FESTAL DAYS.

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On! the coming of these festal days acts on me as a spell,

Reminding me of days and hours remembered all too well,

When, with dear ones at my side, and hearts all love and truth,

We sat beside that happy hearth, amid the sports of youth.

On the morning of these festal days, what if the wind was drear?

Who minds the storm on Christmas day? It comes but once a year:

A warm and heartfelt greeting awaits our journey's end,

And each one on the other looks, as meeteth child and friend.

Oh ye pleasant festal days! let me linger and record

The sweet and bright young faces all around that ample board;

But my eye is filled with tears, and my

is full of pain,

heart

For these blessed happy Christmas days, they ne'er can come again.

The loving circle round the hearth, 'tis smaller than of old;

There are vacant places round the board, fond hearts are growing cold.

Of happy faces, some are gone; the spoiler has been there;

Oh, these festal days are dimmed with grief, they are not what they were.

But there will be a festal day when time shall be no more,

When we shall meet our loved and lost on Jordan's waveless shore;

No storms shall rage, no tempests low'r, but skies serene and fair.

On that bright day, that glorious morn, oh, may we all meet there.

FRIENDSHIP.
Anou.

FRIENDSHIP is love from all its dross refin'd,
The chaste enjoyment of the immortal mind.
This gift divine, the Power Supreme bestows,
To aid our joys, and dissipate our woes;
To make the cheerful hours of life more gay,
And drive the melancholy shades away.

THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS.

Bryant.

THE melancholy days are come, the saddest of

the year,

Of wailing winds and naked woods and meadows brown and sear.

Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the withered leaves lie dead;

They rustle to the eddying gust and to the rabbit's tread.

The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,

And from the wood top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.

Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers 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 wild rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;

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

And the yellow sunflower 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;

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

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.

And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,

The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side;

In the cold moist earth we laid her when the forest cast the leaf,

And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:

Yet not unmeet it was that one like that young friend of ours,

So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.

HUMAN LIFE.

Walter Scott.

TWIST ye, twine ye, even so
Mingle shades of joy and woe;

Hope and fear, and peace and strife,
Weave the thread of human life.

While the mystic twist is spinning,
And the infant's life beginning,
Dimly seen through twilight bending,
Lo! what varied shapes attending.

Passions wild, and follies vain ;
Pleasures, soon exchanged for pain;
Hope and fear, and peace and strife,
Form the thread of human life.