Where they are gathering for the awful rush
That bears them thundering down the dizzy steep,
To mingle, boiling, in the foamy deep.

List to the rumbling of the mighty floods,
Their eloquence is but the type of God's;

Or, note the tempest's wrath, the lightning's glare,
The rainbow's image on the cloudy air,
Bright, beautiful, divine, too fair to stay,
Where all created beauty fades away.

Think how the whirlwind's wrath, the thunder's pride,
Terrific, echoing from the mountain's side;
Suns, planets, comets, on their pathway rolled,
Like brilliant, burning, moving orbs of gold;
The summer's radiant glow, mild autumn's ray,
All, all, the great Creator's night display.

Each flower that sheds its fragrance on the air
Shows some divinest signet fastened there;
Exalts the soul above this meanest clod,

And bids us see and hear a present God,
Whose voice of majesty no words confine, -
An eloquence eternal, deep, divine.

From "Poems of Home and Country."

- Samuel Francis Smith.

THE SEASONS.

O forth issued the seasons of the year;

First, lusty Spring, all dight in leaves of flowers
That freshly budded, and new blooms did bear,

In which a thousand birds had built their bowers,
That sweetly sung to call forth paramours;

And in his hand a javelin he did bear,

And on his head (as fit for warlike stores)

A gilt engraven morion he did wear,

That, as some did him love, so others did him fear.

-Edmund Spenser.

THE GLORY OF GOD IN CREATION.

HOU art, O God, the life and light

THOU

Of all this wondrous world we see;
Its glow by day, its smile by night,
Are but reflections caught from thee.
Where'er we turn, thy glories shine,
And all things fair and bright are thine.

When day, with farewell beam, delays
Among the opening clouds of even,
And we can almost think we gaze

Through opening vistas into heaven,
Those hues that make the sun's decline
So soft, so radiant, Lord, are thine.

When night, with wings of starry gloom,
O'ershadows all the earth and skies,
Like some dark, beauteous bird, whose plume
Is sparkling with unnumbered eyes,
That sacred gloom, those fires divine,
So grand, so countless, Lord, are thine.

And

When youthful Spring around us breathes,
Thy spirit warms her fragrant sigh,
every flower that Summer wreathes
Is born beneath thy kindling eye:
Where'er we turn, thy glories shine,
And all things fair and bright are thine.

Now

And her first footsteps touch'd a verdant hill:

Crowning its lawny crest with amber flame,

Silvering the untainted gushes of its rill,
Which, pure from mossy beds, did down distill,
And after parting beds of simple flowers,
By many streams a little lake did fill,

Which round its marge reflected woven bowers,
And, in its middle space, a sky that never lowers.

TH

SUNSHINE LAND.

HEY came in sight of a lovely shore,
Yellow as gold in the morning light;
The sun's own color at noon it wore,
And had faded not at the fall of night;
Clear weather or cloudy, - 't was all as one,
The happy hills seemed bathed with the sun.
Its secret the sailors could not understand,
But they called this country Sunshine Land.

What was the secret?

a simple thing

(It will make you smile when once you know) : Touched by the tender finger of spring,

A million blossoms were all aglow;

So many, so many, so small and bright,

They covered the hills with a mantle of light;

And the wild bee hummed, and the glad breeze fanned, Through the honeyed fields of Sunshine Land.