. Away, away!—in our blossoming bowers, And breathing myriads are breaking from night, Glide on in your beauty, ye youthful spheres! 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. And her own fair children, dearer than they; And were stretched on the bare rock, side by side. That bloomed and smiled in the court of Saul, I have made the crags my home, and spread I have wept till I could not weep, and the pain In the blaze of the sun and the winds of the sky. Ye were foully murdered, my hapless sons. But I hoped that the cottage roof would be And that while they ripened to manhood fast, They should wean my thoughts from woes of the past : As they stood in their beauty and strength by my side, Oh, what an hour for a mother's heart, The barley harvest was nodding white, And the clouds in sullen darkness rest. 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, Entwined the chaplet round; Till men of spoil Disdained the toil By which the world was nourished, -Now the world her fault repairs— The proud throne shall crumble, The tribes of earth shall humble His pomp away;— The fame that heroes cherish, THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS. The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, 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? The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago, 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, And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief: 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; |