SABBATH.

The Sabbath morn!  How beautiful,
  How peaceful and how blest;
An Angel’s whisper seems to lull
  The weary world to rest.

Hark! how the churchbell’s music steals
  From yonder sacred fane;
Then echoes, like a heavenly sound,
  O’er neighboring hill and plain.

And see! along each different way,
  To yonder temple fair,
With soft, slow step, and solemn mien,
  The village folk repair.

And now, great Nature sends on high
  Her orison of prayer,
And wears upon her sacred face
  A smile divinely fair.

THE THUNDER STORM.

’Twas a cloudless night in August, and the earth all silent lay,
With hills, and glittering rivers and mountains far away,
And angels then seemed bending through the whiteness of the beams,
Whispering to weary mortals soft and sorrow-soothing dreams. 
Oh! surely, eye of mortal never gazed on fairer scene,
Than there lay sweetly dreaming in that loveliness and sheen:—­
But what is darkening yonder? and hark! that distant sound,
That comes like ghostly mutters faintly o’er the echoing ground. 
And now that lightning flashes, like sulphureous light of Hell,
And now the winds come rushing o’er the far off wood and fell. 
That cloud grows quickly larger, and the lightning flashing more—­
Hark!  Earth and Heaven are rocking in a consentaneous roar! 
And heavily the deluge floods the hills, the vales, the streams,
And beasts howl out for terror and men start up from dreams. 
Oh! ’tis a dreadful scene to-night, the dreadest e’er we saw,
The hardest heart that beateth now, in watery fear will thaw. 
But lo! ’twas but a moment, like a wayward Beauty’s wrath,
And the moon resumes in heaven, see! her all serener path—­
And the clouds receding slowly rest upon the horizon round,
And the katydids and waters make the only living sound. 
’Tis yet a night of loveliness, and fondly we may deem,
That Heaven and Earth are resting in the beauty of a Dream.

THE LIFE-LAND.

Oh yes, there’s a land, far away, out of sight,
Where the fairest of flowers forever bloom bright—­
Where the groves never wither—­the buds never die—­
And bright rivers of crystal forever roll by. 
’Tis the clime of the Christian—­the home of the blest—­
Where the wretched are happy—­the weary at rest. 
’Neath its bowers in bloom, by its waters so still,
The righteous shall walk, free from anguish and ill;—­
And they never shall pass from its portals again,
For their pleasures forever and aye shall remain.

TO MISS ——.

The flowers you gave, dear girl, will fade,
  Nor shun the common lot, to die;
The thoughts they spoke, still undecayed,
  Shall bloom immortal as the sky.