EVENING BY THE SEA-SHORE.
WHEN fervid summer crisps the shrinking nerve,
And every prismed rock doth catch the ray
As in a burning glass, 'tis wise to seek
This city of the wave. For here the dews
With which Hygeia feeds the flower of life
Are ever freshening in their secret founts.
Here may'st thou talk with the ocean, and no ear
Of gossip islet on thy words shall feed.
Send thy free thought upon the winged winds,
That sweep the castles of an older world,
And what shall bar it from their ivied heights?
-Tis well to talk with Ocean. Man may cast
His pearl of language on unstable hearts,
And, thriftless sower! reap the winds again.
But thou, all-conquering element, dost grave
Strong characters upon the eternal rock,
Furrowing the brow that holdeth speech with thee.
Musing beneath yon awful cliffs, the soul,
That brief shell-gatherer on the shores of time,
Feels as a brother to the drop that hangs
One moment trembling on thy crest, and sinks
Into the bosom of the boundless wave.
-And see, outspreading her broad, silver scroll
Forth comes the moon, that meek ambassador,
Bearing Heaven's message to the mighty surge.
Yet he, who listeneth to its hoarse reply,
Echoing in anger through the channel'd depths.
Will deem its language all too arrogant,
And earth's best dialect too poor to claim
Benignant notice from the star-pav'd skies,
And man too pitiful to lift himself
In the frail armour of his moth-crush'd pride,
Amid o'ershadowing nature's majesty.
"It may be Autumn, yea Winter with the woman-but with the mother, as a mother, it is always Spring."-SERMON OF THE Rev. THOMAS COBBett, at Lynn, 1665.
I SAW an aged woman bow
To weariness and care,
Time wrote his sorrows on her brow
And 'mid her frosted hair.
Hope, from her breast had torn away
Its rooting, scathed and dry,
And on the pleasures of the gay
She turned a joyless eye.
What was it that like sunbeam clear
O'er her wan features run,
As pressing towards her deafened ear
I named her absent son?
What was it! Ask a mother's breast
Through which a fountain flows Perennial, fathomless and blest,
By winter never froze.
What was it? Ask the King of kings,
Who hath decreed, above,
That change should mark all earthly things, Except a mother's love.
THERE fell no rain on Israel. The sad trees,
Reft of their coronals, and the crisp vines,
And flowers whose dewless bosoms sought the dust,
Mourned the long drought. The miserable herds
Pined on, and perished 'mid the scorching fields;
And near the vanished fountains where they used
Freely to slake their thirst, the moaning flocks
Laid their parched mouths and died.
Who saw high visions of unuttered things,
Dwelt, in deep-musing solitude, apart
Upon the banks of Cherith. Dark winged birds,
Intractable and fierce, were strangely moved
To shun the hoarse cries of their callow brood,
And night and morning lay their gathered spoils
Down at his feet. So, of the brook he drank,
Till pitiless suns exhaled that slender rill
Which, singing, used to glide to Jordan's breast.
Then warned of God, he rose and went his way
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