So call not waste that barren cone

Above the floral zone,

Where forests starve:

It is pure use;

What sheaves like those which here we glean

and bind

Of a celestial Ceres and the Muse?

Ages are thy days,

Thou grand expresser of the present tense,

And type of permanence !

Firm ensign of the fatal Being,

Amid these coward shapes of joy and grief,

That will not bide the seeing!

Hither we bring

Our insect miseries to the rocks;

And the whole flight, with pestering wing,
Vanish, and end their murmuring,-

Vanish beside these dedicated blocks,
Which who can tell what mason laid?
Spoils of a front none need restore,

Replacing frieze and architrave;

Yet flowers each stone rosette and metope brave;

Still is the haughty pile erect

Of the old building Intellect.

Complement of human kind,
Having us at vantage still,
Our sumptuous indigence,

O barren mound, thy plenties fill!

We fool and prate;

Thou art silent and sedate.

To myriad kinds and times one sense
The constant mountain doth dispense;
Shedding on all its snows and leaves,
One joy it joys, one grief it grieves.
Thou seest, O watchman tall,
Our towns and races grow and fall,
And imagest the stable good

For which we all our lifetime grope,
In shifting form the formless mind,
And though the substance us elude,
We in thee the shadow find.

Thou, in our astronomy

An opaker star,

Seen haply from afar,

Above the horizon's hoop,

A moment, by the railway troop,

As o'er some bolder height they speed, By circumspect ambition,

By errant gain,

By feasters and the frivolous,

Recallest us,

And makest sane.

Mute orator! well skilled to plead,

And send conviction without phrase,

Thou dost supply

The shortness of our days,

And promise, on thy Founder's truth,

Long morrow to this mortal youth.

FABLE.

THE mountain and the squirrel

Had a quarrel;

And the former called the latter 'Little Prig.'

Bun replied,

'You are doubtless very big;

But all sorts of things and weather

Must be taken in together,

To make up a year

And a sphere.

And I think it no disgrace

To occupy my place.

If I'm not so large as you,
You are not so small as I,

And not half so spry.

I'll not deny you make

A very pretty squirrel track;

Talents differ; all is well and wisely put;

If I cannot carry forests on my back,

Neither can you crack a nut.'