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And when its yellow luster smiled
O'er mountains yet untrod,

Each mother held aloft her child

To bless the bow of God.

Thomas Campbell.

LEARN A LITTLE EVERY DAY.

ITTLE rills make wider streamlets,

LITT

Streamlets swell, the rivers flow;

Rivers join the mountain billows,
Onward as they go!

Life is made of smaller fragments,
Shade and sunshine, work or play;
So may we with greater profit,
Learn a little every day.

Tiny seeds make boundless harvests,
Drops of rain compose the showers,
Seconds make the flying minutes,
And the minutes make the hours.
Let us hasten then and catch them,
As they pass us on the way,
And with honest true endeavor,
Learn a little every day.

Let us read some striking passage,

Cull a verse from every page, Here a line and there a sentence, 'Gainst the lonely time of age.

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I

THE BROOK.

COME from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,

And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley.

By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges;
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.

I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,

I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.

With many a curve my banks I fret, By many a field and fallow,

And many a fairy foreland set

With willow-weed and mallow.

I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river;
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.

I wind about, and in and out,
With here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling,

And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel,

With many a silvery waterbreak
Above the golden gravel.

I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.

I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeams dance

Against my sandy shallows.

I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses.

And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,

For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.

-Alfred Tennyson.

O

THE RIVER.

TELL me, pretty river!

Whence do thy waters flow?
And whither art thou roaming,
So smoothly and so slow?

My birthplace was the mountain,
My nurse the April showers;
My cradle was the fountain,
O'er-curtained by wild flowers.

One morn I ran away,
A madcap, noisy rill;
And many a prank that day,
I played adown the hill!

And then 'mid meadow banks,

I flirted with the flowers,
That stooped with glowing lips,
To woo me to their bowers.

But these bright scenes are o'er,
And darkly flows my wave;
I hear the ocean's roar

And there must be my grave.

Selected.

THE HYLODES.

(PEEPING FRogs.)

Throw up the window-shades.

HE Hylodes! The Hylodes!

The Hylodes are trooping up
The meadows and the glades.
I hear them piping near and far,
A gleeful band are they,
Who, for a mighty carnival,
Prepare the joyous way!

Oh, hear them by the river side,

And in the shaded rill

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Their trumpets make the forests ring And echo from the hill;

The rustling reeds and rushes, where
The mole has built his nest,

And grasses by the water's edge
Are startled from their rest;

The jay his jingling bell has struck;
The melancholy crow

Has called aloud from all the trees

And fluttered to and fro;

The titmouse and the winter wren,
And buntings on the plain,
Have heard the piping Hylodes,
And joined in their refrain!
Aye, now the wilderness shall sing,
The desert bloom in grace,

And glad shall be the desolate

And solitary place.

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