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A MAN finds in the productions of Nature an inexhaustible stock of material upon which he can employ himself, without any temptations to envy or malevolence; and has always a certain prospect of discovering new reasons for adoring the Sovereign Author of the universe.

DR. JOHNSON.

NATURE never did betray

The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty; and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb

Our cheerful faith that all which we behold
Is full of blessings.

WORDSWORTH.

TURFY HAIR-GRASS.

GRASSES that never knew a scythe,

Wave all the summer long.

THIS silken grass, these pleasant flowers in bloom,
Among these tasty molehills, that do lie
Like summer cushions.

J LOVE at eventide, to walk alone,

Down narrow lanes o'erhung with dewy thorn,
Where, from the long grass underneath, the snail,
Jet black, creeps out and sprouts his timid horn.
I love to muse o'er meadows newly mown,
Where withering grass perfumes the sultry air,
Where bees search round with sad and weary

drone,

In vain, for flowers that bloom'd but newly there.

CLARE.

THE love of Nature serves to identify us with the happiness of that nature to which we belong; to give us an interest in every species of being which surrounds us, and amid the hours of curiosity and delight, to awaken those latent sympathies from which all the moral and intellectual greatness of man finally arises.

ALISON.

TREES and flowers and streams

Are social and benevolent; and he

Who oft communeth in their language pure,
Roaming among them in the cool of day,
Shall find, like him who Eden's garden dress'd,
His Maker there, to teach his listening heart.
MRS. SIGOURNEY.

THUS I fix my firm belief,

While rapture's gushing tears descend,
That every flower and every leaf
Is moral Truth's unerring friend.

R. BLOOMField.

SCARLET PIMPERNEL,

THE SHEPHERD'S WEATHER-GLASS.

BRIGHTLY still the sun shines out,
Flinging welcomes all about;
Flow'rs, a gay and glittering band,
As in sign of joy expand;
Yet the cautious Pimpernel
Closes its prophetic hell,
Ominous its folding flower,
Of a dark, tempestuous hour.
Vain its warning seems, and strange;
Nothing round portends a change ;-
Does it shut its eye to grieve,
That fair looks can so deceive,
That a sun so bright and warm,
Can be herald to a storm?
Is it mission'd to impart
Lessons to the tempted heart,
Warning it with fear to view
Smiles that often prove untrue;
Bidding it for change prepare,
In the glow of sunshine fair?—
Oh! that with its practised eye,
We might guess when storms are nigh;
And, before the tempests lower,

Hide us in celestial bower!

E. ROBERTS.

WHEN a man has succeeded at length in cultivating his imagination, all things, the most familiar and unnoticed, disclose charms invisible to him before; the contrast between the present and past, serving only to enhance and to endear so unlooked-for an acquisition. What Gray has finely said of the " pleasures of vicissitude," conveys but a faint image of what is experienced by the man who, after having lost in vulgar occupation and vulgar amusement his earliest and most precious years, is thus introduced at last to a new heaven and a new earth.

"The meanest flowret of the vale,

The simplest note that swells the gale, The common sun, the air, the skies,

To him are opening Paradise."

PROFESSOR STEWART.

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