e, save Elia himself, will think disproportionate or
misplaced. If I had not these better reasons to govern me, I should
be guided to the same selection by your intense yet critical relish
for the works of the great Dramatist, and for that favorite play in
particular which has furnished the subject of my verses.

It is my design in the following poem to celebrate by an allegory
that immortality which Shakspeare has conferred on the fairy
mythology by his Midsummer Night's Dream. But for him, those pretty
children of our childhood would leave barely their names to our
maturer years; they belong, as the mites upon the plumb, to the
bloom of fancy, a thing generally too frail and beautiful to
withstand the rude handling of time: but the Poet has made this
most perishable part of the mind's creation equal to the most
enduring; he has so intertwined the Elfins with human sympathies,
and linked them by so many delightful associations with the
productions of nature, that they are as real to the mind's eye, as
their green magical circles to the outer sense. It would have been
a pity for such a race to go extinct, even though they were but as
the butterflies that hover about the leaves and blossoms of the
visible world. I am, my dear friend, yours most truly, T. HOOD."]

I.

'Twas in that mellow season of the year
When the hot sun singes the yellow leaves
Till they be gold,--and with a broader sphere
The Moon looks down on Ceres and her sheaves;
When more abundantly the spider weaves,
And the cold wind breathes from a chillier clime;--
That forth I fared, on one of those still eves,
Touch'd with the dewy sadness of the time,
To think how the bright months had spent their prime,

II.

So that, wherever I address'd my way,
I seem'd to track the melancholy feet
Of him that is the Father of Decay,
And spoils at once the sour weed and the sweet;--
Wherefore regretfully I made retreat
To some unwasted regions of my brain,
Charm'd with the light of summer and the heat,
And bade that bounteous season bloom again,
And sprout fresh flowers in mine own domain.

III.

It was a shady and sequester'd scene,
Like those famed gardens of Boccaccio,
Planted with his own laurels evergreen,
And roses that for endless summer blow;
And there were fountain springs to overflow
Their marble basins,--and cool green arcades
Of tall o'erarching sycamores, t