poems prove that she possessed a very accurate and musical taste, while she "fed her heart upon all things noble."

Waking earth-first signs of renewed life in plants.

Winds

of violet's birth-air scented by violets. Fallen_fanes= or old temples of Italy covered with spring flowers. Larch tassels the flowers or cones of the larch fir. Night-bird's lay song of the nightingale. Loosed the chain melted the ice. Sparry caves = caverns covered with spar. Strewn with dust = buried.

ARGUMENT OF THE POEM.-Spring is represented as announcing its coming from the warm south its signs being the buds and flowers, the opening chestnuts of Italy in the south and the tassel-like bloom of the larch in the north. The storms of winter over, the fisherman embarks once more. The joy of the animal creation in the renewed life is seen in the merry bound of the reindeer and the trilling song of the nightingale. The ice and snow all melted, the full springs rush onward to the open sea. The young are called upon to sing and rejoice in this the advent of spring. Men of anxiety are bidden to haste from their close dwellings to the woods and glens to join in the common joy. Then spring speaks of a sorrowful change since its last visit. Some of the young are missed. This loss accounts for the sadness of the left. Tells of a hope in another land: and reminds of the coming summer with its vintage song and harvest home. Bids "farewell" to the children of earth, and departs for the land where flowers never fade and death

never comes.

EXERCISES.-I. Define,-pasture, resounds, careworn, dusky, features, ringlets, remembrance, decay, and silence. 2. Paraphrase, that is, put into your own words, the first stanza. 3. Select six simple sentences (each sentence must have but one finite verb).

SIR ISAAC

Fragile, easy to be broken.
Velocity, rate of motion.
Excited, moved to strong feeling.
Accelerating, increasing in speed.
Assistance, help.

Geometry, the science of form
and magnitude.

Galileo, the great Italian

NEWTON.

Unremitting, without leaving off.
Bicycle, a seat upon two wheels.
Secluded, shut from sight.
Architect, one who plans a build.
ing.

Dismissed, sent away.
Suspense, anxious uncertainty.
philosopher, had been dead

hardly one year, when on December 25th, 1642, at the

manor house of Woolsthorpe, in Lincolnshire, Isaac Newton was born. Isaac was a weak and sickly child; and hence, finding the boyish sports of his companions too much for his fragile body, he took to making, with such tools as he could command, model mills, waterclocks, sundials, and a carriage driven by the rider-in fact, the bicycle, though without the name.

In the public school at Grantham, to which the little fellow was sent, he at first occupied only a low place, until having chastised a schoolmate, much his superior in strength, he determined that he would also be his master in learning; and very soon he not only gave him the go-by but rose to the highest place in the school. In his fifteenth year, Isaac's stepfather, the Rev. Barnabas Smith, dying, he was taken from school to assist in the management of the small manor farm; but it seems that by this time his love of learning had so far mastered his will, that the farm and market duties were pretty generally thrown upon an old and faithful servant, while Isaac quietly pursued his studies by the wayside, or in some secluded. nook.

The young farmer returned to school, and after nearly a year of diligent study he proceeded to Cambridge in 1661, and was entered as a sub-sizar at Trinity College. Here, having to read "Kepler's Optics," he found the necessity for a knowledge of geometry, which he did not then possess. He therefore turned to "Euclid's Elements," for such assistance as it might afford. And now he found where his strength lay; for he was soon able to throw aside Euclid as a "trifling book," and to take to such heavier reading as could be found in the works of Schooten, Descartes, and Wallis.

In 1665, Newton took his B.A. degree, and in the

C

same year he worked out a new and valuable method of calculation known as Fluxions. And now for several years Newton's course was a series of brilliant discoveries, each the result of well-directed and unremitting labour, combined with a mathematical skill rarely if ever equalled.

As an example of how he thought and worked, we will endeavour to translate into such phrases as you may be able to follow, one of the lines of thought which our philosopher pursued about this time. It appears then, that during the long vacation, Newton was sitting in the manor garden at Woolsthorpe, when his attention was aroused by an apple falling to the ground.

He immediately asked himself "Why did this happen?" To obtain a reply he carefully reviewed all that his predecessors had taught respecting falling bodies. He learned that bodies projected upwards into the air or falling downwards to the earth did not move at a uniform rate throughout their course, but with a rapidly decreasing velocity upwards and a corresponding accelerating velocity downwards. This was owing to the fact that the earth draws all bodies near its surface towards its own centre; and this drawing force had been calculated as giving to a falling body a velocity of about 32 feet per second.

Thus far Newton was treading on ground familiar to the philosophers of his own time. They, however, stopped at the consideration of this law as applicable to bodies falling at the earth's surface. To them it appeared that bodies fell to the earth by virtue of a principle peculiar to the earth itself. But Newton's mind soared beyond this; for, said he, if this attracting power existing in the earth draws small bodies near its surface towards

itself, why may it not exert the same influence, though in a less degree, upon bodies far removed from its surface? And if so, why not upon the moon? And if the earth has this power, may not the sun and the planets have a like power? In short, to our philosopher it appeared that by analogy he had really discovered the principle on which the Great Architect rules the motions of the moon about the earth, and the earth and its sister planets about the sun.

Grand and beautiful as was the theory, it alone did not satisfy Newton. To him proof was wanting. This must be supplied, or the theory would be little more than the fairy dream of the poet. Little rest had the ardent thinker until this proof was found. Briefly and simply put, it ran somewhat thus :

The moon revolves in a known orbit at a distance of about 240,000 miles from the earth's centre. The surface on which we live and at which bodies are observed to fall, is about 4000 miles from the same centre. That is, the moon is sixty times as far from the earth's centre as is the earth's own surface. It would therefore appear, according to the known law of attraction, that the drawing or attracting force of the earth upon the moon should be th of that which it exerts on bodies at its own surface. But the latter was known by experiment, and the moon's motion had also been calculated. If then the attracting power of the earth upon the moon, as calculated according to the above proportion, should equal the real force necessary to produce its motion in its orbit, then the theory would be true.

When Newton first worked out this problem, with the most exact figures that the existing knowledge of the earth and moon could supply, the result did not, alas!