200 . ON MYSELF. He bowed amongst them like a tree, Swift to the breach his comrades fly : An earthquake could not overthrow Thus Switzerland again was free; ON MYSELF. - Cowley. THIS only grant me, that my means may lie Not from great deeds, but good alone; Acquaintance I would have, but when 't depends Books should, not business, entertain the light, My garden painted o'er With Nature's hand, not Art's; and pleasures yield, Horace might envy in his Sabine field. Thus would I double my life's fading space; For he that runs it well twice runs his race. These unbought sports, this happy state, To-morrow let my sun his beams display, VOICE of the summer wind, (Shame fall 'em, they are deaf and blind,) But an insect lithe and strong, Bowing the seeded summer flowers. Prove their falsehood and their quarrel, Vaulting on thy airy feet, Clap thy shielded sides and carol, Carol clearly, chirrup sweet. Thou art a mailed warrior, in youth and strength complete. *Among the many beautiful fables of the ancient Greeks was this one. The beauty of Tithonus, son of a king of Troy, gained for him the affection of one of the goddesses. He begged her, as a favor, to make him immortal, and his request was granted. But, as he had forgotten to ask to retain the vigor and beauty of youth, he soon became infirm and decrepid; and, as life became insup portable to him, he begged the goddess to remove him from the world. As he could not die, she changed him into a grasshopper. 202 THE GRASSHOPPER. Armed cap-a-pie, "Sans peur et sans reproche," * Thou hast no sorrow or tears, But a short youth, sunny and free. Soon thy joy is over. And slumbers in the clover, That brush thee with their silken tresses? What hast thou to do with evil, Shooting, singing, ever springing In and out the emerald glooms; Lighting on the golden blooms?. *Without fear and without reproach; an epithet applied to Bayard, a French knight distinguished for his courage and his integrity. He died in 1524. A GRECIAN ANECDOTE. Milnes. How Sparta thirsted after orient gold, And bartered faith for wealth she dared not use, Is as severe a tale as e'er was told The pride of man to conquer and confuse. Therefore forget not what that nature was, To mingle Sparta in his distant broil. How thick the perils of that far emprise, To people as to prince, appeal was vain, Vain the dark menace, -vain the shadowy gibe, But the wise envoy would not bend again His homeward steps till failed the wonted bribe. A suppliant at the regal hearth he stood, Played the king's child,-a girl some nine years old. Ten-twenty-forty talents rose the bait; Yet fifty now had well secured the prey, 204 THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS. Not unaccepted such pure omen came; That gentle voice the present God revealed, And back the Ionian chief returned in shame, Checked by the virtue of that simple shield. THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS. - Bryant. THE melancholy days have come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sear. Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the withered leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rabbit's tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow, through all the gloomy day. Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood? Alas! they all are in their graves; the gentle race of flowers Are lying in their lowly beds, with the fair and good of ours. The rain is falling where they lie, but the cold November rain Calls not, from out the gloomy earth, the lovely ones again. |