HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW. An American poet, born at Portland, in Maine, in the year 1807, and still living, (1877.)

Longfellow's chief works are, Voices of the Night; Evangeline ; The Golden Legend; Hiawatha ; The Courtship of Miles Standish; By the Fireside, etc.

THE WRECK OF THE HESPERUS.
It was the schooner? Hesperus,

That sailed the wintry sea;
And the skipper 2 had taken his little daughter,

To bear him company.
Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax,

Her cheeks like the dawn of day,
And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds

That opes in the month of May.
The skipper he stood beside the helm,

His pipe was in his mouth,
And he watched how the veering * flaw did blow

The smoke now west, now south.
Then up and spake an old sailor,

Had sailed 6 the Spanish Main,
“I

pray thee put into yonder port,

For I fear a hurricane.
“ Last night the moon had a golden ring,

And to-night no moon we see !".
The skipper, he blew a whiff from his pipe,

And a scornful laugh laughed he.
Colder and louder blew the wind,

A gale from the north-east ;
The snow fell hissing in the brine,

And the billows frothed like yeast.

7

Schooner, a vessel with two masts. 2 Skipper, the captain of a merchant vessel. 3 Ope, a poetical word for open. 4 Veering, changing. 5 Flaw, a sudden gust of wind. 6 Had sailed, for who had sailed.

7 Spanish Main, that part of the Atlantic Ocean which washes the north of South America.

Down came the storm, and smote amain'

The vessel in its strength;
She shuddered and paused, like a frighted steed,

Then leaped her cable's length.
“ Come hither! come hither ! my little daughter,

And do not tremble so ;
For I can weather the roughest gale

That ever wind did blow."

He wrapped her warm in his seaman's coat

Against the stinging blast;
He cut a rope from a broken spar,

And bound her to the mast.

“O father! I hear the church-bells ring,

O say what may it be?”
“ 'Tis a fog-bell on a rock-bound coast !”

And he steered for the open sea.
“O father! I hear the sound of guns,

O say what may it be?
“Some ship in distress, that cannot live

“In such an angry sea.”
O father! I see a gleaming light,

O say what may it be ?"
But the father answered never a word,-

A frozen corpse was he.
Lashed to the helm ? all stiff and stark,

With his face turned to the skies,
The lantern gleamed through the gleaming snow

On his fixed and glassy eyes.
Then the maiden clasped her hands and prayed

That saved she might be;
And she thought of Christ, who stilled the wave

On the Lake of Galilee.

| Amain, violently or with great force.

2 Lashed to the helm, tied or fastened to the instrument by which the vessel is guided.

And fast through the midnight dark and drear,

Through the whistling sleet and snow,
Like a sheeted ghost, the vessel swept

Towards the reef of Norman's Woe.
And ever the fitful gusts between

A sound came from the land;
It was the sound of the trampling surf

On the rocks and the hard sea-sand.
The breakers 2 were right beneath her bows,

She drifted a dreary wreck,
And a whooping billow swept the crew

Like icicles from her deck.
She struck where the white and fleecy waves

Looked soft as carded wool;
But the cruel rocks, they gored her side

Like the horns of an angry bull.
Her rattling shrouds 3 all sheathed in ice,

With the mast went by the board ; 4
Like a vessel of glass, she stove and sank:

Ho! ho ! the breakers roared !
At day break, on the bleak sea-beach

A fisherman stood aghast,
To see the form of a maiden fair

Lashed to a drifting mast.
The salt sea was frozen on her breast,

The salt tears in her eyes ;
And he saw her hair, like the brown sea-wecd,

On the billows fall and rise.
Such was the wreck of the Hesperus,

In the midnight and the snow :
Christ save us all from a death like this,

On the reef of Norman's Woe !

1 Reef, a ridge of rocks lying near the surface of the water. 2 Breakers, waves broken by dashing over the rocks.

3 Shrouds, ropes reaching from the sides of a vessel to the top of the niast.

4 Went by the board. To go by the board, is for the mast of a ship to be broken and thrown over the bord or side. Hence the phrase is employed to denote complete destruction.

THE REAPER AND THE FLOWERS.
There is a reaper whose name is Death,

And, with his sickle keen,
He reaps the bearded grain at a breath,

And the flowers ? that grow between.

“ Shall I have nought that is fair?” said he,

“ Have nought but the bearded grain ? Though the breath of these flowers is sweet to me

I will give them all back again.”

He gazed at the flowers with tearful eyes,

He kissed their drooping leaves ; It was for the Lord of paradise

He bound them in his sheaves.

“My Lord has need of these flowerets 3 gay,”

The reaper said, and smiled ; “ Dear tokens of the earth are they,

Where He was once a child.

They shall all bloom in fields of light,

Transplanted by my care,
And saints, upon their garments white,

'These sacred blossoms wear.

And the mother gave, in tears and pain,

The flowers she most did love ;
She knew she would find them all again

In the fields of light above.

Oh, not in cruelty, not in wrath,

The reaper came that day : 'Twas an angel visited the green earth,

And took the flowers away,

ELIZA COOK. Born in Southwark, London, in the year 1818, and still living (1877). She began at an early age to write for various periodicals. In 1840 published her first volume of poetry, which attracted much attention, and won for her considerable popularity.

TRY AGAIN.
King Bruce' of Scotland flung himself down,

In a lonely mood, to think;
'Tis true he was monarch, and wore a crown,

But his heart was beginning to sink.
For he had been trying to do a great deed,

To make his people glad ;
He had tried and tried, but couldn't succeed,

And so he became quite sad.
He flung himself down in low despair,

As grieved as man could be ;
And after a while, as he pondered” there,

I'll give it all up," said he.
Now, just at the moment, a spider dropped,

With its silken, filmy clue ; 3
And the king, in the midst of his thinking, stopped,

To see what the spider would do.
'Twas a long way up to the ceiling dome,

And it hung by a rope so fine ;
That how it would get to its cobweb home,

King Bruce could not divine. 4
It soon began to cling and crawl

Straight up, with strong endeavour ;
But down it came, with a slippery sprawl,

As near to the ground as ever.
Up, up it ran; not a second to stay,

To utter the least complaint ;
Till it fell still lower, and there it lay,

A little dizzy and faint.

See

1 King Bruce, Robert Bruce, the hero of Bannockburn. page 20.