He comes with the spoils of nations back,
The vines lie crushed in his chariot's track,
The turf looks red where he won the day;-
Bring flowers to die in the conqueror's way!

3. Bring flowers to the captive's lonely cell;
They have tales of the joyous woods to tell;
Of the free blue streams, and the glowing sky,
And the bright world shut from his languid eye;
They will bear him a thought of the sunny hours,

And the dream of his youth;-bring him flowers, wild flowers.

4. Bring flowers, fresh flowers, for the bride to wear! They were born to blush in her shining hair. She is leaving the home of her childhood's mirth, She hath bid farewell to her father's hearth; Her place is now by another's side;—

Bring flowers for the locks of the fair young bride!

5. Bring flowers, pale flowers, o'er the bier to shed, A crown for the brow of the early dead! For this through its leaves hath the white rose burst, For this in the woods was the violet nursed! Though they smile in vain for what once was ours, They are love's last gift;-bring ye flowers, pale flowers.

6. Bring flowers to the shrine where we kneel in prayer; They are nature's offering, their place is there! They speak of hope to the fainting heart, With a voice of promise they come and part; They sleep in dust through the wintry hours,

They break forth in glory;-bring flowers, bright flowers.

LXXI. I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER.

THOMAS HOOD.

1. I remember, I remember

The house where I was born —
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn;
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day;
But now I often wish the night
breath away.

Had borne my

2. I remember, I remember
The roses-red and white;
The violets and the lily-cups,
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday
The tree is living yet!

3. I remember, I remember

Where I was used to swing;

And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;

My spirit flew in feathers,
That is so heavy now,

And summer pools could hardly cool

The fever on my brow!

4. I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high;

I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky;

It was a childish ignorance,

But now 'tis little joy

To know I'm farther off from heaven
Than when I was a boy.

LXXII.—GOD CREATES NO BROKEN FORMS.

HUGH MILLER.

1. In the pages of no writer is the argument, drawn from the miracle of creation-if argument it may be termed —at once so ingeniously asserted and so exquisitely adorned, as in the pages of Chateaubriand. The passage is comparatively little known in this country, and so I quote it entire from the translation of a friend:

2. "We approach the last objection, concerning the modern origin of the globe. The earth,' it is said, 'is an old nurse, whose decrepitude everything announces. Examine its fossils, its marbles, its granites, and you will decipher its innumerable years, marked by circle, by stratum, or by branch, like those of the serpent by his rattles, the horse by his teeth, or the stag by his horns.' This difficulty has been a hundred times solved by this answer, 'God should have created, and without question has created, the world with all the marks of antiquity and completeness which we now see.'

3. "Indeed, it is probable that the author of nature at first planted old forests and young shoots,-that animals were produced, some full of days, others adorned with all the graces of infancy. Oaks, as they pierced the fruitful soil, would bear at once the forsaken nest of the crow and the young posterity of the dove; the caterpillar was chrysalis and butterfly; the insect fed on the herb, suspended its

golden egg amid the forests, or trembled in the wavy air; the bee which had lived but a single morning reckoned its ambrosia by generations of flowers. We must believe that the sheep was not without its young, the fawn without its little ones, that the thickets hid nightingales, astonished with their own first music, in warming the fleeting hopes of their first loves.

4. "If the world had not been at once young and old, the grand, the serious, the moral would disappear from nature; for these sentiments belong essentially to the antique. Every scene would have lost its wonders. The ruined rock could not have hung over the abyss; the woods, despoiled of every chance appearance, would not have displayed that touching disorder of trees bending over their roots, and of trunks leaning over the courses of the rivers.

5. "Inspired thoughts, venerable sounds, magic voices, the sacred gloom of forests, would vanish with the vaults which served them for retreats; and the solitudes of heaven and earth would remain naked and disenchanted, in losing those columns of oak which unite them.

The very day when

the ocean dashed its first waves on the shores, it bathed―let us not doubt-rocks already worn by the breakers, beaches strewn with the wrecks of shells, and headlands which sustained against the assaults of the waters the crumbling shores of earth.

6. "Without this inherent old age, there would have been neither pomp nor majesty in the work of the Eternal; and, what could not possibly be, nature in its innocence would have been less beautiful than it is to-day amid its corruption. An insipid infancy of plants, animals, and elements, would have crowned a world without poetry. But God was not so tasteless a designer of the bowers of Eden as infidels pretend. The man king was himself born thirty years old, in order to

accord in his majesty with the ancient grandeur of his new kingdom; and his companion reckoned sixteen springs which she had not lived, that she might harmonize with flowers, birds, innocence, love, and all the youthful part of the creation."

7. This is unquestionably fine writing, and it contains a considerable amount of general truth. But not a particle of the true does it contain in connection with the one point which the writer sets himself to establish. There exists, as has been shown, a reason, palpable in the nature of things, why creation, in even its earliest dawn, should not have exhibited an insipid infancy of plants and animals; the animals otherwise could not have survived, and thus the great end of creation would have been defeated. But though there exists an obvious reason for the creation of the full-grown and the mature, there exists no reason whatever for the creation of the ruined and the broken.

8. It is a very indifferent argument, to allege that the poetic sentiment demanded the production of fractured shells on the shore, or of deserted crows' nests in the trees. If sentiment demanded the creation of broken shells that had never belonged to molluscous animals, how much more imperatively must it have demanded the creation of broken human skeletons that had never belonged to men; or, if it rendered necessary the creation of deserted crows' nests, how much more urgent the necessity for the creation of deserted palaces and temples, sublime in their solitude, or of desolate cities partially buried in the sands of the desert!

9. There is a vast deal more of poetry in the ancient sepulchres of Thebes and of Luxor, with their silent millions of the embalmed dead, than in the comminuted shells of sea-beaches; and in Palmyra and the pyramids, than in deserted crows' nests. Nor would the creation of the one