Beautiful was the heavily-coiling smoke in the crisp morning air. How deliciously its opaque whiteness was piled against a background of sky! What a charming aerial welcome it was from the morning life of the farmhouse!

Beautiful was the fantastic piling of storm-clouds, forerunners of winds; and beautiful were the rugged drifts made by flying snows.

Hush!I am young again. The homely scenes have all come back,-the old workers into their old ways and places, and the earth they deal with wraps them about with its splendor. Snow King, grand old Master, variously carving out the features of a winter landscape, I salute you!

Dear dwellers in that old-fashioned home, I salute you also! You seem to me in memory as stately and as beautiful as one of the tall oaks of your own possessions. Nature was your godmother. She led you in childhood through her fields and pastures and woodlands. She distilled for you the best balsams of her trees and shrubs. You unwittingly quaffed them as you went with her, and they gave you health and strength and lease of a long life. They inoculated you with a taste for pure pleasures. Your frames, your manners, your desires, your whole life, had a flavor of the land that bore you. You were the true outgrowth, the real aborigines, the rightful, harmonious, delightful denizens of the soil, you long-dead, but never-to-be-forgotten dwellers in my grandfather's home!

SHADOW AND GRIEF.

The poems of shadow far outnumber those of sunshine, as if the tenderness and pathos of a grieving heart were more native to the poetic sentiment than the gay heedlessness of happy days and merry thoughts. Some few of these songs with the shadow of sorrow upon them we here append. The flight of the fresh joyousness of youth, never again" to return, is neatly rendered in song by Stoddard.

THERE are gains for all our losses,

There are balms for all our pain:
But when youth, the dream, departs,
It takes something from our hearts,
And it never comes again.

We are stronger, and are better,

Under manhood's sterner reign:
Still we feel that something sweet
Followed youth, with flying feet,
And will never come again.

Something beautiful is vanished,
And we sigh for it in vain;
We behold it everywhere,

On the earth, and in the air,

But it never comes again!

Longfellow, whose song is ever full of the wine of human sympathy, thus counsels the grieving to resignation under the affliction of the death-angel:

There is no flock, however watched and tended, ·

But one dead lamb is there!

There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended,

But has one vacant chair!

The air is full of farewells to the dying

And mournings for the dead;

The heart of Rachel, for her children crying,
Will not be comforted.

Let us be patient! These severe afflictions
Not from the ground arise,

But oftentimes celestial benedictions
Assume this dark disguise.

We see but dimly through the mist and vapors ;
Amid these earthly damps

What seem to us but sad, funereal tapers

May be heaven's distant lamps. . . .

...

And though at times, impetuous with emotion.

And anguish long suppressed,

The swelling heart heaves moaning like the ocean,
That cannot be at rest,

We will be patient, and assuage the feeling

We may not wholly stay,

By silence sanctifying, not concealing,

The grief that must have way.

This beautifully-rendered sentiment may be fitly followed by James Aldrich's "Death-Bed" verses:

Her suffering ended with the day;

Yet lived she at its close,

And breathed the long, long night away

In statue-like repose.

But when the sun, in all his state,

Illumed the eastern skies,

She passed through glory's morning gate,

And walked in Paradise.

Another poet, who prefers to remain in the list of the anonymous, thus sings the song of the mourner who grieves and will not be comforted:

PERDITA.

Under the snows she sleepeth,

Under the cold, immaculate snows,

And my heart is bitter with grief and pain,
For I know, though June brings back the rose,
That my lily will never bloom again,
My pure, pale lily that sleepeth.

Beneath the violet lying;

No Spring, with its tender and warm excess
Of life and passion, of bud and bloom,

No Summer's infinite loveliness,

Can reach to the depth of that silent tomb
Wherein my love is lying.

In vain they tell me she liveth,

With her warm, sweet face and her tender eyes,

In some divine Beyond, afar:

I only know that out of my skies

Has faded and vanished the morning star:
Not unto me she liveth.

Death, however, has its consolations, as well as its thoughts of gloom. In Phoebe Cary's sweetest song it holds out hands of welcome to clasp our outreaching hands of hope and trust.

II. T

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NEARER HOME.

One sweetly solemn thought

Comes to me o'er and o'er:

I'm nearer home to-day

Than I ever have been before;

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Nearer my Father's house,

Where the many mansions be;
Nearer the great white throne;
Nearer the crystal sea;

Nearer the bound of life,

Where we lay our burdens down;
Nearer leaving the cross;

Nearer gaining the crown.

But lying darkly between,

Winding down through the night,
Is the silent, unknown stream
That leads at last to the light.

Closer and closer my steps

Come to the dread abysm;

Closer Death to my lips

Presses the awful chrism.

Oh, if my mortal feet

Have almost gained the brink;

If it be I am nearer home

Even to-day than I think;

Father, perfect my trust;

Let my spirit feel in death
That her feet are firmly set

On the rock of a living faith!

We append one other poem, through which runs, like a dark vein through the rock of life, the sentiment of heart-pain and hopelessness.

THE VOICELESS.

We count the broken lyres that rest

Where the sweet wailing singers slumber,