love to Him who hears
The softest strain in Music's soul.

There was a remarkable display of the aurora borealis in January, 1837,
and this poem commemorates the phenomenon:--

THE NORTHERN LIGHTS

A light is troubling heaven! A strange dull glow
Hangs like a half-quenched veil of fire between
The blue sky and the earth; and the shorn stars
Gleam faint and sickly through it. Day hath left
No token of its parting, and the blush
With which it welcomed the embrace of Night
Has faded from the blue cheek of the West;
Yet from the solemn darkness of the North,
Stretched o'er the "empty place" by God's own hand,
Trembles and waves that curtain of pale fire,--
Tingeing with baleful and unnatural hues
The winter snows beneath. It is as if
Nature's last curse--the fearful plague of fire--
Were working in the elements, and the skies
Even as a scroll consuming.

Lo, a change!
The fiery wonder sinks, and all along
A dark deep crimson rests--a sea of blood,
Untroubled by a wave. And over all
Bendeth a luminous arch of pale, pure white,
Clearly contrasted with the blue above,
And the dark red beneath it. Glorious!
How like a pathway for the Shining Ones,
The pure and beautiful intelligences
Who minister in Heaven, and offer up
Their praise as incense, or like that which rose
Before the Pilgrim prophet, when the tread
Of the most holy angels brightened it,
And in his dream the haunted sleeper saw
The ascending and descending of the blest!

And yet another change! O'er half the sky
A long bright flame is trembling, like the sword
Of the great angel of the guarded gate
Of Paradise, when all the holy streams
And beautiful bowers of Eden-land blushed red
Beneath its awful wavering, and the eyes
Of the outcasts quailed before its glare,
As from the immediate questioning of God.

And men are gazing at these "signs in heaven,"
With most unwonted earnestness, and fair
And beautiful brows are reddening in the light
Of this strange vision of the upper air:
Even as the dwellers of Jerusalem
Beleaguered by the Romans--when the skies
Of Palestine were thronged with fiery shapes,
And from Antonia's tower the mailed Jew
Saw his own image pictured in the air,
Contending with the heathen; and the pr