gives them mystic grandeur to our fancies hides their evils from our disgust. Belted knights and barons bold will be ever fine in story; we call them up in their strength and bravery; we not only reanimate them with a new life of resurrection, but we clothe them with a new light of transfiguration. In this, as in all things, the beautiful is immortal, the bad has perished. These men rise up before us in their chivalric and heroic deeds, but the witnesses of their crimes do not come so quickly; the serfs whom they trampled are nameless and numberless in the dust of centuries; the cries of their midnight murders have passed to as deep a silence as the laughter of their midnight revels; the eyes which they caused to weep have long closed in final slumber, and the hearts which they crushed are quiet in eternal rest. A poetry of the poor, which must necessarily be a moral poetry, a poetry of sentiment and sympathy, has no alliance with the gorgeousness of chivalric times; and the physical luxuriance and voluptuous personification, which belonged to pagan mythology, have no congruity with modern poetry.

Poetry must embody faith, or it is an empty sound. Our faith has not taken the material universe from poetry, but it has changed their relations. We have not a distinct deity for every region of nature; every object to us does not present an embodied god; we see no goddess blush in the morning's dawn; we behold no divinity clothing himself with light in the rising sun; we hear no celestial anger in the tempest of the winds and the roaring of the seas; we see no gods at peace in the serene calm of the blue sky, and the gladsome quiet of the verdant earth; we have no vision of naiad or nymph, by stream or fountain, in glen or cavern.

And it is not, as I have said, that creation is empty, or that poetry has deserted nature. The same beautiful nature is with us as with the ancients; around us as around the men of other days; around Wordsworth as around Homer, around Bryant as around Hesiod. Ages have not dimmed the sun, nor

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dried up from the stars their rivers of light. The same glori ous temple is above us, and the same gorgeous floor beneath us; the desert has still its spots of Eden, the sky has still its palaces of cloud, the universe is still the same; but the gods many and the lords many," which bewildered fancy fashioned, have dissolved before enlightened reason. One God and one Lord reigns upon the throne; the King eternal and immortal sways the sceptre of the worlds, and commands the homage of their worship; one spirit moves and lives in all; one spirit guides and governs all. The ocean mirrors his immensity, the thunder shouts his praise; cataracts, in the mighty wilderness, foam perennial incense; the hills are his everlasting altars, and all the elements are his ministers. Hence our literature above all, our poetry - has not only a more exalted inspiration, but a more expansive interest; the poor have their importance as the rich, for Jehovah has made them both, and before Jehovah both are equal.

LESSON LXXXI.

Flowers for the Heart. ELLIOTT.

FLOWERS! winter flowers!- the child is dead,
The mother cannot speak :

O, softly couch his little head,
Or Mary's heart will break!

Amid those curls of flaxen hair

This pale pink ribbon twine,
And on the little bosom there

Place this wan lock of mine.

U

How like a form in cold, white stone
The coffined infant lies!

Look, mother, on thy little one!
And tears will fill thine eyes.

She cannot weep; more faint she grows,
More deadly pale and still :
Flowers! O, a flower! a winter rose,
That tiny hand to fill.

Go, search the fields! the lichen wet
Bends o'er th' unfailing well;
Beneath the furrow lingers yet
The scarlet pimpernel.

Peeps not a snow-drop in the bower
Where never froze the spring?
A daisy! Ah! bring childhood's flower!
The half-blown daisy bring!

Yes, lay the daisy's little head
Beside the little cheek;

O, haste! the last of five is dead!
The childless cannot speak!

LESSON LXXXII.

The First Mild Day of Spring. WORDSWORTH.

IT is the first mild day of March:
Each minute, sweeter than before,

The redbreast sings from the tall larch
That stands beside our door.

There is a blessing in the air,

Which seems a sense of joy to yield To the bare trees, and mountains bare, And grass in the green field.

My sister! ('tis a wish of mine)

Now that our morning meal is done, Make haste, your morning task resign; Come forth and feel the sun.

Edward will come with

you; and

pray

Put on with speed your woodland dress;

And bring no book; for this one day
We'll give to idleness.

No joyless forms shall regulate

Our living Calendar:

We from to-day, my friend, will date

The opening of the year.

Love, now a universal birth,

From heart to heart is stealing,

From earth to man, from man to earth;
It is the hour of feeling.

One moment now may give us more
Than fifty years of reason:
Our minds will drink at every pore
The spirit of the season.

Some silent laws our hearts will make,

Which they shall long obey:

We for the year to come may take

Our temper from to-day.

And from the blessed power that rolls
About, below, above,

We'll frame the measure of our souls:
They shall be tuned to love.

LESSON LXXXIII.

Evening in Italy. BYRON.

THE moon is up, and yet it is not night;
Sunset divides the sky with her; a sea
Of glory streams along the alpine height

Of blue Friuli's mountains; heaven is free
From clouds, but of all colors seems to be,
Melted to one vast iris of the west,
Where the day joins the past eternity;

While, on the other hand, meek Dian's crest Floats through the azure air an island of the blest!

A single star is at her side, and reigns

With her o'er half the lovely heaven; but still
Yon sunny sea heaves brightly, and remains
Rolled o'er the peak of the far Rhætian hill,
As day and night contending were, until
Nature reclaimed her order:

-

gently flows

The deep-dyed Brenta, where their hues instil

The odorous purple of a new-born rose,

Which streams upon her stream, and glassed within it glows,

Filled with the face of heaven, which from afar

Comes down upon the waters: all its hues,