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Alas! nor chariot, nor barouche,
Nor bandit cavalcade,

Tore from the trembling father's arms
His all-accomplished maid.
For her how happy had it been!
And heaven had spared to me
To see one sad, ungathered rose
On my ancestral tree.

LESSON LXII.

PASTORAL POETRY.-N. P. WILLIS.

Some poets, in every age, have endeavored to portray the simplicity and supposed charms of a Pastor's or Shepherd's life, in verses imagined to be written by rustics. This class of poetry is called Pastoral, and the Idyls of Theocritus, in Greek, the Bucolies of Virgil, in Latin, the poems of Shenstone, in English, are supposed to be the most favorable specimens. Even Milton falls in with the notion, and in an Elegy, or funeral song on the death of a friend, who was no more of a shepherd or rustic than himself, he attempts to write as a shepherd, and the poem which the pupil may find in the American First Class Book, page 353, is a strange mixture of profound classical knowledge with pastoral allusions and affected rusticity. The following does not pretend to be a pastoral poem, but it hits off the silly affectation in the sprightly style peculiar to our gifted poet.

They talk of love in a cottage,
And bowers of trelliced vine,
Of nature bewitchingly simple,
And milkmaids half divine ;-
They talk of the pleasure of sleeping
In the shade of a spreading tree,
And of walks with a nymph at morning,
Who trips with a footstep free.

Your love in a cottage gets hungry,
Your vine is a nest for flies,
Simplicity cuts the graces,

And your milkmaid talks of pies;

You sink to your shady slumber,

And wake with a flea in your ear;

And your damsel that walks in the morning,
Is shod like a mountaineer.

True love is at home on the carpet,
And mightily likes his ease;
And true love has an eye to a capon,
And starves in your "shady trees."
His wing is the fan of a lady,

His foot's an invisible thing,

And his arrow is tipped with a jewel,
And shot from a silver string.

LESSON LXIII.

THE PLOUGH.

It is easy to find poems which the war spirit has inspired, but it is not so easy to find suitable pieces in praise of peace, and those arts which it cherishes. The following piece, taken from an English paper, may, in the hands of the farmer's boy, warm the heart of many an honest yeoman. As a pastoral poem, it is free from the affectation noticed in the introduction to lesson 62.

Let them sing who may of the battle fray,

And the deeds that have long since past;

Let them chant in praise of the tar, whose days
Are spent on the ocean vast;

I would render to these all the worship you please,
I would honor them even now,

But I'd give far more from my heart's full store
To the cause of the Good Old Plough.

How pleasant to me is the song from the tree,
And the rich and blossoming bough;

Oh! these are the sweets which the rustic greets
As he follows the Good Old Plough.

Though he follows no hound, yet his day is crowned
With a triumph as good, I trow,
As though antlered head at his feet lay dead,
Instead of the Good Old Plough.

Full many there be that we daily see
With a selfish and hollow pride,
Who the ploughman's lot in his humble cot
With a scornful look deride.

Yet I'd rather take, aye, a hearty shake
From his hand than to wealthiness bow,
For the honest grasp of that hand's rough clasp
Hath guided the Good Old Plough.

All honor be then to these gray old men,
When at last they are bowed with toil;
Their warfare then o'er, why they battle no more
For they 've conquered the stubborn soil.
And the chaplet each wears is his silver hairs,
And ne'er shall the victor's brow

With a laurelled crown to the grave go down,
Like these sons of the Good Old Plough.

LESSON LXIV.

DEFENCE OF THE PILGRIM FATHERS AGAINST THE CHARGE OF PERSECUTION.-EDITOR.

The pupil who wishes to understand the character of the settlers of New England, should make himself familiar with the state of religion in England from the time when the English Church separated from the Church of Rome, under Henry VIII, to the death of Charles II. He will then see that they were far beyond their age in many important respects, and in none fell behind it. Neal's History of the Puritans, though not elegantly written, gives the most familiar account of the matter, and is accessible to all. If the piece is too long, the paragraphs in brackets may be omitted.

It is not uncommon for the upholders of abuse in foreign countries, to sneer at the persecuting spirit,

which, as they assert, distinguished the Puritan Fathers of New England; and it is not a strange thing to see their degenerate offspring among ourselves plead guilty to the charge, and blushing as they attempt to apologize for the offence. Apologize for what! Let us look a moment into their history, and we shall see.

Imagine to yourselves a band of men, against whose loyalty no minion of power dared to whisper an accusation;—against whose morality the courts of law had never breathed a suspicion ;—against whose sincerity even their persecutors never entertained a doubt;—and against whose fervent piety the corrupt hierarchy brought no charge but its excess;-imagine such a band imprisoned as rebels; stripped of their lawful property by every unjust exercise of power; treated as hypocrites and unholy zealots, for whom the rack was mercy, and death itself but the prevention of greater condemnation ;-imagine these men driven to desperation without rising in revolt; stripped of their hardearned possessions, and cut off from the means of subsistence, without remonstrance; accused of impiety without any reply but the patient exercise of every christian grace; imagine them leaving the country which was endeared to them by every charm that is condensed in the word home, and, self exiled, betaking themselves to a wilderness, with regrets and heartbreakings behind them, and nothing but hardships and sufferings ahead;-imagine them submitting to all this for the privilege of worshipping God in their own way, a way which their very name of reproach, Puritans, declared to be more solemn, more devout, and more simple than that of their persecutors ;-imagine all this, and say if they had not earned a right to that unity of belief for which they had borne all, left all, and sacrificed all;-a right, I had almost said, to punish those who should cruelly intrude upon their dear-bought seclusion.

[They had made the sacrifice in vain if the hier archy, from which they had fled, could follow them and, backed as it was by the civil arm, could renew it attacks in the wilderness. They had made themselve exiles in vain, if they must still be exposed to heresie which shocked their piety, and, as they believed, en dangered the eternal peace of themselves and thei children.]

We must not judge such men by the standard of ou own times, far as we are removed from perfect tolera tion; for this may lead us to expect that, having suf fered persecution for religious opinion, they should have made their new settlement an asylum for the op pressed of all nations. They probably would have done so, had there been no room in the new world for another colony. But there was room enough, and to spare, and it will admit of debate whether there was more of cruelty in the expulsion of guests who disturbed the colony by their restless attacks upon its laws and institutions, than in the unfeeling attempt to disturb a peace that had been purchased at a price which we, in these altered times, know not how to estimate.

[I should as soon accuse a man of cruelty who dismissed an intruder from the household, whose harmony and happiness he had disturbed, as to accuse the Puritan Fathers of injustice in purging their little community of the elements of anarchy and dissolution. I should as soon accuse a magistrate of cruelty, who restrained a madman from throwing firebrands amongst the peaceful dwellings of a city, as I should accuse the fathers of New England of undue severity in restraining the incendiaries, who wished to kindle the flames of discord in their homes and in their churches.]

Our fathers were men, or they would never have ascertained their rights in the mother country; rights even now hardly acknowledged, but then universally de

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