y gleamed, then sank in the foam,
And darkness swept over the gorgeous glare--
They lighted the mariners down to their home,
And left them all sleeping in stillness there!

VI.

The storm is hushed, and my vision is o'er,
The Surf Sprite changed to a foamy wreath,
The night is deepened along the shore,
And I thread my way o'er the dusky heath.
But often again I shall go to that cliff,
And seek for her form on the flashing tide,
For I know she will come in her airy skiff,
And over the sea we shall swiftly ride!

[Footnote A: The Laplanders are said to entertain the idea that the
coruscations of the Aurora Borealis, are occasioned by the sports of the
fishes in the polar seas.]

[Footnote B: The loss of the United States Sloop-of-War Hornet, in the
Gulf of Mexico, 1829, suggested this passage. She was supposed to have
gone down in a hurricane, but as nothing is positively known on the
subject, it is not beyond lawful poetical license to imagine, at least in
a dream, that the powder magazine was set on fire by the lightning, and
the ship rent in pieces, by the explosion.]

[Illustration: Vignette]

The First Frost of Autumn.

[Illustration: The First Frost of Autumn]

At evening it rose in the hollow glade,
Where wild-flowers blushed 'mid silence and shade;
Where, hid from the gaze of the garish noon,
They were slily wooed by the trembling moon.
It rose--for the guardian zephyrs had flown,
And left the valley that night alone.
No sigh was borne from the leafy hill,
No murmur came from the lapsing rill;
The boughs of the willow in silence wept,
And the aspen leaves in that sabbath slept.
The valley dreamed, and the fairy lute
Of the whispering reed by the brook was mute.
The slender rush o'er the glassy rill,
As a marble shaft, was erect and still,
And no airy sylph on the mirror wave,
A dimpling trace of its footstep gave.
The moon shone down, but the shadows deep
Of the pensile flowers, were hushed in sleep.
The pulse was still in that vale of bloom,
And the Spirit rose from its marshy tomb.
It rose o'er the breast of a silver spring,
Where the mist at morn shook its snowy wing,
And robed like the dew, when it woos the flowers.
It stole away to their secret bowers.

With a lover's sigh, and a zephyr's breath,
It whispered bliss, bu