Josiah Gilbert Holland.

BORN in Belchertown, Mass., 1819. DIED in New York, N. Y., 1881.

INTERLUDES FROM "BITTER-SWEET."

[Bitter-Sweet. 1858.—Complete Poetical Writings. 1879.]

Who can tell what a baby thinks?
Who can follow the gossamer links

By which the manikin feels his way
Out from the shore of the great unknown,
Blind, and wailing, and alone,

Into the light of day?—

Out from the shore of the unknown sea,
Tossing in pitiful agony,-

Of the unknown sea that reels and rolls,
Specked with the barks of little souls-
Barks that were launched on the other side,
And slipped from Heaven on an ebbing tide!
What does he think of his mother's eyes?
What does he think of his mother's hair?

What of the cradle-roof that flies

Forward and backward through the air?

What does he think of his mother's breast

Bare and beautiful, smooth and white,

Seeking it ever with fresh delight—

Cup of his life and couch of his rest?

What does he think when her quick embrace

Presses his hand and buries his face

Deep where the heart-throbs sink and swell

With a tenderness she can never tell,

480

SIXTEEN barrels of cider
Ripening all in a row!

Open the vent-channels wider!
See the froth, drifted like snow,
Blown by the tempest below!
Those delectable juices

Flowed through the sinuous sluices

Of sweet springs under the orchard;

Climbed into fountains that chained them;

Dripped into cups that retained them,

And swelled till they dropped, and we gained them.

Then they were gathered and tortured

By passage from hopper to vat,

And fell—every apple crushed flat.

Ah! how the bees gathered round them,

And how delicious they found them!

Oat-straw, as fragrant as clover,

Was platted, and smoothly turned over,
Weaving a neatly-ribbed basket;
And, as they built up the casket,

In went the pulp by the scoop-full,

Till the juice flowed by the stoup-full,—
Filling the half of a puncheon

While the men swallowed their luncheon.
Pure grew the stream with the stress

Of the lever and screw,

Till the last drops from the press
Were as bright as the dew.
There were these juices spilled;
There were these barrels filled;
Sixteen barrels of cider-
Ripening all in a row!

Open the vent-channels wider!
See the froth, drifted like snow.
Blown by the tempest below!

SELF-HELP.

[Plain Talks on Familiar Subjects. 1865.]

ABOR, calling, profession, scholarship, and artificial and arbitrary distinctions of all sorts, are incidents and accidents of life, and pass away. It is only manhood that remains, and it is only by manhood that man is to be measured. When this proposition shall be comprehended and accepted, it will become easy to see that there is no such thing as menial work in this world. No work that God sets a man to do-no work to which God has specially adapted a man's powers-can properly be called either menial or mean. The man who blacks your boots and blacks them well, and who engages in that variety of labor because he can do it better than he can do anything else, may have, if he choose, just as sound and true a manhood as you have, not only after he gets through the work of his life, but now, with your boots in one hand and your shilling in the other. There is very much dirtier work done in politics, and sometimes in the professions, than that of blacking boots; work, too, which destroys manhood, or renders its acquisition impossible. If I have attained the object of this lecture, I have presented to you, and impressed upon you, certain important and intimately related truths, which I will briefly recount:

First. That the faculty of self-help is that which distinguishes man from animals; that it is the Godlike element, or holds within itself the Godlike element, of his constitution.

Second. That God gives every man individuality of constitution, and the faculty to achieve individuality of character, through an intelligent selection of food for the nourishment, and labor for the discipline and development of his powers.

Third. That those counsels which convey to young persons, indiscriminately, the idea that they can make anything of themselves that they choose to make, are pernicious, from the fact that many will choose to make of themselves that for which Nature never designed them, and will thus spoil themselves for the work to which their individualities are adapted.

Fourth. That a man can never be well-made who is not, in reality, self-made; whose native individuality is not the initial and the dominant fact in his development.

Fifth. That it is a mistake to suppose that a man, in order to be selfmade, must necessarily seek the peculiar development that will prepare him for professional or political life.

Sixth. That no man has a right to be engaged in a calling or profession in which he occupies an inferior position, while there exists a call

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