And when its yellow luster smiled 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, Life is made of smaller fragments, Tiny seeds make boundless harvests, 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. I THE BROOK. COME from haunts of coot and hern, And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley. By thirty hills I hurry down, I chatter over stony ways, I bubble into eddying bays, 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 I wind about, and in and out, And here and there a foamy flake With many a silvery waterbreak I steal by lawns and grassy plots, I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance, Against my sandy shallows. I murmur under moon and stars And out again I curve and flow For men may come and men may go, -Alfred Tennyson. O THE RIVER. TELL me, pretty river! Whence do thy waters flow? My birthplace was the mountain, One morn I ran away, And then 'mid meadow banks, I flirted with the flowers, But these bright scenes are o'er, 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 Oh, hear them by the river side, And in the shaded rill Their trumpets make the forests ring And echo from the hill; The rustling reeds and rushes, where And grasses by the water's edge The jay his jingling bell has struck; Has called aloud from all the trees And fluttered to and fro; The titmouse and the winter wren, And glad shall be the desolate And solitary place. |