SEVENTY-SIX.

WHAT heroes from the woodland sprung,
When, through the fresh awakened land,

The thrilling cry of freedom rung,
And to the work of warfare strung
The yeoman's iron hand!

Hills flung the cry to hills around,

And ocean-mart replied to mart,

And streams, whose springs were yet unfound, Pealed far away the startling sound

Into the forest's heart.

Then marched the brave from rocky steep,
From mountain river swift and cold;

The borders of the stormy deep,
The vales where gathered waters sleep,
Sent up the strong and bold,-

As if the very earth again

Grew quick with God's creating breath,

And, from the sods of grove and glen,
Rose ranks of lion-hearted men

To battle to the death.

The wife, whose babe first smiled that day, The fair fond bride of yestereve,

And aged sire and matron gray,
Saw the loved warriors haste away,
And deemed it sin to grieve.

Already had the strife begun;

Already blood on Concord's plain Along the springing grass had run, And blood had flowed at Lexington, Like brooks of April rain.

That death-stain on the vernal sward
Hallowed to freedom all the shore;
In fragments fell the yoke abhorred—
The footstep of a foreign lord
Profaned the soil no more.

THE LIVING LOST.

MATRON! the children of whose love,

Each to his grave, in youth hath passed, And now the mould is heaped above

The dearest and the last!

Bride! who dost wear the widow's veil
Before the wedding flowers are pale!
Ye deem the human heart endures
No deeper, bitterer grief than yours.

Yet there are pangs of keener wo,
Of which the sufferers never speak,
Nor to the world's cold pity show

The tears that scald the cheek,
Wrung from their eyelids by the shame
And guilt of those they shrink to name,
Whom once they loved with cheerful will,
And love, though fallen and branded, still.

Weep, ye who sorrow for the dead,

Thus breaking hearts their pain relieve;

And reverenced are the tears ye shed,
And honoured ye who grieve.
The praise of those who sleep in earth,
The pleasant memory of their worth,
The hope to meet when life is past.
Shall heal the tortured mind at last.

But ye, who for the living lost
That agony in secret bear,

Who shall with soothing words accost
The strength of your despair?
Grief for your
sake is scorn for them
Whom ye lament and all condemn;
And o'er the world of spirits lies

A gloom from which ye turn your eyes.

CATTERSKILL FALLS.

MIDST greens and shades the Catterskill leaps,
From cliffs where the wood-flower clings;
All summer he moistens his verdant steeps

With the sweet light spray of the mountain springs;
And he shakes the woods on the mountain side,
When they drip with the rains of autumn-tide.

But when, in the forest bare and old,
The blast of December calls,

He builds, in the starlight clear and cold,
A palace of ice where his torrent falls,
With turret, and arch, and fretwork fair,
And pillars blue as the summer air.

For whom are those glorious chambers wrought,
In the cold and cloudless night?

Is there neither spirit nor motion of thought
In forms so lovely, and hues so bright?
Hear what the gray-haired woodmen tell
Of this wild stream and its rocky dell.