Apples are general favorites. Every eye covets, every hand reaches to them. It is a noble fruit: the friend of immortality, its virtues blush to be tasted. Every Muse delights in it, as its mythology shows, from the gardens of the Hesperides to the orchard of Plato. A basket of pearmains, golden russets, or any of the choice kinds, standing in sight, shall perfume the scholar's composition as it refreshes his genius. He may snatch wildness from the woods, get shrewdness from cities, learning from libraries and universities, compliments from courts. But for subtlety of thought, for sovereign sense, for color, the graces of diction and behavior, he best betakes himself

"Where on all sides the apples scattered lie,
Each under its own tree."

SWEET HERBS.

[From the Same.]

AS orchards to man, so are flowers and herbs to women.

Indeed the

garden appears celibate, as does the house, without womanly hands to plant and care for it. Here she is in place,-suggests lovely images of her personal accomplishments, as if civility were first conceived in such cares, and retired unwillingly, even to houses and chambers; something being taken from their elegancy and her nobleness by an undue absorption of her thoughts in household affairs. But there is a fitness in her association with flowers and sweet herbs, as with social hospitalities, showing her affinities with the magical and medical, as if she were the plant All-Heal, and mother of comforts and spices. Once the herb garden was a necessary part of every homestead; every country house had one well stocked, and there was a matron inside skilled in their secret virtues, having the knowledge of how her

'Herbs gladly cure our flesh, because that they
Have their acquaintance there,"

her memory running back to the old country from whence they first came, and of which they retained the fragrance. Are not their names refreshing? with the superstitions concerning the sign under which they were to be gathered, the quaint spellings;-mint, roses, fennel, coriander, sweet-cicely, celandine, summer savory, smellage, rosemary, dill, caraway, lavender, tanzy, thyme, balm, myrrh; these and many more, and all good for many an ail; sage, too, sovereign sage, best of all— excellent for longevity-of which to-day's stock seems running low,-for

This persuasion that the things near us, and under our feet, stand in that relationship from some natural affinity they have to our welfare, appears to be most firmly rooted with respect to the medical herbs, whether growing wild in the fields and woods, or about the old homesteads, though the names of most of them are now forgotten. A slight reference to the herbals and receipt-books of the last century would show the good uses to which they were applied, as that the virtues of common sense are also disowned, and oftentimes trodden under foot. Certainly, they are less esteemed than formerly, being superseded, for the most part, by drugs less efficacious because less related geographically to our flesh, and not finding acquaintance therewith. Doubtless many superstitions were cherished about them in ancient heads, yet all helpful to the cure. The sweet fennel had its place in the rural garden, and was valued, not as a spice merely, but as a sacred seed, associated with worship, sprigs of it, as of caraway and dill, being taken to the pews, for appetizing the service. So the balm and rue had their sacredness. Pliny commends these natives to every housekeeper. "A good housewife," he says, "goes to her herb garden, instead of a spice shop, for seasonings, and thus preserves the health of her family, by saving her purse."

CHANN

SONNETS OF CHARACTER.

[Sonnets and Canzonets. 1882.]

CHANNING.

HANNING! my Mentor whilst my thought was young,
And I the votary of fair liberty, -

How hung I then upon thy glowing tongue,

And thought of love and truth as one with thee!

Thou wast the inspirer of a nobler life,
When I with error waged unequal strife,
And from its coils thy teaching set me free.
Be ye, his followers, to his leading true,
Nor privilege covet, nor the wider sway;
But hold right onward in his loftier way,

As best becomes, and is his rightful due.

If learning's yours,-gifts God doth least esteem,—
Beyond all gifts was his transcendent view;

O realize his Pentecostal dream!

EMERSON.

MI

ISFORTUNE to have lived not knowing thee!

'T were not high living, nor to noblest end,
Who, dwelling near, learned not sincerity,
Rich friendship's ornament that still doth lend
To life its consequence and propriety.

Thy fellowship was my culture, noble friend:
By the hand thou took'st me, and did'st condescend
To bring me straightway into thy fair guild;
And life-long hath it been high compliment

By that to have been known, and thy friend styled,
Given to rare thought and to good learning bent;
Whilst in my straits an angel on me smiled.
Permit me, then, thus honored, still to be
A scholar in thy university.

MARGARET FULLER.

THOU, Sibyl rapt! whose sympathetic soul
Infused the myst'ries thy tongue failed to tell;
Though from thy lips the marvellous accents fell,
And weird wise meanings o'er the senses stole,
Through those rare cadences, with winsome spell;
Yet, even in such refrainings of thy voice,
There struggled up a wailing undertone,
That spoke thee victim of the Sisters' choice,—
Charming all others, dwelling still alone.
They left thee thus disconsolate to roam,
And scorned thy dear, devoted life to spare.

