The Elm Sylph. H. W. Parker. A BEAUTIFUL Elm, with a maidenly form, That smiles in the sunlight and swings in the storm, Has shaded my window for many a year, And grown, like a sister, more lovely and dear. It sings me its music through all the hushed night, Oh, long have I loved thee, my Elm, gentle Elm ! THE ANEMONE. 255 Shout, shout to thy brothers, the forests, I said, Thou art armed to the head, and hast many a plume,-- They live and they die where they spring into birth; And trees are no more than they outwardly seem. The Anemone. Hartley Coleridge. HO would have thought a thing so slight, WH So frail a birth of warmth and light, A thing as weak as fear or shame, Bearing thy weakness in thy name— What power has given thee to outlast The pelting rain, the driving blast— 256 HARTLEY COLERIDGE. To sit upon thy slender stem, Adorning latest Autumn with A relic sweet of vernal pith? O Heaven! if, as faithful I believe, Thou wilt the prayer of faithful love receive, Let it be so with me! I was a child Of large belief, though froward, wild. And deemed my little prayers to God were heard. October. Bryant. AY, thou art welcome, heaven's delicious breath! When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf, And suns grow weak, and the weak suns grow brief, In the gay woods and in the golden air, In such a bright, late quiet, would that I And music of kind voices, ever nigh; And when my last sand twinkled in the glass, Grief's Neglect. Tennyson. NWATCHED the garden bough shall sway, UNWAT The tender blossom flutter down, Unloved that beech will gather brown, This maple burn itself away. Unloved, the sunflower, shining fair, Ray round with flames her disk of seed, And many a rose carnation feed With Summer spice the humming air. Unloved, by many a sandy bar The brook shall babble down the plain, At noon, or when the lesser wain Is twisting round the polar star. Uncared for, gird the windy grove, And flood the haunts of hern and crake; Or into silver arrows break The sailing moon in creek and cove. |