THE COUNTRY LIFE.

NOT what we would, but what we must,
Makes up the sum of living;

Heaven is both more and less than just

In taking and in giving.

Swords cleave to hands that sought the plough,
And laurels miss the soldier's brow.

Me, whom the city holds, whose feet
Have worn its stony highways,
Familiar with its loneliest street-
Its ways were never my ways.
My cradle was beside the sea,
And there, I hope, my grave will be.

Old homestead! In that old, gray town,
Thy vane is seaward blowing,
The slip of garden stretches down
To where the tide is flowing:

Below they lie, their sails all furled,
The ships that go about the world.

Dearer that little country house,
Inland, with pines beside it;
Some peach-trees, with unfruitful boughs,
A well, with weeds to hide it:
No flowers, or only such as rise
Self-sown, poor things, which all despise.

Dear country home! Can I forget
The least of thy sweet trifles?
The window-vines that clamber yet,
Whose bloom the bee still rifles?

The roadside blackberries, growing ripe,
And in the woods the Indian Pipe?

Happy the man who tills his field,
Content with rustic labor;

Earth does to him her fulness yield,
Hap what may to his neighbor.
Well days, sound nights, oh, can there be
A life more rational and free?

Dear country life of child and man!
For both the best, the strongest,
That with the earliest race began,
And hast outlived the longest:

Their cities perished long ago;
Who the first farmers were we know.

Perhaps our Babels too will fall;

If so, no lamentations,

For Mother Earth will shelter all,

And feed the unborn nations;

Yes, and the swords that menace now,
Will then be beaten to the plough.

RICHARD HENRY STODDARD.

THE SWISS PEASANT.

66

FROM THE TRAVELLER."

TURN me to survey

Where rougher climes a nobler race display,

Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansion

tread,

And force a churlish soil for scanty bread:

No product here the barren hills afford
But man and steel, the soldier and his sword;
No vernal blooms their torpid rocks array,
But winter lingering chills the lap of May;
No zephyr fondly sues the mountain's breast,
But meteors glare, and stormy glooms invest.

Yet still, even here, content can spread a charm, Redress the clime, and all its rage disarm. Though poor the peasant's hut, his feast though small,

He sees his little lot the lot of all;

Sees no contiguous palace rear its head,
To shame the meanness of his humble shed;
No costly lord the sumptuous banquet deal
To make him loathe his vegetable meal;
But calm, and bred in ignorance and toil,
Each wish contracting, fits him to the soil.
Cheerful at morn he wakes from short repose,
Breathes the keen air, and carols as he goes;
With patient angle trolls the finny deep,

Or drives his venturous ploughshare to the steep;
Or seeks the den where snow-tracks mark the way,
And drags the struggling savage into day.

At night returning, every labor sped,
He sits him down the monarch of a shed;
Smiles by a cheerful fire, and round surveys
His children's looks that brighten to the blaze,
While his loved partner, boastful of her hoard,
Displays her cleanly platter on the board;
And haply too some pilgrim, thither led,
With many a tale repays the nightly bed.