eply I am blest.

Though wintry clouds are in the air
And the dead leaves unburied lie,
Nor open is the violet's eye,
I see new beauty everywhere.

I walk beneath the naked trees,
Where wild streams shiver as they pass,
Yet in the sere and sighing grass
I hear a murmur as of bees,--

The bees that in love's morning rise
From tender eyes and lips to drain,
In ecstasies of blissful pain,
The sweets that bloomed in Paradise.

There twines a joy with every care
That springs within this sacred ground;
But, oh! to give what I have found
Doth thrill me with divine despair.

If distant, thou dost rise a star
Whose beams are with my being wrought,
And curvest all my teeming thought
With sweet attractions from afar.

As a winged ship, in calmest hour,
Still moves upon the mighty sea
To some deep ocean melody,
I feel thy spirit and thy power.

CHESUNCOOK

[Continued]

How far men go for the material of their houses! The inhabitants of the
most civilized cities, in all ages, send into far, primitive forests,
beyond the bounds of their civilization, where the moose and bear and
savage dwell, for their pine-boards for ordinary use. And, on the other
hand, the savage soon receives from cities iron arrow-points, hatchets,
and guns to point his savageness with.

The solid and well-defined fir-tops, like sharp and regular spear-heads,
black against the sky, gave a peculiar, dark, and sombre look to the
forest. The spruce-tops have a similar, but more ragged outline,--their
shafts also merely feathered below. The firs were somewhat oftener regular
and dense pyramids. I was struck by this universal spiring upward of the
forest evergreens. The tendency is to slender, spiring tops, while they
are narrower below. Not only the spruce and fir, but even the arbor-vitae
and white pine, unlike the soft, spreading second-growth, of which I saw
none, all spire upwards, lifting a dense spear-head of cones to the light
and air, at any rate, while their branches straggle after as they may; as
Indians lift the ball over the heads of the crowd in their desperate game.
In this they resemble grasses, as also palms somewhat. The hemlock is
commonly a tent-like pyramid from the ground to its summit.

After passing through some long rips and by a large island, we reached an
interesting part of the river called the Pine-Stream Dead-Water, about six
miles below Ragmuff, where the river expanded to thirty rod