O germ! O fount! O word of love!
O thought at random cast!
Ye were but little at the first,
But mighty at the last!

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XXV.

THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

THE melancholy days are 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 autumn. 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.

The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long

ago,

And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the sum

mer glow;

But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the

wood,

And the yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,

Till fell the frost from the clear, cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,

And the brightness of their smile was gone, from upland, glade, and glen.

And now, when comes the calm, mild day, as still such days will come,

To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;

When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,

And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the

rill;

APOSTROPHE TO THE OCEAN.

155

The south wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,

And sighs to find them in the wood and by the stream no more.

And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,

The fair, meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side;

In the cold, moist earth we laid her, when the forest cast the leaf,

And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief:

Yet not unmeet it was that one like that young friend

of ours,

So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.

XXVI.

APOSTROPHE TO THE OCEAN.

LORD BYRON.

ROLL on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin, - his control
Stops with the shore: upon the watery plain,
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When for a moment, like a drop of rain,

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.

The armaments, which thunderstrike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in their capitals;
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;
These are thy toys, and, as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada's pride or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee;
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, — what are they?
Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts: not so thou;
Unchangeable, save to thy wild waves' play,
Time writes no wrinkles on thine azure brow;
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

AT midnight, in his guarded tent,
The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power.

In dreams, through camp and court, he bore
The trophies of a conqueror;

In dreams his song of triumph heard;
Then wore his monarch's signet ring,

Then pressed that monarch's throne-a king; As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing,

As Eden's garden bird.

At midnight, in the forest shades,

Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band,

True as the steel of their tried blades,
Heroes in heart and hand.

There had the Persian thousands stood,
There had the glad earth drunk their blood,
On old Platæa's day;

And now there breathed that haunted air,
The sons of sires who conquered there,

With arm to strike, and soul to dare,

As quick, as far, as they.