"And thou dost wait and watch to meet
My spirit sent to join the blest,
And, wondering what detains my feet
From the bright land of rest,
Dost seem, in every sound, to hear
The rustling of my footsteps near "

ODE FOR AN AGRICULTURAL CELE

BRATION.

FAR back in the ages,

The plough with wreaths was crowned; The hands of kings and sages

Entwined the chaplet round;

Till men of spoil disdained the toil

By which the world was nourished, And dews of blood enriched the soil

Where green their laurels flourished: -Now the world her fault repairs

The guilt that stains her story; And weeps her crimes amid the cares That formed her earliest glory.

The proud throne shall crumble,
The diadem shall wane,

The tribes of earth shall humble
The pride of those who reign;
And War shall lay his pomp away ;—
The fame that heroes cherish,
The glory earned in deadly fray

Shall fade, decay, and perish.
Honor waits, o'er all the Earth,

Through endless generations, The art that calls her harvests forth, And feeds the expectant nations.

RIZPAH.

And he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them in the hill before the Lord; and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of the harvest, in the first days, in the beginning of barley-harvest.

And Rizpah, the daughter of Aiah, took sackcloth, and spread it for her upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until the water dropped upon them out of heaven, and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest upon them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night.

2 SAMUEL, XXi. 10.

HEAR what the desolate Rizpah said,

As on Gibeah's rocks she watched the dead.

The sons of Michal before her lay,

And her own fair children, dearer than they;

By a death of shame they all had died,

And were stretched on the bare rock, side by side;

And Rizpah, once the loveliest of all

That bloomed and smiled in the court of Saul,
All wasted with watching and famine now,
And scorched by the sun her haggard brow,
Sat mournfully guarding their corpses there,
And murmured a strange and solemn air ;
The low, heart-broken and wailing strain
Of a mother that mourns her children slain :

"I have made the crags my home and spread On their desert backs my sackloth bed; I have eaten the bitter herb of the rocks, And drunk the midnight dew in my locks ;

I have wept till I could not weep, and the pain Of my burning eyeballs went to my brain. Seven blackened corpses before me lie,

In the blaze of the sun and the winds of the sky.