A STRANGER HERE.

I MISS the dear paternal dwelling,
Which mem'ry still undimm'd recals,
A thousand early stories telling,

I miss the venerable walls.

I miss the chamber of my childhood,
I miss the shade of boyhood's tree,—

The glen, the path, the cliff, the wild-wood,
The music of the well-known sea.

I miss the ivied haunt of moonlight,
I miss the forest and the stream,
I miss the fragrant grove of noonlight,
I miss our mountain's sunset gleam.

I miss the green slope, where reposing
I mused upon the near and far,
Marked, one by one, each floweret closing,

Watched, one by one, each opening star.

I miss the well-remembered faces,

The voices, forms of fresher days;

Time ploughs not up these deep-drawn traces, These lines no ages can erase.

I miss them all, for, unforgetting,
My spirit o'er the past still strays,
And, much its wasted years regretting,
It treads again these shaded ways.

I mourn not that each early token
Is now to me a faded flower,
Nor that the magic snare is broken
That held me with its mystic power.

I murmur not that now a stranger,
I pass along the smiling earth ;
I know the snare, I dread the danger,
I hate the haunts, I shun the mirth.

My hopes are passing upward, onward,
And with my hopes my heart has gone ;

My eye is turning skyward, sunward,

Where glory brightens round yon throne.

My spirit seeks its dwelling yonder;

And faith fore-dates the joyful day When these old skies shall cease to sunder The one dear, love-linked family.

Well-pleased I find years rolling o'er me, And hear each day time's measured tread; Far fewer clouds now stretch before me, Behind me is the darkness spread.

And summer's suns are swiftly setting,
And life moves downward in their train,
And autumn dews are fondly wetting
The faded cheek of earth in vain.

December moons are coldly waning,
And life with them is on the wane;
Storm-laden skies with sad complaining,
Bend blackly o'er the unsmiling main.

My future from my past unlinking,
Each dying year untwines the spell ;
The visible is swiftly sinking,

Uprises the invisible.

To light, unchanging, and eternal,

From mists that sadden this bleak waste,

To scenes that smile for ever vernal,

From winter's blackening leaf I haste.

Earth, what a sorrow lies before thee,

None like it in the shadowy past ;— The sharpest throe that ever tore thee, Even tho' the briefest and the last!

I see the fair moon veil her lustre,
I see the sackcloth of the sun;
The shrouding of each starry cluster,
The three-fold woe of earth begun.

I see the shadows of its sunset;

And wrapt in these the Avenger's form;

I see the Armageddon-onset ;

But I shall be above the storm.

There comes the moaning and the sighing,

There comes the hot tear's heavy fall,

The thousand agonies of dying ;—

But I shall be beyond them all.

OCEAN TEACHINGS.

"This great and wide sea."-Ps. CIV. 25.

THAT rising storm! It has awakened me;
My slumbering spirit starts to life anew;
That blinding spray-drift, how it falls upon me,
As on the weary flower the freshening dew.

That rugged rock-fringe that girds in the ocean,
And calls the foam from its translucent blue,
It seems to pour strange strength into my spirit,—
Strength for endurance, strength for conflict too.

And these bright ocean-birds, these billow-rangers, The snowy-breasted, each a winged waveThey tell me how to joy in storm and dangers,

When surges whiten, or when whirlwinds rave.