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For my taste the blackberry cone
Purpled over hedge and stone;
Laughed the brook for my delight,
Through the day and through the night:
Whispering at the garden wall,
Talked with me from fall to fall;
Mine the sand-rimmed pickerel pond,
Mine the walnut slopes beyond,
Mine, on bending orchard trees,
Apples of Hesperides!

Still, as my horizon grew,
Larger grew my riches too,
All the world I saw or knew
Seemed a complex Chinese toy,
Fashioned for a barefoot boy!

O, for festal dainties spread,
Like my bowl of milk and bread,
Pewter spoon and bowl of wood,
On the door-stone, gray and rude!
O'er me, like a regal tent,
Cloudy-ribbed, the sunset bent:
Purple-curtained, fringed with gold,
Looped in many a wind-swung fold;
While, for music, came the play
Of the pied frogs' orchestra;

And, to light the noisy choir,
Lit the fly his lamp of fire.
I was monarch; pomp and joy
Waited on the barefoot boy!

Cheerily, then, my little man!
Live and laugh as boyhood can;
Though the flinty slopes be hard,
Stubble-speared the new-mown sward,

Every morn shall lead thee through

Fresh baptisms of the dew;
Every evening from thy feet

Shall the cool wind kiss the heat;
All too soon these feet must hide

In the prison-cells of pride,
Lose the freedom of the sod,
Like a colt's for work be shod,
Made to tread the mills of toil,
Up and down in ceaseless moil:
Happy if their track be found
Never on forbidden ground;
Happy if they sink not in

Quick and treacherous sands of sin.
Ah! that thou couldst know thy joy,
Ere it passes, barefoot boy!

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER.

THE COUNTRY LIFE.

SOT what we would, but what we must,

N

Makes up the sum of living;

Heaven is both more and less than just
In taking and in giving.

Swords cleave to hands that sought the plough,
And laurels miss the soldier's brow.

Me, whom the city holds, whose feet
Have worn its stony highways,
Familiar with its loneliest street-
Its ways were never my ways.
My cradle was beside the sea,
And there, I hope, my grave will be.

Old homestead! In that old, gray town,
Thy vane is seaward blowing,
The slip of garden stretches down
To where the tide is flowing:
Below they lie, their sails all furled,
The ships that go about the world.

Dearer that little country house,

Inland, with pines beside it;

Some peach-trees, with unfruitful boughs,
A well, with weeds to hide it:
No flowers, or only such as rise

Self-sown, poor things, which all despise.

Dear country home! Can I forget
The least of thy sweet trifles?
The window-vines that clamber yet,
Whose bloom the bee still rifles?
The roadside blackberries, growing ripe,
And in the woods the Indian Pipe?

Happy the man who tills his field,

Content with rustic labor;

Earth does to him her fulness yield,

Hap what may to his neighbor. Well days, sound nights, oh, can there be A life more rational and free?

Dear country life of child and man!

For both the best, the strongest,
That with the earliest race began,
And hast outlived the longest:
Their cities perished long ago;
Who the first farmers were we know.

Perhaps our Babels too will fall;
If so, no lamentations,
For Mother Earth will shelter all,

And feed the unborn nations;
Yes, and the swords that menace now,
Will then be beaten to the plough.

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.

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IBERAL, not lavish, is kind Nature's hand; Nor was perfection made for man below: Yet all her schemes with nicest art are planned, Good counteracting ill, and gladness woe. With gold and gems if Chilian mountains glow, If bleak and barren Scotia's hills arise, There plague and poison, lust and famine, grow; Here peaceful are the vales and pure the skies, And freedom fires the soul and sparkles in the eyes.

Then grieve not, thou, to whom the indulgent Muse,
Vouchsafes a portion of celestial fire;
Nor blame the partial Fates, if they refuse
The imperial banquet and the rich attire:
Know thine own worth, and reverence the lyre.

Wilt thou debase the heart which God refined?
No; let thy Heaven-taught soul to Heaven aspire,
To fancy, freedom, harmony, resigned;
Ambition's grovelling crew forever left behind.

O, how canst thou renounce the boundless store
Of charms which Nature to her votary yields!
The warbling woodland, the resounding shore,
The pomp of groves, and garniture of fields;
All that the genial ray of morning gilds,
And all that echoes to the song of even,
All that the mountain's sheltering bosom shields,
And all the dread magnificence of heaven,

O, how canst thou renounce, and hope to be forgiven!

JAMES BEATTIE.

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