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النشر الإلكتروني

GEMS FOR THE FIRESIDE.

HE

FOREST HYMN.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

groves were God's first temples, | Here, in the shadow of this aged wood, ere man learned

Offer one hymn,-thrice happy if it find

To hew the shaft, and lay the Acceptance in His ear.

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That run along the summit of these trees
In music; Thou art in the cooler breath
That from the inmost darkness of the place
Comes, scarcely felt; the barky trunks, the
ground,

The fresh, moist ground, are all instinct with
Thee:

Here is continual worship;-nature, here,
In the tranquility that Thou dost love,
Enjoys Thy presence. Noiselessly around,
From perch to perch, the solitary bird
Passes; and yon clear spring that, midst its
herbs,

Wells softly forth, and, wandering, steeps the

roots

Of half the mighty forest, tells no tale
Of all the good it does. Thou hast not left
Thyself without a witness, in these shades,
Of Thy perfection. Grandeur, strength, and
grace

Are here to speak of Thee. This mighty oak,

By whose immovable stem I stand and seem Almost annihilated,—not a prince,

In all that proud old world beyond the deep, L'er wore his crown as loftily as he

Wears the green coronal of leaves with which

Thy hand hath graced him. Nestled at his root

Is beauty, such as blooms not in the glare Of the broad sun. That delicate forest flower,

With scented breath, and look so like a smile,

Seems, as it issues from the shapeless mould,
An emanation of the indwelling life,
A visible token of the upholding Love,
That are the soul of this wide universe

My heart is awed within me when I think Of the great miracle that still goes on, In silence, round me,-the perpetual work Of Thy creation, finished, yet renewed Forever. Written on Thy works, I read The lesson of Thy own eternity. Lo! all grow old and die; but see again, How on the faltering footsteps of decay Youth press 8,-ever gay and beautiful youth,

In all its beautiful forms. These lofty trees Wave not less proudly that their ancestors Moulder beneath them. O, there is not

lost

One of Earth's charms! Upon her bosom yet,

After the flight of untold centuries,
The freshness of her far beginning lies,
And yet shall lie. Life mocks the idle

hate

Of his arch-enemy,-Death,-yea, seats him self

Upon the tyrant's throne, the sepulchre,
And of the triumphs of his ghastly foe
Makes his own nourishment. For he came
forth

From Thine own bosom, and shall have no end.

There have been holy men who hid themselves

Deep in the woody wilderness, and gave Their lives to thought and prayer, till they

outlived

The generation born with them, nor seemed Less aged than the hoary trees and rocks Around them; and there have been holy

men

Who deemed it were not well to pass life thus.
But let me often to these solitudes
Retire, and in Thy presence, reassure
My feeble virtue. Here its enemies,
The passions, at Thy plainer footsteps
shrink,

And tremble, and are still. O God! when
Thou

Dost scare the world with tempests, set on fire

The heavens with falling thunderbolts, or fill,

With all the waters of the firmament,
The swift dark whirlwind that uproots the

woods

And drowns the villages; when, at Thy call,
Uprises the great deep, and throws himself
Upon the continent, and overwhelms
Its cities, who forgets not, at the sight
Of these tremendous tokens of Thy power.
His prides, and lay his strifes and follies
by?

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UT how about killing fish for sport? In the name of sense, man, if God made fish to be eaten, what difference does it make if I enjoy the killing of them before I eat them? You would have none but a fisherman by trade do it, and then you would have him utter a sigh, a prayer, and a pious ejaculation at each cod or haddock that he killed; and if by chance the old fellow, sitting in the boat at work, should for a moment think there was, after all, a little fun and a little pleasure in his

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business, you would have him take a round turn with his line, and drop on his knees to ask forgiveness for the sin of thinking there was sport in fishing.

I can imagine the sadfaced melancholy-eyed man, who makes it his business to supply game for the market as you would have him, sober as the sexton in Hamlet, and forever moralizing over the gloomy necessity that has doomed him to a life of murder?

Why, good sir, he would

frighten respectable fish, and the market would soon be destitute.

The keenest day's sport in my journal of a great many years of sport was when, in company with some other gentlemen, I took three hundred blue-fish in three hours' fishing off Block Island, and those fish were eaten

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