COMMON POLIPODY.
WHO are best able to discern
The merit of the humble Fern?
Those who in Nature's varied face,
Hidden and holy meanings trace;
And those who have at their command,
Great gift! a more than magic wand,
At touch whereof, before their eyes,
Sweet Nature, stript of her disguise,
Reveals her most sequester'd stores
Inclosed within her mystic doors;—
To such the Fern has something new
To tell them, what she tells to few;
How various are her kinds and sorts,
In fields remote, how wild her sports,
Peopling the shades where only move
Silence, and things that silence love.
In forests where no fowl has been,
Or vulture's eye a path has seen;
There flourishes beneath the sky,
Seen only by the Maker's eye,
The humble and unhonor'd fern-
A fabric yet from which we learn
More than the sage's lessons teach,
Or all the art of man can reach.
Ir is truly a most Christian exercise to extract a sentiment of piety from the works and appearances of nature. Our Saviour expatiates on a flower, and draws from it the delightful argument of confidence in God. He gives us to see that taste may be combined with piety, and that the same heart may be occupied with all that is serious in the contemplations of religion, and be, at the same time, alive to the charms and the loveliness of Nature.
I BOW before the Power
Who form'd the fragile flower;
Yet ere its little life was spent,
Gave it the soul-reviving scent;
Clad it in beauty, fashion'd it with grace,
And from the teeming germ decreed a count
THE Wall-Flower, the Wall-Flower,
How beautiful it blooms!
It gleams above the ruin'd tower,
Like sunlight over tombs;
It sheds a halo of repose
Around the wrecks of Time;
To beauty give the flaunting Rose-
The Wall-Flower is sublime!
Whither hath fled the choral band,
That fill'd the Abbey's nave?
Yon dark sepulchral yew-trees stand,
O'er many a level grave.
In the belfry's crevices the dove
Her young brood nurseth well,
Whilst thou, lone flower, dost shed above,
A sweet, decaying smell.
THE greatest pleasure the mind is capable of in this life, is in the contemplation of God and Nature, the sweetness of philosophy and the discourse of reason.
I READ his awful name emblazon'd high,
With golden letters on the illumined sky;
Nor less the mystic characters I see,
Wrought in each flower, inscribed in every tree;
In every leaf that trembles to the breeze,
I hear the voice of God among the trees;
With Thee in shady solitudes I walk,
With Thee in busy crowded cities talk,
In every creature own thy forming power,
In each event thy providence adore.
NARROW MEALY RAMALINA. (LICHEN.)
WOULD you haply wish to trace
The wonders of the Lichen race;
Cold, but congenial to their kinds,
The wintry air pervades, unbinds
The tubercled and warty crust,
Which in the summer heat adust,
Now swoln with moisture, spreads around
In shapes fantastic; and the ground,
Stones, rocks, and walls, and heathy waste,
And branching tree exhibits, cased
In spots with many a shining boss,
Or mingles with the verdant moss;
Prank'd like "the snake's enamel'd skin,"
Fit "weed to wrap a fairy in ;"
With hues as manifold as glow
Embroider'd on the heavenly bow.
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