The fruitage of this apple-tree,
  Winds, and our flag of stripe and star,
  Shall bear to coasts that lie afar,
  Where men shall wonder at the view,
  And ask in what fair groves they grew;
    And they who roam beyond the sea,
  Shall look, and think of childhood’s day,
    And long hours passed in summer play
  In the shade of the apple-tree.

  Each year shall give this apple-tree
  A broader flush of roseate bloom,
  A deeper maze of verdurous gloom,
  And loosen, when the frost-clouds lower,
  The crisp brown leaves in thicker shower;
    The years shall come and pass, but we
  Shall hear no longer, where we lie,
    The summer’s songs, the autumn’s sigh,
  In the boughs of the apple-tree.

  And time shall waste this apple tree. 
  Oh, when its aged branches throw
  Thin shadows on the sward below,
  Shall fraud and force and iron-will
  Oppress the weak and helpless still? 
    What shall the tasks of mercy be,
  Amid the toils, the strifes, the tears
    Of those who live when length of years
  Is wasting this apple-tree?

  “Who planted this old apple-tree?”
  The children of that distant day
  Thus to some aged man shall say;
  And gazing on its mossy stem,
  The gray-haired man shall answer them: 
    “A poet of the land was he. 
  Born in the rude, but good, old times;
  ’Tis said he made some quaint old rhymes
    On planting the apple-tree.”

* * * * *

=_Maria Brooks, 1795-1845._= (Manual, p. 523.)

=_344._= MARRIAGE.

  The bard has sung, God never formed a soul
    Without its own peculiar mate, to meet
  Its wandering half, when ripe to crown the whole
    Bright plan of bliss, most heavenly, most complete!

  But thousand evil things there are that hate
    To look on happiness:  these hurt, impede,
  And, leagued with time, space, circumstance, and fate,
    Keep kindred heart from heart, to pine, and pant, and bleed.

  And as the dove to far Palmyra flying,
    From where her native founts of Antioch beam,
  Weary, exhausted, longing, panting, sighing,
    Lights sadly at the desert’s bitter stream;

  So, many a soul, o’er life’s drear desert faring,
    Love’s pure, congenial spring unfound, unquaffed,
  Suffers, recoils, then thirsty and despairing
    Of what it would, descends, and sips the nearest draught.

* * * * *

=_Joseph Rodman Drake, 1795-1820._= (Manual, p. 517.)

From “The Culprit Fay.”

=_345._= THE FAY’S DEPARTURE.

* * * * *