.

Away, away!—in our blossoming bowers,
In the soft air wrapping these spheres of ours,
In the seas and fountains that shine with morn,
See, love is brooding, and life is born,

And breathing myriads are breaking from night,
To rejoice, like us, in motion and light.

Glide on in your beauty, ye youthful spheres!
To weave the dance that measures the years.
Glide on in the glory and gladness sent

To the farthest wall of the firmament,

The boundless, visible smile of Him,

To the veil of whose brow our lamps are dim.

RIZPAH.

And he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the hill before the Lord; and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of the harvest, in the first days, in the beginning of barley-harvest.

And Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, took sackcloth and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until the water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest upon them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night.—2 Samuel, xxi. 9, 10.

Hear what the desolate Rizpah said,

As on Gibeah's rocks she watched the dead.
The sons of Michal before her lay,

And her own fair children, dearer than they;
By a death of shame they all had died,

And were stretched on the bare rock, side by side.
And Rizpah, once the loveliest of all

That bloomed and smiled in the court of Saul,
All wasted with watching and famine now,
And scorched by the sun her haggard brow,
Sat, mournfully guarding their corpses there,
And murmured a strange and solemn air;
The low, heart-broken, and wailing strain.
Of a mother that mourns her children slain.

I have made the crags my home, and spread
On their desert backs my sackcloth bed;
I have eaten the bitter herb of the rocks,
And drank the midnight dew in my
locks;

I have wept till I could not weep, and the pain
Of my burning eyeballs went to my brain-
Seven blackened corpses before me lie,

In the blaze of the sun and the winds of the sky.
I have watched them through the burning day,
And driven the vulture and raven away;
And the cormorant wheeled in circles round,
Yet feared to alight on the guarded ground.
And, when the shadows of twilight came,
I have seen the hyena's eyes of flame,
And heard at my side his stealthy tread,
But aye at my shout the savage fled !
And I threw the lighted brand, to fright
The jackal and wolf that yelled in the night.

Ye were foully murdered, my hapless sons.
By the hands of wicked and cruel ones;
Yet fell in your fresh and blooming prime,
All innocent, for your father's crime.
He sinned—but he paid the price of his guilt,
When his blood by a nameless hand was spilt;
When he strove with the heathen host in vain,
And fell with the flower of his people slain,
And the sceptre his children's hands should sway,
From his injured lineage passed away.

But I hoped that the cottage roof would be
A safe retreat for my sons and me;

And that while they ripened to manhood fast,

They should wean my thoughts from woes of the past :
And my bosom swelled with a mother's pride,

As they stood in their beauty and strength by my side,
Tall like their sire, with the princely grace
Of his stately form, and the bloom of his face.

Oh, what an hour for a mother's heart,
When the pitiless ruffians tore us apart!
When I clasped their knees and wept and prayed,
And struggled and shrieked to heaven for aid,
And clung to my sons with desperate strength,
Till the murderers loosed my hold at length,
And bore me breathless and faint aside,
In their iron arms, while my children died.
They died—and the mother that gave them birth
Is forbid to cover their bones with earth.

The barley harvest was nodding white,
When my children died on the rocky height,
And the reapers were singing on hill and plain,
When I came to my task of sorrow and pain.
But now the season of rain is nigh,
The sun is dim in the thickening sky,

And the clouds in sullen darkness rest.
When he hides his light at the doors of the west,
I hear the howl of the wind that brings
The long drear storm on its heavy wings;
But the howling wind, and the driving rain.
Will beat on my houseless head in vain :
I shall stay, from my murdered sons to scare
The beasts of the desert, and fowls of the air.

When the Israelites took possession of the land of Canaan, they were commanded to extirpate the occupants of the country. This was but imperfectly fulfilled in Israel and its borders there always remained some of the descendants of the primitive inhabitants. About a thousand years before Christ, Saul, king of Israel, slew some of the Gibeonites, a remnant of the Amorites.— A few years after, the Gibeonites, like other savages, demanded of David, as a satisfaction for the injury they had sustained from his predecessor, life for life. They required that seven men of the posterity of Saul should be delivered to them to be hanged, and David consented to this cruel proposition. The king took two sons of Saul and Rizpah, and five sons of Michal, Saul's daughter, and delivered them to the Gibeonites. The fearful vengeance executed upon these men, and the constant heart-rending fondness of Rizpah, are already known from the words of the scripture and the pathetic verses of the poet.

AGRICULTURAL ODE.

Far back in the ages,

The plough with wreaths was crowned,
The hands of kings and sages

Entwined the chaplet round;

Till men of spoil

Disdained the toil

By which the world was nourished,
And blood and pillage were the soil
In which their laurels flourished.

-Now the world her fault repairs—
The guilt that stains her story,
And weeps her crimes amid the cares
That formed her earliest glory.

The proud throne shall crumble,
The diadem shall wane,

The tribes of earth shall humble
The pride of these who reign;
And war shall lay

His pomp away;—

The fame that heroes cherish,
The glory earned in deadly fray
Shall fade, decay and perish.
—Honour waits o'er all the earth,
Through endless generations,
The art that calls the harvest forth,
And feeds the expectant nations.

THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS.

The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year,
Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and

sere.

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 shrub 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 sprung 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.

FITZ-GREENE HALLECK,

;

An American poet of rare merit. He has not written much but what he has written is nearly faultless. He possesses warm feeling, rich, yet playful, fancy, a copious flow of words, and very melodious versification.

Marco Bozzaris was a leader of the Greeks in the late revolutionary war he was killed in the assault of a Turkish camp. Wounded by a shot in the side, he concealed the accident, and continued to fight, until a ball struck him in the face; he fell, and instantly expired. Their leader's death becoming known, the Souliotes whom Bozzaris commanded, retreated, carrying off with them their general's body.

MARCO BOZZARIS.

At midnight, in his guarded tent,

The Turk was dreaming of the hour

When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,

Should tremble at his

power;