Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, Green

that lately sprang and stood

In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous

sisterhood?

Alas! they all are in their graves, the gentle race of flowers

Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and
good of ours.

The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold,
November rain,

Calls not, from out the gloomy earth, the lovely
ones again.

The wind-flower and the violet, they perished

long ago,

And the brier-rose and the orchids died amid the

summer glow;

But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,

And the yellow sun-flower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,

Till fell the frost from the clear, cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,

And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.

And now, when comes the calm, mild day, as still such days will come,

To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;

Things Growing

Green When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, Things though all the trees are still,

Growing

And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill,

The south wind searches for the flowers whose

fragrance late he bore,

And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

Autumn's Mirth

'Tis all a myth that Autumn grieves,
For, watch the rain among the leaves;
With silver fingers dimly seen
It makes each leaf a tambourine,
And swings and leaps with elfin mirth.
To kiss the brow of mother earth;
Or, laughing 'mid the trembling grass,
It nods a greeting as you pass.
Oh! hear the rain amid the leaves,
"Tis all a myth that Autumn grieves!

"Tis all a myth that Autumn grieves,
For, list the wind among the sheaves;
Far sweeter than the breath of May,
Or storied scents of old Cathay,

It blends the perfumes rare and good
Of spicy pine and hickory wood
And with a voice in gayest chime,
It prates of rifled mint and thyme.
Oh! scent the wind among the sheaves,
"Tis all a myth that Autumn grieves!

'Tis all a myth that Autumn grieves,
Behold the wondrous web she weaves!
By viewless hands her thread is spun
Of evening vapors shyly won.
Across the grass from side to side
A myriad unseen shuttles glide
Throughout the night, till on the height
Aurora leads the laggard light.
Behold the wondrous web she weaves,
"Tis all a myth that Autumn grieves!
SAMUEL MINTURN PECK.

Green Things Growing

On the Wing

66

Our "little brothers of the air," have you named them all without a gun, as Emerson asks in Forbearance "? Shy, glancing eyes peer from nests half-hidden in leaves; the forest is vocal with melody, the air is tremulous with the whirr of tiny wings.

Poet-singers have written undying lines about their brother minstrels of the wood, and the "blithe_lark," especially, has a proud place in poetry, apostrophized as he is by Shakespeare, Shelley, Frederick Tennyson, Wordsworth, and The Ettrick Shepherd.

As the skylark's note dies away we hear the saucy chatter of Cranch's Bobolink, the twitter of Keats's Goldfinches, the mournful cry of Celia Thaxter's Sandpiper, and the revolving wheel of Emily Dickinson's Humming-bird, with its resonance of emerald, its rush of cochineal. The feathered warblers, Robin, Bluebird, Swallow, speed their southern flight, but there are other songs of summer, voices of sweet and tiny cousins, heard at the lazy noontide; chirpings, rustlings of the green little vaulters in the sunny grass. And if the wee grasshoppers and those warm little housekeepers the crickets, have served as themes for Keats and Leigh Hunt, so has the humble bee provoked his tribute from the poets:

"His feet are shod with gauze,

His helmet is of gold;

His breast a single onyx

With chrysophrase inlaid."

Come within earshot of his drowsy hum, his breezy bass, -Father Tabb's publican bee,

"Collecting the tax

On honey and wax,”

or Emerson's yellow-breeched philosopher,

"Seeing only what is fair,

Sipping only what is sweet.”