old apple-tree?"
The children of that distant day
Thus to some aged man shall say;
And gazing on its mossy stem,
The gray-haired man shall answer them:
"A poet of the land was he.
Born in the rude, but good, old times;
'Tis said he made some quaint old rhymes
On planting the apple-tree."

* * * * *

=_Maria Brooks, 1795-1845._= (Manual, p. 523.)

=_344._= MARRIAGE.

The bard has sung, God never formed a soul
Without its own peculiar mate, to meet
Its wandering half, when ripe to crown the whole
Bright plan of bliss, most heavenly, most complete!

But thousand evil things there are that hate
To look on happiness: these hurt, impede,
And, leagued with time, space, circumstance, and fate,
Keep kindred heart from heart, to pine, and pant, and bleed.

And as the dove to far Palmyra flying,
From where her native founts of Antioch beam,
Weary, exhausted, longing, panting, sighing,
Lights sadly at the desert's bitter stream;

So, many a soul, o'er life's drear desert faring,
Love's pure, congenial spring unfound, unquaffed,
Suffers, recoils, then thirsty and despairing
Of what it would, descends, and sips the nearest draught.

* * * * *

=_Joseph Rodman Drake, 1795-1820._= (Manual, p. 517.)

From "The Culprit Fay."

=_345._= THE FAY'S DEPARTURE.

* * * * *

The moon looks down on old Crow-nest,
She mellows the shades, on his shaggy breast,
And seems his huge grey form to throw
In a silver cone on the wave below;
His sides are broken by spots of shade,
By the walnut bough and the cedar made,
And through their clustering branches dark
Glimmers and dies the fire-fly's spark--
Like starry twinkles that momently break,
Through the rifts of the gathering tempest's rack.

The stars are on the moving stream,
And fling, as its ripples gently flow,
A burnished length of wavy beam
In an eel-like, spiral line below;
The winds are whist, and the owl is still,
The bat in the shelvy rock is hid.
And naught is heard on the lonely hill
But the cricket's chirp, and the answer shrill
Of the gauze-winged katy-did;
And the plaint of the wailing whip-poor-will,
Who mourns unseen, and ceaseless sings,
Ever a note of wail and woe,
Till morning spreads her rosy wings,
And earth and sky in her glance