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A MORNING INVOCATION.

Oh! lose not in unconscious ease

An hour so heavenly fair;

Come forth, while yet the glittering trees

Wave in the purple air;

While yet a dewy freshness fills

The morning's fragrant gale;
While o'er the woods and up the hills,
The mist rolls from the vale.

Awake! too soon, alas! too soon,
The glory must decay;
And, in the fervid eye of noon,

The freshness fade away.

Then seize the hour so swift of flight,

Its early bloom partake:

By all that's beautiful and bright,

I call on thee-awake!

LIGHT.

BY WILLIAM PITT PALMER.

"Bright effluence of bright essence increate!

Before the sun, before the heavens, thou wert."-MILTON.

FROM the quickened womb of the primal gloom
The sun rolled black and bare,

Till I wove him a vest for his Ethiop breast,

Of the threads of my golden hair;

And when the broad tent of the firmament

Arose on its airy spars,

I pencilled the hue of its matchless blue,
And spangled it round with stars.

I painted the flowers of the Eden bowers,
And their leaves of living green,

And mine were the dyes in the sinless eyes

Of Eden's virgin queen;

And when the fiend's art on her trustful heart

Had fastened its mortal spell,

In the silvery sphere of the first-born tear

To the trembling earth I fell.

Dd

When the waves that burst o'er a world accursed

Their work of wrath had sped,

And the Ark's lone few, the tried and true,

Came forth among the dead;

With the wondrous gleams of my braided beams,

I bade their terrors cease,

As I wrote on the roll of the storm's dark scroll
God's covenant of peace.

Like a pall at rest on a pulseless breast,

Night's funeral shadow slept,

Where shepherd swains on the Bethlehem plains
Their lonely vigils kept;

When I flashed on their sight the heralds bright

Of heaven's redeeming plan,

As they chanted the morn of a Saviour born-
Joy, joy to the outcast Man!

Equal favour I show to the lofty and low,

On the just and unjust I descend;

E'en the blind, whose vain spheres roll in darkness and

tears,

Feel my smile the blest smile of a friend:

Nay, the flower of the waste by my love is embraced,

As the rose in the garden of kings;

At the chrysalis bier of the worm I appear,

And lo! the gay butterfly's wings!

The desolate Morn, like a mourner forlorn,

Conceals all the pride of her charms,

Till I bid the bright Hours chase the Night from her bowers,

And lead the young Day to her arms;

And when the gay rover seeks Eve for his lover,

And sinks to her balmy repose,

I wrap their soft rest by the zephyr-fanned west,

In curtains of amber and rose.

From my sentinel steep, by the night-brooded deep,

I gaze with unslumbering eye,

When the cynosure star of the mariner

Is blotted from the sky;

And guided by me through the merciless sea,
Though sped by the hurricane's wings,
His compassless bark, lone, weltering, dark,
To the haven-home safely he brings.

I waken the flowers in their dew-spangled bowers,
The birds in their chambers of green,

And mountain and plain glow with beauty again,
As they bask in my matinal sheen.

O if such the glad worth of my presence to earth,
Though fitful and fleeting the while,

What glories must rest on the home of the blest,
Ever bright with the DEITY'S smile!

THE LEAF.

BY SAMUEL G. GOODRICH.

It came with spring's soft sun and showers, Mid bursting buds and blushing flowers; It flourished on the same light stem,

It drank the same clear dews with them.

The crimson tints of summer morn,

That gilded one, did each adorn.

The breeze, that whispered light and brief
To bud or blossom, kissed the leaf;
When o'er the leaf the tempest flew,
The bud and blossom trembled too.

But its companions passed away,
And left the leaf to lone decay.
The gentle gales of spring went by,
The fruits and flowers of summer die.

The autumn winds swept o'er the hill,

And winter's breath came cold and chill.

The leaf now yielded to the blast,

And on the rushing stream was cast.