Page:Peterson's Magazine 1842, Volume I.pdf/96

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With thy rude ploughshare, Death, turn up the sod, And spread the furrow for the seed we sow ; This is the field and Acre of our God, This is the place where human harvests grow !"

Here we close our quotations from the volumes before us. It would not be doing justice to Mr. Longfellow if we were to encroach further on his copy-right, and we have only made these few quotations in order to give the public some idea of his best qualities. The stanzas on the Skeleton in Armor, the lines on a village Blacksmith, a little piece called the " Rainy Day," and two poems of a superior order, one entitled " The Goblet of Life," and the other addressed " To the river Charles," are our favorites in this collection.

We leave Mr. Longfellow with a single remark- he is in danger of idling away his years. He has a cozy professorship, he is endowed with a scholarly taste, his bent is toward the epicurean creed, " enjoy life easily." He has genius, high genius ; but then he loves "to take his ease in his inn.” The incentive to prolonged, incessant, arduous exertion, which goads so many to immortality, is wanting to Longfellow. He is playing the part of Gray, and, like Gray, verily he will have his reward. Posterity will despise his indolence, while they admire his poems. Enjoying the applause of a circle of friends, he is content with their approbation, or, if he aspires after a more extended fame, he wants the energy to struggle for it. He seems to write for his clique, and then coolly to take his chance with the public, reasoning much as Sancho Panza did, " but let them say of me what they list, I neither lose nor win, and so my name be but in print, and go about the world from hand to hand, I care not a fig." Now this may be the true philosophy for a man who loves the ease of his study before the honors of the world; but it is not the creed which, if acted out, will make a poet immortal.

ARABIAN SONG.

BY THE ETTRICK SHEPHERD. MEET me at even, my own true love, Meet me at even, my honey, my dove, While the mountain revealing The cool fountain stealing, Away and away Through flow'rets so gay, Singing its silver roundelay. Love is the fountain of life and bliss, Love is the valley of joyfulness ; A garden of roses, Where rapture reposes,A temple of light All heavenly bright ; Oh, virtuous love is the soul's delight!

ΝΟΙΝΑ.

A TALE OF WYOMING. WHEN we admire a spot for its beauty, or love it for the associations of the past which cluster around it, we are prone to shed over even its trivial incidents a glory borrowed from the intensity of our own feelings ; and are hence surprised that others gaze, with coldness or contempt, upon the objects of our deep enthusiasm. It may be thus perchance with this little tale, that has come whispering downward on the breezes of tradition, like the first echo of some far-off melody. We must go backward far-years before even the Genoese had dreamed of that new world, which was to immortalize his name, and man's ingratitude, ""Twas summer in Wyoming ;"

but, then were there no golden seas of grain, rolling in mimic waves beneath the breezes that swept down from her mountains- no broad belts of green pasture land stretching, as now, far away into the dense forest, like civilization pressing with swift foot upon barbarism. All was one continuous waste of trees upon the mountain, and trees upon the plain ; save where the silvery Susquehanna wound, gleaming in the sunlight, and sending back a free, broad smile to the Day God's wooing. The valley, even then, in its pristine wildness, presented a landscape of no ordinary character, with its graceful regularity of form, as if chiselled out with exquisite skill from the mountains that sweep around it- its universal green, relieved, and brilliantly adorned by the clear stream, that sparkled onward in its serpentine course through the very centre, receiving at times a brawling tributary that dashed down from the hills to meet her, and at times parting her waters to encircle some fairy islet, that gleamed like an emerald in its rich setting. It was when the wild hunter still roamed, the tenant of nature, over this lovely spot, in the brightest season of the year, that a bold young chieftain erected his wigwam, and led to it in triumph, the lovely Noinathe flower of the valley-his Indian bride. She was the admiration of the whole tribe of the Shawnees, and the enamored bridegroom, as he first gazed upon her in her new home, her dark eyes sparkling with happiness, felt a joy such as only those who have felt such emotions can describe. The happy pair chose, for their future abode, a lone romantic spot, near where the river first breaks into the valley, and far above the villages of their tribe, as if they wanted to fly from the gross sensuality that reigned there ; and find a holier society in nature, and their own pure hearts. They dwelt upon a narrow strip of lowland, between the mountains and the stream ; across the latter, directly opposite their wigwam, rose bold, and broad, and high, a perpendicular ledge of rocks,