What cloud is that, which, girt with wings,
Comes sweeping where proud Corinth smiles?
No shadowy cloud; that vessel brings
The dove from far Atlantic isles;
Lo! o'er her, with a dark blue blent,
There waves a starry firmament.

The warriour wakes; there is no cloud
Upon his heart; the morning sun

Shines through his tent, and fierce and loud

Come shouts, as when the battle's won.

And little taught by yester night,

The Satrap arms again for fight.

LESSON XVII.

The Rivulet. -BRYANT.

THIS little rill that, from the springs
Of yonder grove, its current brings,
Plays on the slope awhile, and then
Goes prattling into groves again,
Oft to its warbling waters drew
My little feet when life was new.
When woods in early green were drest,
And from the chambers of the west
The warmer breezes, travelling out,
Breathed the new scent of flowers about,
My truant steps from home would stray,
Upon its grassy side to play;

Το crop the violet on its brim,
And listen to the throstle's hymn,
With blooming cheek and open brow,
As
young and gay, sweet rill, as thou.

And when the days of boyhood came,
And I had grown in love with fame,
Duly I sought thy banks, and tried
My first rude numbers by thy side.
Words cannot tell how glad and gay
The scenes of life before me lay.

High visions then, and lofty schemes
Glorious and bright as fairy dreams,
And daring hopes, that now to speak
Would bring the blood into my cheek,
Passed o'er me; and I wrote on high
A name I deemed should never die.

Upon yon hill

Years change thee not.
The tall old maples, verdant still,
Yet tell, in proud and grand decay,
How swift the years have passed away,
Since first, a child, and half afraid,
I wandered in the forest shade.
But thou, gay, merry rivulet,
Dost dimple, play, and prattle yet;
And sporting with the sands that pave
The windings of thy silver wave,
And dancing to thy own wild chime,
Thou laughest at the lapse of time.

The same sweet sounds are in my ear My early childhood loved to hear; As pure thy limpid waters run, As bright they sparkle to the sun; As fresh the herbs that crowd to drink The moisture of thy oozy brink ; The violet there, in soft May dew, Comes up, as modest and as blue; As green amid thy current's stress, Floats the scarce-rooted water cress; And the brown ground bird, in thy glen, Still chirps as merrily as then.

Thou changest not-but I am changed, Since first thy pleasant banks I ranged; And the grave stranger, come to see The play-place of his infancy, Has scarce a single trace of him, Who sported once upon thy brim. The visions of my youth are past—Too bright, too beautiful to last.

I've tried the world-it wears no more The colouring of romance it wore.

Yet well has nature kept the truth-
She promised to my earliest youth;
The radiant beauty, shed abroad
On all the glorious works of God,
Shows freshly, to my sobered eye,
Each charm it wore in days gone by.

A few brief years shall pass away,
And I, all trembling, weak, and gray,
Bowed to the earth, which waits to told
My ashes in the embracing mould,
(If haply the dark will of fate
Indulge my life so long a date)
May come for the last time to look
Upon my childhood's favourite brook.
Then dimly on my eyes shall gleam
The sparkle of thy dancing stream;
And faintly on my ear shall fall
Thy prattling current's merry call;
Yet shalt thou flow as glad and bright
As when thou met'st my infant sight.

And I shall sleep and on thy side,
As ages after ages glide,

Children their early sports shall try,
And pass to hoary age and die.

But thou, unchanged from year to year,
Gaily shalt play and glitter here;
Amid young flowers and tender grass
Thy endless infancy shalt pass;
And, singing down thy narrow glen,
Shalt mock the fading race of men.

LESSON XVIII.

The Angler.-WASHINGTON IRVING.

