The first sure symptoms of a mind in health, Nor need we power or splendour,— Wide hall or lordly dome; The good, the true, the tender,— These form the wealth of home. Young. Mrs. Hale. His warm but simple home, where he enjoys With her who shares his pleasure and his heart, Sweet converse. Cowper. Home is the sphere of harmony and peace, Mrs. Hale. Home is the resort Of love, of joy, of peace, and plenty, where, Thomson. An angel always dwells beneath the roof LICHEN.... Solitude. How use doth breed a habit in a man! Shakspeare. Full many a dreary hour have I past, That the still murmur of the honey-bee Would never teach a rural song to me: That the bright glance from beauty's eyelids slanting Or warm my breast with ardour to unfold Keats. No din Invades the temple of their mind;—the mirth As well as to their fellow men; for death No heavenly word or sound approacheth near MacKellar. There was a poet whose untimely tomb Shelley. How blest the Solitary's lot, The cavern wild with tangling roots, Or, haply, to his evening thought, The ways of men are distant brought, While praising, and raising His thoughts to heaven on high, As wand'ring, meand'ring, He views the solemn sky. Than I, no lonely hermit placed Less fit to play the part; And just to stop, and just to move, With self-respecting art: But ah! those pleasures, loves, and joys The Solitary can despise, Burns. DEATH OF THE FLOWERS. The melancholy days are come, the saddest of the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows brown and sere. Heaped in the hollow of the grove, the withered leaves lie dead; They rustle to the eddying gust and to the rabbit's tread. The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrub the jay, And from the wood-top calls the crow, through all the gloomy day. Where are the flowers, the young fair flowers, that lately sprang and stood, In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sister hood? Alas! they all are in their graves; the gentle race of flowers Are lying in their lonely beds, with the fair and good of ours. The rain is falling where they lie: but the cold November rain Calls not, from out the gloomy earth, the lovely ones again. The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long ago, And the wild-rose and the orchis died, amid the sum mer glow; |