belting woods,
    Smile down in rainbows from your falling floods,
  And on your kingly brows at morn and eve
    Set crowns of fire!  So shall my soul receive
  Haply the secret of your calm and strength,
    Your unforgotten beauty interfuse
    My common life, your glorious shapes and hues
    And sun-dropped splendors at my bidding come,
    Loom vast through dreams, and stretch in billowy length
  From the sea-level of my lowland home!

  They rise before me!  Last night’s thunder-gust
  Roared not in vain:  for, where its lightnings thrust
  Their tongues of fire, the great peaks seem so near,
  Burned clean of mist, so starkly bold and clear,
  I almost pause the wind in the pines to hear,
  The loose rock’s fall, the steps of browsing deer. 
  The clouds that shattered on yon slide-worn walls
    And splintered on the rocks their spears of rain
  Have set in play a thousand waterfalls,
  Making the dusk and silence of the woods
  Glad with the laughter of the chasing floods
  And luminous with blown spray and silver gleams,
  While, in the vales below, the dry-lipped streams
    Sing to the freshened meadow-lands again. 
  So, let me hope, the battle-storm that beats
    The land with hail and fire may pass away
    With its spent thunders at the break of day,
  Like last night’s clouds, and leave, as it retreats,
    A greener earth and fairer sky behind,
    Blown crystal-clear by Freedom’s Northern wind!

* * * * *

THE USE OF THE RIFLE.

In no branch of manufacture has human ingenuity been taxed more vigorously, for the attainment of the highest possible point of perfection, than in that of rifled guns for the use of the troops, on whose capacity for the destruction of their opponents the throne of the tyrant or the liberty of the people may be dependent.  Nations, companies, and individuals have expended years of time and millions of money in testing every conceivable contrivance which offered a hope of improvement in precision, force, facility of loading or firing, or any of the minute details which contribute to render the weapon more serviceable.

And yet, at this day, not only are the troops of different nations armed with rifles differing in size, weight, calibre, and degree of twist, requiring different instruction in their use, and shooting projectiles of widely different pattern, but scarcely any two gun-makers will be found to agree in all the details requisite to the construction of the most serviceable weapon.  The reason for this diversity lies in the fact, that perfection in any one of its requirements can be attained only by the sacrifice of some portion at least of its other elements, and the point at which the balance should be fixed is a sliding scale covering as wide a range as that of the mental and physical differences of the men on whom the decision rests.