SONGS OF NATURE. SONG. LITTLE, laughing, glancing wave, To make you leap, and roar, and rave, Zephyr falling on the flowers, With summer's heat half-dead, What would it take to mend your powers, I will not trust your innocence, You are but seeming and pretense, And have your end. For well I know that storms do blow, And wild seas rave, While I but dream of zephyr soft TWILIGHT. WOMEN, moths, bats, beetles, toads And undefined sympathies. Now one's mind is like his dress- And conscience like the cross-roads sign I take some vagrant scent for guide,— But way-side things I gladly greet, For I have doffed humanity, Dead things have living tongues for me— Though outcast, rebel, renegade, THE GRASSHOPPER. GRASSHOPPER, grasshopper, dressed all in green, Did the hot sun from a dew-drop create you? O king of creation! Small bridegroom of June! Tell me, if I in the fields were to live, now, To leap over leaves and 'mong lilies to dive, now, But lie in the grass, on the brink of the river, What? You say that the summer is not yet a-goingThat you do not feel winter's breath yet a-blowing; That roses can only be sipped while they're growing; That, in harvest, 'tis better be reaping than sowing. THE ROSES. JUST like as to the school-boy's vagrant mind, The clean-faced roses nodding in the wind Seem whisp'ring, "Yes, yes, come! Here's better lore, "How does the white road feel to flying feet? "What bribes are in the smiles of heaven's blue Farms; streams; birds'-nests; rough, sunny mountain-slopes: When you lift up your hat's rim? He elopes ! Forward, at one side, rises a rough slope, But rearward, where the rivers meet at first, There the wild streams, self-prisoned, roam about, From under the half-shadow of a screen Of gauzy trees, with openings wide and high, Most of the trees are aspens, slim and gray, Beyond them widens a great campaign, famed And over it the filmy-textured sky, Thin but unbroken, like a flower-bell bent, A giant lily with a bee in-pent, While its curved lip momently kisses still A LITTLE WORLD. SOMEBODY has characterized our Southern scenery as consisting of "a line and a pine." To the traveler who derives his first impression from what he sees upon coming into the Mississippi from the Gulf, there is redundancy in even so epigrammatic a statement, which would seem to contain more truth, if less poetry, were the pine left out. The low reed-marsh, which melts off imperceptibly into the sea, fringes the coast for miles inland-if land it can be called which affords pasture only to mosquitoes and alligators, and over which the slight tropical tides have daily dominion. What we see thus vaguely indicated is the continuation of the geological process which has given much of Louisiana to the continent. The "Father of Waters" is the progenitor also of the land itself. The entire delta country is but so much terrestrial flotsam and jetsam. The normal relations elsewhere of land and water are here reversed, or at least interchangeable, for the big river can, upon occasion, be as independent of its banks as was the allegorical Thames in "The Critic"; while its tributaries-as we would call them upon the testimony of the atlas-exhibit a marked propensity to run away from it. A labyrinthine tangle of these bayous laces the low-lying alluvial country in every direction, affording an outlet to market for the products of that teeming soil which has been created and enriched by their successive overflows. SALT-WORKS AT PETITE ANSE. Its Of these natural canals, the most interesting in all aspects is the Bayou Têche, famed through Longfellow's verse. sluggish and sinuous course lies through the fertile prairies of the Attakapas and "fair Opelousas," grazed by the herds of longhorned cattle which form the substance of the exiled Acadians. But the unbroken solitude of other days, when Evangeline and Father Felician traversed its waters on their pathetic quest, has given place to a succession of well-cultivated plantations which fully justify the encomiums of the ci-devant blacksmith of Grand Pré upon the bountiful character of the new soil. The huge sugarhouses with towering chimneys, the massive machinery and stacks of coal seen here and there along the levee, suggest manufacturing rather than agricultural interests, and impart to the scene a character all its own. From the deck of the René Macready at times we seemed to be moving by the water-front of a prolonged village, so close together are the homesteads which line the levee. The arable land lying invariably along the bayous, the tracts are measured, like city lots, upon the front, except that |