Ir is said, that many an unlucky urchin is induced to run away from his family, and betake himself to a seafaring life, from reading the history of Robinson Crusoe; and I suspect that, in like manner, many of those worthy gentlemen, who are given to haunt the sides of pastoral streams, with angle

rod in hand, may trace the origin of their passion to the seductive pages of honest Izaak Walton. I recollect studying his "Complete Angler" several years since, in company with a knot of friends in America, and, moreover, that we were all completely bitten with the Angling Mania. It was early in the year; but as soon as the weather was auspicious, and that the spring began to melt into the verge of summer, we took rod in hand, and sallied forth into the country, as stark mad as was ever Don Quixote from reading books of chivalry.

One of our party had equalled the Don in the fulness of his equipments; being attired cap-a-pie for the enterprise. He wore a broad skirted, fustian coat, perplexed with half a hundred pockets; a pair of stout shoes and leathern gaiters; a basket, slung on one side for fish; a patent rod; a landing net, and a score of other inconveniences only to be found in the true Angler's Armory. Thus harnessed for the field, he was as great a matter of stare and wonderment among the country folk, who had never seen a regular angler, as was the steel-clad hero of La Mancha, among the goat-herds of the Sierra Morena.

Our first essay was along a mountain brook, among the highlands of the Hudson-a most unfortunate place for the exercise of those piscatory tactics, which had been invented along the velvet margins of quiet English rivulets. It was one of those wild streams, which lavish, among our romantic solitudes, unheeded beauties enough to fill the sketch book of a hunter of the picturesque. Sometimes it would leap down rocky shelves, making small cascades, over which the trees threw their broad balancing sprays-and long, nameless weeds hung in fringes from the impending banks, dripping with diamond drops. Sometimes it would brawl and fret along a ravine, in the matted shade of a forest, filling it with murmurs; and, after this termagant career, would steal forth into open day with the most placid air imaginable as I have seen some shrew of a housewife, after filling her home with uproar and ill-humour, come dimpling out of doors, swimming and courtesying and smiling upon all the world.

How smoothly would this vagrant brook glide, at such times, through some bosom of green meadow land, among the mountains, where the quiet was only interrupted by the occasional tinkling of a bell, from the lazy cattle among the clover, or the sound of the woodcutter's axe from the neighbouring forest.

For my part, I was always a bungler at all kinds of sport, that required either patience or adroitness; and had not angled above half an hour, before I had completely "satisfied the sentiment," and convinced myself of the truth of Izaak Walton's opinion, that angling is something like poetry—a man must be born to it. I hooked myself, instead of the fish; tangled my line in every tree; lost my bait; broke my rod; until I gave up the attempt in despair, and passed the day under the trees, reading old Walton; satisfied that it was his fascinating vein of honest simplicity, and rural feeling, that had bewitched me, and not the passion for angling.

My companions, however, were more persevering in their delusion. I have them, at this moment, before my eyes, stealing along the border of the brook, where it lay open to the day, or only fringed by shrubs and bushes. I see the bittern, rising with hollow scream, as they break in upon his rarely invaded haunt; the king-fisher, watching them from his dry tree, that overhangs the deep black mill-pond, in the gorge of the hills; the tortoise, letting himself slip sideways, off from the stone or log, on which he is sunning himself; and the panic struck frog, plumping in headlong, as they approach, and spreading an alarm throughout the watery world around.

I recollect, also, that after toiling, and watching, and creeping about, for the greater part of the day, with scarcely any success, in spite of all our admirable apparatus, a lubberly country urchin, came down from the hills, with a rod made from a branch of a tree, a few yards of twine, and, as heaven shall help me! I believe, a crooked pin for a hook, baited with a vile earth worm, and, in half an hour, he caught more fish, than we had had nibbles throughout the day!

But, above all, I recollect the "good, honest, wholesome, hungry," repast, which we made under a beech tree, just by a spring of pure sweet water, that stole out of the side of a hill; and how, when it was over, one of the party read old Izaak Walton's scene with the milk maid, while I lay on the grass, and built castles in a bright pile of clouds, until I fell asleep.