GEMS FOR THE FIRESIDE. HE FOREST HYMN. WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. groves were God's first temples, | Here, in the shadow of this aged wood, ere man learned Offer one hymn,-thrice happy if it find To hew the shaft, and lay the Acceptance in His ear. That run along the summit of these trees The fresh, moist ground, are all instinct with Here is continual worship;-nature, here, Wells softly forth, and, wandering, steeps the roots Of half the mighty forest, tells no tale Are here to speak of Thee. This mighty oak, By whose immovable stem I stand and seem Almost annihilated,—not a prince, In all that proud old world beyond the deep, L'er wore his crown as loftily as he Wears the green coronal of leaves with which Thy hand hath graced him. Nestled at his root Is beauty, such as blooms not in the glare Of the broad sun. That delicate forest flower, With scented breath, and look so like a smile, Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould, My heart is awed within me when I think Of the great miracle that still goes on, In silence, round me,-the perpetual work Of Thy creation, finished, yet renewed Forever. Written on Thy works, I read The lesson of Thy own eternity. Lo! all grow old and die; but see again, How on the faltering footsteps of decay Youth press 8,-ever gay and beautiful youth, In all its beautiful forms. These lofty trees Wave not less proudly that their ancestors Moulder beneath them. O, there is not lost One of Earth's charms! Upon her bosom yet, After the flight of untold centuries, hate Of his arch-enemy,-Death,-yea, seats him self Upon the tyrant's throne, the sepulchre, From Thine own bosom, and shall have no end. There have been holy men who hid themselves Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave Their lives to thought and prayer, till they outlived The generation born with them, nor seemed Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks Around them; and there have been holy men Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus. And tremble, and are still. O God! when Dost scare the world with tempests, set on fire The heavens with falling thunderbolts, or fill, With all the waters of the firmament, woods And drowns the villages; when, at Thy call, UT how about killing fish for sport? In the name of sense, man, if God made fish to be eaten, what difference does it make if I enjoy the killing of them before I eat them? You would have none but a fisherman by trade do it, and then you would have him utter a sigh, a prayer, and a pious ejaculation at each cod or haddock that he killed; and if by chance the old fellow, sitting in the boat at work, should for a moment think there was, after all, a little fun and a little pleasure in his business, you would have him take a round turn with his line, and drop on his knees to ask forgiveness for the sin of thinking there was sport in fishing. I can imagine the sadfaced melancholy-eyed man, who makes it his business to supply game for the market as you would have him, sober as the sexton in Hamlet, and forever moralizing over the gloomy necessity that has doomed him to a life of murder? Why, good sir, he would frighten respectable fish, and the market would soon be destitute. The keenest day's sport in my journal of a great many years of sport was when, in company with some other gentlemen, I took three hundred blue-fish in three hours' fishing off Block Island, and those fish were eaten |