fire. The
old leather-covered English Reader, which he said in later life was the
best book ever written, lay on the table before him. He did not open it,
however. He put his hands behind him and raised his dark face as in a
kind of abstraction. He began to recite slowly in a clear voice, full
of a peculiar sympathy that gave color to every word. He seemed as
though he felt that the experience of the poet was somehow a prophecy of
his own life; and it was. He himself became a skeptical man in religious
thought, but returned to the simple faith of his ancestors amid the dark
scenes of war.

The poem was a beautiful one in form and soul, an old English pastoral,
by Beattie. How grand it seemed, even to unpoetic Thomas Lincoln, as it
flowed from the lips of his studious son!

_THE HERMIT._

At the close of the day, when the hamlet is still,
And mortals the sweets of forgetfulness prove;
When naught but the torrent is heard on the hill,
And naught but the nightingale's song in the grove:
'Twas thus, by the cave of the mountain afar,
While his harp rung symphonious, a hermit began;
No more with himself or with Nature at war,
He thought as a sage, though he felt as a man:

"Ah, why, all abandoned to darkness and woe,
Why, lone Philomela, that languishing fall?
For spring shall return, and a lover bestow,
And sorrow no longer thy bosom inthrall.
But, if pity inspire thee, renew the sad lay,
Mourn, sweetest complainer, man calls thee to mourn;
O soothe him whose pleasures like thine pass away:
Full quickly they pass--but they never return.

"Now gliding remote, on the verge of the sky,
The moon, half extinguished, her crescent displays:
But lately I marked when majestic on high
She shone, and the planets were lost in her blaze.
Roll on, thou fair orb, and with gladness pursue
The path that conducts thee to splendor again:
But man's faded glory what change shall renew?
Ah, fool! to exult in a glory so vain!

"'Tis night, and the landscape is lovely no more:
I mourn; but, ye woodlands, I mourn not for you;
For morn is approaching, your charms to restore,
Perfumed with fresh fragrance, and glitt'ring with dew.
Nor yet for the ravage of winter I mourn;
Kind Nature the embryo blossom will save:
But when shall spring visit the moldering urn?
Oh, when shall day d