140 WOODMAN, SPARE THAT TREE.

When but an idle boy,

I sought its grateful shade;
In all their gushing joy

Here too my sisters played.
My mother kissed me here;
My father pressed my hand
Forgive this foolish tear,

But let that old oak stand.

My heartstrings round thee cling,
Close as thy bark, old friend!
Here shall the wild-bird sing,
And still thy branches bend.
Old tree the storm shall brave!
And woodman leave the spot:
While I've a hand to save,
Thy axe shall harm it not.

George P. Morris.

THE RETURN.

AST thou come with the heart of thy childhood back?

The free, the pure, the kind?

So murmured the trees in my homeward track,

As they played to the mountain-wind.

"Hath thy soul been true to its early love?” Whispered my native streams;

"Hath thy spirit nursed amidst hill and grove, Still revered its first high dreams?"

"Hast thou borne in thy bosom the holy prayer

Of the child in his parent-halls?"Thus breathed a voice on the morning air, From the old ancestral walls.

"Hast thou kept thy faith with the faithful dead,

Whose place of rest is nigh?

With the father's blessing o'er thee shed, With the mother's trusting eye?"

142

THE RETURN.

Then my tears gushed forth in a sudden rain,
As I answered,—"O, ye shades!
I bring not my childhood's heart again.
To the freedom of your glades."

"I have turned from my first pure love aside, O, bright and happy streams!

Light after light, in my soul have died,
The day-spring's glorious dreams.

And the holy prayer from my thoughts hath pass'd,

The prayer at my mother's knee; Darkened and troubled I come at last, Home of my boyish glee!

"But I bear from my childhood a gift of tears, To soften and atone;

And O, ye scenes of those blessed years,

They shall make me again your own!"

Felicia Hemans.

MY AIN COUNTREE.

HE sun rises bright in France,

And fair sets he;

But he has not the blythe blink he had
In my ain countree.
O, gladness comes to many,

But sorrow comes to me,
As I look o'er the wide ocean
To my ain countree.

O, it's nae my ain ruin

That saddens aye my e'e,
But the love I left in Galloway,
Wi' bonnie bairnies three.
My hamely hearth burnt bonnie,
An' smiled my fair Marie;
I've left my heart behind me
In my ain countree.

The bud comes back to summer,
And the blossom to the bee;
But I'll win back O, never,
To my ain countree.

I'm leal to the high heaven,

Which will be leal to me, An' there I'll meet ye a' sune

Frae my ain countree.

Allan Cunningham

HERE went a dirge through the forest's gloom.

An exile was borne to a lonely tomb. "Brother!" (so the chant was sung In the slumberer's native tongue), "Friend and brother! not for thee Shall the sound of weeping be; Long the exile's woe hath lain. On thy life a withering chain; Music from thine own blue streams, Wandered through thy fever-dreams, Voices from thy country's vines, Met thee 'midst the alien pines; And thy true heart died away, And thy spirit would not stay."