BOTANIST.

Go thou to thy learned task,
I stay with the flowers of spring: 
Do thou of the ages ask
What me the flowers will bring.

GARDENER.

True Bramin, in the morning meadows wet,
Expound the Vedas of the violet,
Or, hid in vines, peeping through many a loop,
See the plum redden, and the beurre stoop.

FORESTER.

He took the colour of his vest
From rabbit’s coat or grouse’s breast;
For, as the wood-kinds lurk and hide,
So walks the woodman, unespied.

NORTHMAN.

The gale that wrecked you on the sand,
It helped my rowers to row;
The storm is my best galley hand,
And drives me where I go.

FROM ALCUIN.

The sea is the road of the bold,
Frontier of the wheat-sown plains,
The pit wherein the streams are rolled,
And fountain of the rains.

EXCELSIOR.

Over his head were the maple buds,
And over the tree was the moon,
And over the moon were the starry studs,
That drop from the angel’s shoon.

BORROWING.  FROM THE FRENCH.

Some of your hurts you have cured,
And the sharpest you still have survived,
But what torments of grief you endured
From evils which never arrived!

NATURE.

Boon Nature yields each day a brag which we now first behold,
And trains us on to slight the new, as if it were the old: 
But blest is he, who, playing deep, yet haply asks not why,
Too busied with the crowded hour to fear to live or die.

FATE.

Her planted eye to-day controls,
Is in the morrow most at home,
And sternly calls to being souls
That curse her when they come.

HOROSCOPE.

Ere he was born, the stars of fate
Plotted to make him rich and great: 
When from the womb the babe was loosed,
The gate of gifts behind him closed.

POWER.

Cast the bantling on the rocks,
Suckle him with the she-wolf’s teat,
Wintered with the hawk and fox,
Power and speed be hands and feet.

CLIMACTERIC.

I am not wiser for my age,
Nor skilful by my grief;
Life loiters at the book’s first page,—­
Ah! could we turn the leaf.

HERI, CRAS, HODIE.

Shines the last age, the next with hope is seen,
To-day slinks poorly off unmarked between: 
Future or Past no richer secret folds,
O friendless Present! than thy bosom holds.