woodland histories.

4.

I see leaf-shade and sun-fleck lend
Their tremulous, sweet vicissitude
To smooth, dark pool, to crinkling bend,--
(O, stew him, Ann, as 't were your friend,
With amorous solicitude!)

5.

I see him step with caution due,
Soft as if shod with moccasins,
Grave as in church,--and who plies you,
Sweet craft, is safe as in a pew
From all our common stock o' sins.

6.

The unerring fly I see him cast,
That as a rose-leaf falls as soft,--
A flash! a whirl! he has him fast!
We tyros,--how that struggle last
Confuses and appalls us oft!

7.

Unfluttered he; calm as the sky
Looks on our tragicomedies,
This way and that he lets him fly,
A sunbeam-shuttle, then to die
Lands him with cool _aplomb_, at ease.

8.

The friend who gave our board such gust,--
Life's care, may he o'erstep it half,
And when Death hooks him, as he must,
He'll do it featly, as I trust,
And J. H. write his epitaph!

9.

O, born beneath the Fishes' sign,
Of constellations happiest,
May he somewhere with Walton dine,
May Horace send him Massic wine,
And Burns Scotch drink,--the nappiest!

10.

And when they come his deeds to weigh,
And how he used the talents his,
One trout-scale in the scales he'll lay,
(If trout had scales,) and 't will outsway
The wrong side of the balances.

PHYSICAL HISTORY OF THE VALLEY OF THE AMAZONS.

I.

A year or two ago I published in the Atlantic Monthly, as part of a
series of geological sketches, a number of articles on the glacial
phenomena of the Northern hemisphere. To-day I am led to add a new
chapter to that strange history, taken from the Southern hemisphere, and
even from the tropics themselves.

I am prepared to find that the statement of this new phase of the
glacial period will awaken among my scientific colleagues an opposition
even more violent than that by which the first announcement of my views
on this subject was met. I am, however, willing to bide my time; feeling
sure that, as the theory of the ancient extension of glaciers in Europe
has gradually come to be accepted by geologists, so will the existence
of like phenomena, both in North and South America, during the same
epoch, be recognized sooner or later as