No groaning cargo of despair

Her roomy hold within;

No Lethean drug for Eastern lands,
Nor poison-draught for ours;
But honest fruits of toiling hands

And Nature's sun and showers.

Be hers the Prairie's golden grain,
The Desert's golden sand,
The clustered fruits of sunny Spain,

The spice of Morning-land!

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75

Her pathway on the open main

May blessings follow free,

And glad hearts welcome back again
Her white sails from the sea!

80

THE WORSHIP OF NATURE.

THE harp at Nature's advent strung
Has never ceased to play;

The song the stars of morning sung

Has never died away.

And prayer is made, and praise is given,

By all things near and far;

The ocean looketh up to heaven,
And mirrors every star.

Its waves are kneeling on the strand,

As kneels the human knee,

Their white locks bowing to the sand,
The priesthood of the sea!

They pour their glittering treasures forth,
Their gifts of pearl they bring,

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10

And all the listening hills of earth
Take up the song they sing.

The green
earth sends her incense up
From many a mountain shrine;
From folded leaf and dewy cup
She pours her sacred wine.

The mists above the morning rills
Rise white as wings of prayer;
The altar-curtains of the hills
Are sunset's purple air.

The winds with hymns of praise are loud,
Or low with sobs of pain,-

The thunder-organ of the cloud,

The dropping tears of rain.

With drooping head and branches crossed

The twilight forest grieves,

Or speaks with tongues of Pentecost

From all its sunlit leaves.

The blue sky is the temple's arch,
Its transept earth and air,
The music of its starry march
The chorus of a prayer.

So Nature keeps the reverent frame
With which her years began,
And all her signs and voices shame.
The prayerless heart of man.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH.

THERE died at Concord, Massachusetts, in the

year 1862, a man of forty-five who, if one were to take his word for it, need never have gone out of the little village of Concord to see all that was worth seeing in the world. Lowell, in his My Garden Acquaintance, reminds the reader of Gilbert White, who, in his Natural History of Selborne, gave minute details of a lively world found within the borders of a little English parish. Alphonse Karr, a French writer, has written a book which contracts the limit still further in A Journey round my Garden, but neither of these writers so completely isolated himself from the outside world as did Thoreau, who had a collegiate education at Harvard, made short journeys to Cape Cod, Maine, and Canada, acted for a little while as tutor in a family on Staten Island, but spent the best part of his life as a looker-on in Concord, and during two years of the time lived a hermit on the shores of Walden Pond. He made his living, as the phrase goes, by the occupation of a land surveyor, but he followed the profession only when it suited his convenience. He did not marry; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay taxes; he sought no society; he declined companions when they were in his way, and when he had anything to say in public, went about from door to door and invited people to come to a hall to hear him deliver his word.

That he had something to say to the world at large is

pretty evident from the books which he has left, and it is intimated that the unpublished records of his observation and reflection are more extensive. Thus far his published writings are contained in ten volumes. The first in appearance was A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. It was published in 1849 and built upon the adventures of himself and brother ten years before, when, in a boat of their own construction, they had made their way from Concord down the Concord River to the Merrimack, up that to its source, and back to the starting point. It will readily be seen that such an excursion would not yield a bookful of observation, and though Thoreau notes in it many trivial incidents, a great part of the contents is in the reflections which he makes from day to day. He comes to the little river with its sparse border of population and meagre history, and insists upon measuring antiquity and fame by it. All of his reading he tests by the measure of this stream, and undertakes to show that the terms, big and little, are very much misapplied, and that here on this miniature scale one may read all that is worth knowing in life. His voyage is treated with the gravity which one might use in recording a journey to find the sources of the Nile.

Between the date of the journey and the publication of the book, Thoreau was engaged upon an experiment still more illustrative of his creed of individuality. In 1845 he built a hut in the woods by Walden Pond, and for two years lived a self-contained life there. It was not altogether a lonely life. He was within easy walking distance of Concord village, and the novelty of his housekeeping attracted many visitors, while his friends who valued his conversation sought him out in his hermitage. Besides and beyond this Thoreau had a genius for intercourse with humbler companions. There have been few instances in history of such perfect understanding as existed between him and the lower orders of creation. It has been said of him: "Every fact which occurs in the bed [of the Concord