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WEEHAWKEN.

Yet should the stranger ask, what lore
Of by-gone days, this winding shore,
Yon cliffs and fir-clad steeps could tell,
If vocal made by Fancy's spell,—
The varying legend might rehearse
Fit themes for high, romantic verse.

O'er yon rough heights and moss-clad sod
Oft hath the stalworth warrior trod;
Or peered, with hunter's gaze, to mark
The progress of the glancing bark.
Spoils, strangely won on distant waves,
Have lurked in yon obstructed caves.

When the great strife for Freedom rose
Here scouted oft her friends and foes,
Alternate, through the changeful war,
And beacon-fires flashed bright and far;
And here, when Freedom's strife was won,
Fell, in sad feud, her favoured son ;-

Her son, the second of the band,

The Romans of the rescued land.
Where round yon cape the banks ascend,
Long shall the pilgrim's footsteps bend;
There, mirthful hearts shall pause to sigh,
There, tears shall dim the patriot's eye.

The rising Mart and Isles and Bay,
Before him in their glory lay,-

Scenes of his love and of his fame,-
The instant ere the death-shot came.

A MORNING INVOCATION.

BY EPES SARGENT.

WAKE, slumberer! Summer's golden hours

Are speeding fast away;

The sun has waked the opening flowers,

To greet the new-born day.

The deer leaps from his leafy haunt;

Fair gleams the breezy lake;

The birds their matin carols chant

All Nature cries, awake!

Come forth, while yet the glittering tree:

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!