THE LITTLE MATCH GIRL.

BY G. H. BALLOU.

Он man of art, who marshallest

Thy hues in bright array,

And striv'st to grasp some gorgeous thought Above our common clay

Thy toil is nought! Earth's common things

More loveliest truth contain,

Than all thy loftiest dreams can reach,

Or all thy love explain.

And humble lives and lowly hearts

Are better worth thy care,

Than all the deeds of gallant knight,

Or plumes of lady fair.

And there are flowers by beggars' hut,

Or by the prison wall,

Which God doth love as well as those

That grace a princely hall.

Then, master, come !-who knowest best

To use the minstrel's lyre,

Or how to limn the beauteous gifts

Which still our souls admire

And pray to him who children taught,

That he may teach thee too;

Pray for a heart of lowly frame,
A gentle, and a true.

Pray that thou mayst, in all thy toil, Ne'er lend one lure to shame,

But ever in thy daily works

Make fresh thy Saviour's name.

THE PAUPER SOLDIER.

A NEW ENGLAND TALE.

BY MRS. C. M. SAWYER.

LONELY it stands within a lonely nook,

Yon low-roofed cottage by the alder brook;
There where the mimic dam, by childhood's toil
With careful art constructed, keeps a coil
'Mid the clear waters; flinging up the spray
In dazzling showers-like fairy hands at play-
Till the wild flowers that by the brooklet nod-
The golden oxlips and rich emerald sod,
Look bright, as is the tender cress that laves
Its tossing clusters in the limpid waves.

Lonely it stands, and empty now!-a home
Where hooting night birds only love to come.
Its little casement dark with many a stain
And weather beaten, shows no gleaming pane;
The sunken roof with moss is all o'ergrown;
The shattered door, long hingeless left, now prone
Upon the ground, lies moldering; from the wall,
That leans and totters to its final fall,

The loosened clapboard, swinging, beats the air,
Scaring the busy squirrel, in its lair

Beneath the sill, where, provident, it lays
Its store of acorns for the winter days,-

And the shy ground-bird that her soft nest weaves
Under the creeping ivy's sheltering leaves.