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Where musing solitude might love to lift
Her soul above this sphere of earthliness,
Where silence undisturb'd might watch alone,
So cold, so bright, so still.

RETURNING SPRING.

BY SHELLEY.

Ан, woe is me! Winter is come and gone,
But grief returns with the revolving year;
The airs and streams renew their joyous tone;
The ants, the bees, the swallows reappear;

Fresh leaves and flowers deck the dead season's bier.
The loving birds now pair in every brake,
And build their mossy homes in field and brere;
And the green lizard and the golden snake,

Like unimprisoned flames, out of their trance awake.

Through wood and stream and field and hill and

ocean,

A quickening life from earth's heart has burst,
As it has ever done, with change and motion,
From the great morning of the world! when first
God dawn'd on chaos; in its stream immersed,
The lamps of heaven flash with a softer light;
All baser things pant with life's sacred thirst;
Diffuse themselves; and spend in love's delight
The beauty and the joy of their renewed might.

AUTUMN.

BY SHELLEY.

THE warm sun is failing, the bleak wind is wailing, The bare boughs are sighing, the pale flowers are dying,

And the year

On the earth her death bed, in a shroud of leaves dead,

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And, like dim shadows, watch by her sepulchre.

The chill rain is falling, the night-worm is crawling, The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling

For the year;

The blithe swallows are flown, and the lizards each

gone

To his dwelling;

Come, months, come away;
Put on white, black, and gray,
Let your light sisters play,-
Ye follow the bier

Of the dead cold year

And make her grave green with tear on tear.

KEATS.-BORN 1795; DIED 1821.

SONNET.

How many bards gild the lapses of time!
A few of them have ever been the food
Of my delighted fancy,-I could brood
Over their beauties, earthly, or sublime:
And often, when I sit me down to rhyme,
These will in throngs before my mind intrude:
But no confusion, no disturbance rude

Do they occasion, 'tis a pleasing chime.
So the unnumbered sounds that evening store;
The songs of birds-the whispering of the leaves—
The voice of waters-the great bell that heaves
With solemn sound,-and thousand others more,
That distance of recognizance bereaves,

Make pleasing music; and not wild uproar.

ON THE GRASSHOPPER AND CRICKET.

BY KEATS.

THE poetry of earth is never dead:

When all the birds are faint with the hot sun, And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead: That is the Grasshopper's-he takes the lead In summer luxury,-he has never done With his delights, for when tired with fun, He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed. The poetry of earth is ceasing never:

On a lone winter evening, when the frost

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Has wrought a silence, from the stone there shrills

The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,

And seems, to one in drowsiness half lost, The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

KINDNESS OF YOUTH.

BY ROGERS.

Ан, then, what honest triumph flush'd my breast!
This truth once known-To bless is to be blest!
We led the bending beggar on his way

(Bare were his feet, his tresses silver gray);
Soothed the keen pangs his aged spirit felt,
And on his tale with mute attention dwelt.
As in his scrip we dropt our little store,
And wept to think that little was no more,

He breathed his prayer, "Long may such goodness live!"

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'Twas all he gave, 'twas all he had to give.

MEMORY.

BY ROGERS.

HAIL Memory, hail! in thy exhaustless mine,
From age to age unnumbered treasures shine!
Thought and her shadowy brood thy call obey,
And place and time are subject to thy sway!
Thy pleasures most we feel when most alone,
The only pleasures we can call our own!
Lighter than air hope's summer visions die,
If but a fleeting cloud obscure the sky;

If but a beam of sober reason play,

Lo! Fancy's fairy frost-work melts away!
But can the wiles of Art, the grasp of Power,
Snatch the rich relics of a well spent hour?
These, when the trembling spirit wings her flight,
Pour round her path a stream of living light,
And gild those pure and perfect realms of rest,
Where virtue triumphs, and her sons are blest!

THE OMNIPRESENCE OF GOD.
BY MOORE.

THOU art, O God! the life and light
Of all this wondrous world we see;
Its glow by day, its smile by night,
Are but reflections caught from thee:
Where'er we turn thy glories shine.
And all things fair and bright are thine.

When day, with farewell beam, delays
Among the opening shades of even,
And we can almost think we gaze

Through golden vistas into heaven;
Those hues, that mark the sun's decline,
So soft, so radiant, Lord! are thine.

When night, with wings of starry gloom,
O'ershadows all the earth and skies,
Like some dark, beauteous bird, whose plume
Is sparkling with unnumbered eyes;
That sacred gloom, those fires divine,
So grand, so countless, Lord! are thine.

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