Then shall the good stand in immortal bloom, With thy rude ploughshare, Death, turn up the sod, This is the place, where human harvests grow! HENRY W. LONGFELLOW. Gently the Parting Spirit fled. DEAR EAR as thou wert, and justly dear, ; One thought shall check the starting tear, It is that thou art free. And thus shall Faith's consoling power Oh! who that saw thy parting hour, Triumphant in thy closing eye Joy breathed in thine expiring sigh, Gently the passing spirit fled, Sustained by grace Oh! may divine: such grace on me be shed, And make my end like thine! DALE. FIRST Golden Precepts. IRST worship God;-he that forgets to pray Bids not himself good-morrow, nor good-day; Let thy first labour be to purge thy sin, And serve him first, whence all things did begin. Honour thy parents to prolong thine end; Honour the king, as sons their parents do, Take well whate'er shall chance, though bad it be, Swear not; an oath is like a dangerous dart Fly drunkenness, whose vile incontinence To doubtful matters do not headlong run, First think; and if thy thoughts approve thy will, So live with men, as if God's curious eye Take thou no care how to defer thy death, 'Bove Galen's diet or Hippocrates': Strive to live well; tread in the upright ways, But he that outlives Nestor, and appears To have pass'd the date of gray Methusalem's years, If he his life to sloth and sin doth give, I say he only was, he did not live. THOMAS RANDOLPII. Goodness and Truth require no GOODNESS and truth require no decoration; and fair: All ornament is supererogation, Giving false coloring and fictitious air. Beauty is virtue's image, truth's best light,- 'Tis the grand girdle, that, with radiance bright, To both,-in all that are, their lustre gives. To its sublime control all evil bows, Or sneaks away, subjected to its reign; O'er each defect a garb of mystery throws, Or seeks her midnight nakedness again. Error must be the lot of mortal kind, But virtue, in life's night, man's guide may be ; For man's dim eye, so weak,-'tis almost blind,— Scarce looks through mist-damps of mortality. Vain is endeavour!-true; but that endeavour, It goodness, truth, and virtue testifies; Struggles and fails, but fails through weakness ever, Yet, failing, pours out light on darkened eyes. Ye vainly dream, obscurers of the earth, That all is tending downwards to its fall; Vain are your scoffs on manhood, and man'sworth, And that great tendency which governs all. In vain, with fading and offensive flowers, Call what is incomplete, degenerate; God's children, bastards; and its curses At all who bend not at its temple-gate, A slowly, surely, sweetly working leaven, We sink not, sacred ones! but fluttering tend,— Though weak, we tend towards God: the word we hear, Audibly bidding us uprise, and wend Our way above man's feebleness and fear. An idle toil is slumbering man's poor fate, Yet duty is but deeds of loveliness, And truth is power to make the prisoner free; And him, whose self-forged chains his spirit press, No effort shall arouse from slavery. |