O Thou Transcendent!

Nameless, the fiber and the breath,

Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou center

of them,

Thou pulse, thou motive of the stars, suns, systems,

That circling move in order, safe, harmonious,

Athwart the shapeless vastnesses of space,—

How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if out of myself

I could not launch to those superior universes?

Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God,

At Nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death, But that I turning call to thee, O soul,

And lo, thou gently masterest the orbs,

Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death,

And fillest, swellest full the vastness of Space!

Τ'

Witch Hazel Bloom

HE rich, ripe beauty of the mature year now delights all who in our clime and latitude walk forth to view the great colour harmonies of the forests, the completed repose of the harvested fields, and breathe the vital elixir of the border air, blending summer sweetness with winter strength. If the pearl of the year be June, with its glorious sensuous loveliness, then October is the ruby, deeply founded, superbly toned, a crystallization, not an accretion, and royal even in the rough. For there is no year in which October is not glorious, though its degrees of hospitality are by no means uniform. Stern storms and frosts may forbid its minor graces of tenderness,-its veiling hazes, its wooing zephyrs, its blossoming of clover, its warm hillsides beneath the curtained sun, its clear north winds that sweep the heavens clear, and provoke the mountains into joy. But never can storms or frosts utterly abolish the transfiguring colour of the ripening trees, which under skies of cloud as

beneath the sun display the grand artistry of Nature; nor can these change the magic of the leafy woodland paths, which one treads as if in another world from that of business, books, newspapers and politics, which compel his attention where he and his fellow-mortals confront their artificial existence.

The forest bloom has departed, the birds have flown, the squirrels and the boys are a-nutting; on the roadsides few flowers besides the asters linger and the long sprays of the wreath goldenrod, the humbler members of the sunflower kindred and the late gentians; in the fields appear those second blossoms that spring from the mowed down golden-rods, ox-eye daisies and black-eyed Susans. Down the forest aisles streams the unique magnetic fragrance of the witch hazel, which only of all fragrances could harmonize with the sacred sweetness of the autumn woodland. familiar of the flowers knows that a month hence he shall find these and a score of flowers besides, in places that he wots of, but to the general eye the gay children of Nature have departed, and winter seems waiting around the corner to close the door.

A

Still the charm of the fall air softens the omens. of departure. The wild fragrance of the fallen foliage rises like an oblation to the generous gen

ius of Nature, and thrills the sense with kinship of all that lives which now and again fills the heart of Nature's lover, as he reclines on the bare rocks of the mountain peak, and beholds the varied earth,—the wild wood, the clearing, the reaped grain-field, the meadow with its sweet rowen, the bare brown earth reft of its roots or tubers, the corn-stooks like to tented camps and the piles of sunny pumpkins among them; the abandoned summer pastures, the cattle feeding in the mowings; the orchards with their heaps of green, ruddy or yellow apples-some for the market, some for the home, much for the cider mill; the tobacco fields with their scattered little sprouts since the harvest; the onion fields with their rows of bulbs pulled and deployed along the lines of their original ranks, and whatsoever other truck of the husbandman is visible in the fertile valley beneath

his eyes.

Far off on his horizons rise in blue remoteness the heights of greater hills, and as he calls their names he seems to share their prospects also, so that from Tom or Holyoke he looks not only on the winding Connecticut, but as well on the twin lakes of Salisbury or across the wide valley of the Hudson to the Catskills, as if he were on the wild, treeless top of Taconic Dome; or perchance across to peaceful Sugar river, as if he were on

Ascutney; or over multitudinous hills to the Adirondacks, as if it were Greylock he stood on. All the mountain world is his in a new sense; it almost seems as if it were but to will, and be transported to Greylock, to Mettawampe, or to Mettawee, as the oriental heroes journey. But no magic carpet has ever been owned in New England, except the one Madame Blavatsky had at Spirit Vale, and that she took with her.

This fall there is no swift and sweeping change of colour in the hills, but as a whole the great effect is delayed and prolonged; the work began later than usual, and individual trees have suddenly reddened or bloomed in golden luxuriance, and sooner than their wont have shed their leaves and stand bare amid their yet verdant fellows. But we cannot clearly know in our valley when in the northern or western hills, lifted from a thousand to three thousand feet higher, this magical painting of the autumn began. A month ago there was a marshy pasture on the side of Mettawampe as brilliant in its glow of ruddy maples as any place hereabout is now, and in the noble sugar orchards of that region there were glorious old maples, with their feet in the springy mountain side, as richly robed as such monarchs ought to be, before whose presence one remembered the boast of King Adrastus in Talfourd's "Ion :-"