THE VALLEY BROOK.

"Oh! could my years, like thine, be passed
In some remote and silent glen,
Where I could dwell and sleep at last,

Far from the bustling haunts of men!"

But what new echoes greet my ear?
The village schoolboys' merry call!
And 'mid the village hum I hear
The murmur of the water-fall.

I looked! the widening vale betrayed
A pool that shone like burnished steel,
Where that bright valley-stream was stayed
To turn the miller's ponderous wheel.

Ah! why should I, I thought with shame,
Sigh for a life of solitude,

When even this stream without a name
Is laboring for the common good.

No longer let me shun my part
Amid the busy scenes of life,
But with a warm and generous heart
Press onward in the glorious strife.

39

JOHN HOWARD BRYANT.

BY THE AUTUMN SEA.

FAIR as the dawn of the fairest day,
Sad as the evening's tender gray,

By the latest lustre of sunset kissed,

That wavers and wanes through an amber mist,
There cometh a dream of the past to me,

On the desert sands, by the autumn sea.

All heaven is wrapped in a mystic veil,

And the face of the ocean is dim and pale,
And there rises a wind from the chill north-west.
That seemeth the wail of a soul's unrest,

As the twilight falls, and the vapors flee
Far over the wastes of the autumn sea.

A single ship through the gloaming glides,
Upborne on the swell of the seaward tides;
And above the gleam of her topmost spar
Are the virgin eyes of the vesper-star
That shine with an angel's ruth on me,-
A hopeless waif, by the autumn sea.

The wings of the ghostly beach-birds gleam

Through the shimmering surf, and the curlew's scream Falls faintly shrill from the darkening height;

The first weird sigh on the lips of Night

Breathes low through the sedge and the blasted tree,

With a murmur of doom, by the autumn sea.