And as the midnight shadows sweep,
Life's noisy torrent drops to sleep,
Its unseen current dark and deep
In silence flows.

Thomas Buchanan Read.

New York, the City, N. Y.

WHE

NIEUW AMSTERDAM.

HERE nowadays the Battery lies,
New York had just begun,

A new-born babe, to rub its eyes,

In Sixteen Sixty-One.

They christened it Nieuw Amsterdam,

Those burghers grave and stately,
And so, with schnapps and smoke and psalm,
Lived out their lives sedately.

Two windmills topped their wooden wall,

On Stadthuys gazing down,

On fort, and cabbage-plots, and all

The quaintly gabled town;

These flapped their wings and shifted backs,
As ancient scrolls determine,
To scare the savage Hackensacks,
Paumanks, and other vermin.

At night the loyal settlers lay
Betwixt their feather-beds;

In hose and breeches walked by day,
And smoked, and wagged their heads.
No changeful fashions came from France,
The vrouwleins to bewilder;

No broad-brimmed burgher spent for pants
His every other guilder.

In petticoats of linsey-red,
And jackets neatly kept,

The vrouws their knitting-needles sped
And deftly spun and swept.

Few modern-school flirtations there

Set wheels of scandal trundling,

But youths and maidens did their share
Of staid, old-fashioned bundling.

Edmund Clarence Stedman.

IS

NEW YORK HARBOR ON A CALM DAY.

this a painting? Are those pictured clouds Which on the sky so movelessly repose?

Has some rare artist fashioned forth the shrouds
Of yonder vessel? Are these imaged shows
Of outline, figure, form, or is there life-
Life with a thousand pulses in the scene
We gaze upon? Those towering banks between,
E'er tossed these billows in tumultuous strife?
Billows! there's not a wave! the waters spread
One broad, unbroken mirror; all around

Is hushed to silence, - silence so profound,
That a bird's carol, or an arrow sped
Into the distance, would, like larum bell,

Jar the deep stillness and dissolve the spell.

Park Benjamin.

HYMN OF THE CITY.

Nor in the solitude

Alone may man commune with heaven, or see
Only in savage wood

And sunny vale, the present Deity;
Or only hear his voice

Where the winds whisper and the waves rejoice.

Even here do I behold

Thy steps, Almighty!-here, amidst the crowd,
Through the great city rolled,

With everlasting murmur deep and loud,

Choking the ways that wind

'Mongst the proud piles, the work of human kind.

Thy golden sunshine comes

From the round heaven, and on their dwellings lies, And lights their inner homes;

For them thou fill'st with air the unbounded skies, And givest them the stores

Of ocean, and the harvests of its shores.

Thy spirit is around,

Quickening the restless mass that sweeps along;
And this eternal sound,

Voices and footfalls of the numberless throng, -
Like the resounding sea,

Or like the rainy tempest, speaks of thee.

And when the hours of rest

Come, like a calm upon the mid-sea brine,
Hushing its billowy breast, -

The quiet of that moment too is thine;
It breathes of Him who keeps

The vast and helpless city while it sleeps.

William Cullen Bryant.

SPRING IN TOWN.

HE country ever has a lagging Spring,

THE

Waiting for May to call its violets forth,
And June its roses, showers and sunshine bring,
Slowly, the deepening verdure o'er the earth;
To put their foliage out, the woods are slack,
And one by one the singing-birds come back.

Within the city's bounds the time of flowers
Comes earlier. Let a mild and sunny day,
Such as full often, for a few bright hours,

Breathes through the sky of March the airs of May, Shine on our roofs and chase the wintry gloom — And lo! our borders glow with sudden bloom.

For the wide sidewalks of Broadway are then
Gorgeous as are a rivulet's banks in June,
That overhung with blossoms, through its glen,
Slides soft away beneath the sunny noon,

"Slowly, the deepening verdure o'er the earth." See page 138.