Around the storm-tost vessel sinking there

The wild waves chant thy dirge and welcome home; Survives alone thy sex's valiant plea,

And the great heart that loved the brave and free.

W

THOREAU.

HO nearer Nature's life would truly come

Must nearest come to him of whom I speak;
He all kinds knew, -the vocal and the dumb;
Masterful in genius was he, and unique,
Patient, sagacious, tender, frolicsome.

This Concord Pan would oft his whistle take,
And forth from wood and fen, field, hill, and lake,

Trooping around him, in their several guise,

The shy inhabitants their haunts forsake:

Then he, like Esop, man would satirize,
Hold up the image wild to clearest view
Of undiscerning manhood's puzzled eyes,
And mocking say, "Lo! mirrors here for you:
Be true as these, if ye would be more wise."

F

GARRISON.

REEDOM'S first champion in our fettered land!
Nor politician nor base citizen

Could gibbet thee, nor silence, nor withstand.
Thy trenchant and emancipating pen

The patriot Lincoln snatched with steady hand,
Writing his name and thine on parchment white,
'Midst war's resistless and ensanguined flood;
Then held that proclamation high in sight
Before his fratricidal countrymen,-

"Freedom henceforth throughout the land for all,"—
And sealed the instrument with his own blood,
Bowing his mighty strength for slavery's fall;

Whilst thou, stanch friend of largest liberty,

[From the Essay presented to Emerson on his birthday, 25 May, 1865.]

SEE

EE our Ion standing there,—his audience, his manuscript, before him,—himself an auditor, as he reads, of the Genius sitting behind him, and to whom he defers, eagerly catching the words, the words,— as if the accents were first reaching his ears too, and entrancing alike oracle and auditor. We admire the stately sense, the splendor of diction, and are surprised as we listen. Even his hesitancy between the delivery of his periods, his perilous passages from paragraph to paragraph of manuscript, we have almost learned to like, as if he were but sorting his keys meanwhile for opening his cabinets; the spring of locks following, himself seeming as eager as any of us to get sight of his specimens, as they come forth from their proper drawers; and we wait willingly till his gem is out glittering; admire the setting, too, scarcely less than the jewel itself. The magic minstrel and speaker! whose rhetoric, voiced as by organ-stops, delivers the sentiment from his breast in cadences peculiar to himself; now hurling it forth on the ear, echoing; then, as his mood and matter invite it, dying like

"Music of mild lutes

Or silver coated flutes,

Or the concealing winds that can convey
Never their tone to the rude ear of day."

He works his miracles with it, as Hermes did, his voice conducting the sense alike to eye and ear by its lyrical movement and refraining melody. So his compositions affect us, not as logic linked in syllogisms, but as voluntaries rather, or preludes, in which one is not tied to any design of air, but may vary his key or note at pleasure, as if improvised without any particular scope of argument; each period, each paragraph, being a perfect note in itself, however it may chance chime with its accompaniments in the piece; as a waltz of wandering stars, a dance of Hesperus with Orion. His rhetoric dazzles by circuits, contrasts, antitheses; Imagination, as in all sprightly minds, being his wand of power. He comes along his own paths, too, and always in his own fashion. What though he build his piers downwards from the firmament to the tumbling tides, and so throw his radiant span across the fissures of his argument, and himself pass over the frolic arches,-Ariel-wise,is the skill less admirable, the masonry less secure for its singularity? So his books are best read as irregular writings, in which the sentiment. is, by his enthusiasm, transfused throughout the piece, telling on the mind in cadences of a current under-song, and giving the impression of a connected whole-which it seldom is,—such is the rhapsodist's cunning in its structure and delivery.

George Wood.

BORN in Newburyport, Mass., 1799. DIED at Saratoga Springs, N. Y., 1870.

ON JORDAN'S STORMY BANKS.

[Moderr. Pilgrims: Showing the Improvements in Travel, and the Newest Methods of Reaching the Celestial City. 1855.]

THE

HE next day, Mr. Greatheart took Frank along with him to show him the cataract, the deep thunders of which they heard, in the hours of midnight, like the booming of the ocean. It was only six miles off, so near had they come to the very verge of the precipice. Pilgrims. in olden times, taking the Bunyan route, reached the Jordan many leagues above, where the river was shallow, and readily crossed; though there it had its holes and hollows, which, if a pilgrim chanced to step