THE IVY GREEN.

O, A DAINTY plant is the ivy green,
That creepeth o'er ruins old!

Of right choice food are his meals, I ween,
In his cell so lone and cold.

The walls must be crumbled, the stones decayed,
To pleasure his dainty whim;
And the moldering dust that years have made
Is a merry meal for him.

Creeping where no life is seen,
A rare old plant is the ivy green.

Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings,
And a stanch old heart has he!
How closely he twineth, how tight he clings
To his friend, the huge oak-tree !
And slyly he traileth along the ground,
And his leaves he gently waves,
And he joyously twines and hugs around
The rich mold of dead men's graves.
Creeping where no life is seen,
A rare old plant is the ivy green.

But the stout old ivy shall never fade
From its hale and hearty green.

The brave old plant in its lonely days
Shall fatten upon the past;
For the stateliest building man can raise
Is the ivy's food at last.

Creeping where no life is seen,

A rare old plant is the ivy green.

CHARLES DICKENS.

And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,

To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;

Whole ages have fled, and their works decayed, When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though And nations have scattered been ; all the trees are still,

And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the

rill;

They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rab

bit's tread.

Are lying in their lowly beds with the fair and
good of ours.

The rain is falling where they lie; but the cold
November rain

The robin and the wren are flown, and from the shrubs the jay,

And from the wood-top calls the crow through all the gloomy day.

Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely ones again.

Where are the flowers, the fair young flowers, that lately sprang and stood

In brighter light and softer airs, a beauteous sisterhood?

Alas! they all are in their graves; the gentle race of flowers

The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long

ago,

And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;

But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,

And then I think of one who in her youthful beauty died,

The fair meek blossom that grew up and faded by my side.

THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS.

In the cold moist earth we laid her, when the forests cast the leaf,

THE melancholy days are come, the saddest of And we wept that one so lovely should have a the year, life so brief; one, like that young

Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows Yet not unmeet it was that friend of ours,

brown and sear.

Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the flowers.

leaves lie dead;

And the yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,

Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,

And the brightness of their smile was gone from upland, glade, and glen.

The south-wind searches for the flowers whose fragrance late he bore,

And sighs to find them in the wood and by the

stream no more.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

THE USE OF FLOWERS.

Gop might have bade the earth bring forth
Enough for great and small,

The oak-tree and the cedar-tree,
Without a flower at all.

We might have had enough, enough
For every want of ours,

For luxury, medicine, and toil,
And yet have had no flowers.

AUTUMN.

"When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,

And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill."