LOVE OF NATURE (another of the same).

"Nothing is foreign, parts relate to whole,
One all-extending, all-preserving Soul
Connects each being, greatest with the least,
Made beast in aid of man, and man of beast;
All served, all serving, nothing stands alone-
The chain holds on, and where it ends unknown."

Pope's "Essay on Man."

"TIS sweet to walk with bonny, cheerful Spring,
All Nature seems so fresh and gay,

The very lav'rock makes the welkin ring,
With courtship's universal lay!

And bright is Summer in her ripening charms,
More lovely in her pregnant powers;

So much her mate, the Sun with ardour warms,
He strews her paths with scented flowers.
Dear, too, is Autumn, as she glides along
Beside her russet-mantled train,

And doubly dear to hear the reaper's song
From many a busy, jocund plain.

And kind is Winter,-though he looks so cold,
For genial throbs his heart below;
Indeed, his votaries are over bold,

Because they pray for ice and snow.

So, too, hath man four seasons in his life-
With each appropriate, Heaven-born joy,
If in his youth he prunes down vice and strife,
And guards his gold from Sin's alloy.

The tiny Infant has its jingling toy,

The Schoolboy has his top and nest,

The glowing Youth, he has his sweetheart coy,
And Old Age hath its book and rest.

From Youth to Age unwearied Time steals on,
If true faith guide our thoughts aright,

The brightest morning sun that ever shone
As lovely melted into night.

Each age of Man, like Seasons, hath its charm,
For all is lovely in its day;

"Tis Ignorance and Sin alone can harm
Man's mental buds, like frost in May.

Ah! should the young and tender spirit-bud,
Which peeps so trusting to the sun,

Receive the blast of Sin into its blood,
It shrinks and dies, its race is run.

Or, if it lives, it grows a withered thing,
No luscious fruit it ever bears;

But wears the impress of its early sting

A blackened heart,-a seed of tares!

I cannot resist here giving the fine words of Jenyns, on Death. I never read them till after this little poem was written, but some of the thoughts and words bear a striking similarity. "Death, the last and most dreadful of all evils, is so far from being one, that it is the infallible cure for all others :

To die is landing on some silent shore,

Where billows never beat, nor tempests roar,

Ere well we feel the friendly stroke, 'tis o'er.

But was it an evil ever so great, it could not be remedied but by one much greater, which is, by living for ever; by which means our wickedness, unrestrained by the prospect of a future state, would grow so unsupportable, our sufferings so intolerable by perseverance, and our pleasures so tiresome by repetition, that no being in the universe could be so completely miserable as a species of immortal men. We have no reason, therefore, to look upon death as an evil, or to fear it as a punishment, even without any supposition of a future life; but if we consider it as a passage to a more perfect state, or a remove only in an eternal succession of still improving states (for which we have the strongest reasons), it will then appear a new favour from the Divine munificence; and a man must be absurd to repine at dying, as a traveller would be who proposed to himself a delightful tour through various unknown countries, to lament that he cannot take up his residence at the first dirty in which he baits at on the road. The instability of human life, or of the changes of its successive periods, of which we so frequently complain, are no more than the necessary progress of it to this necessary conclusion, and are so far from being evils deserving these complaints, that they are the source of our greatest pleasures, as they are the source of all novelty, from which our greatest pleasures are ever derived. The continual successions of seasons in the human life, by daily presenting to us new scenes, render it agreeable, and, like those of the year, afford us delights by their change, which the choicest of them could not give us by their continuance. In the spring of life, the gilding of the sunshine, the verdure of the fields, and the variegated paintings of the sky, are so exquisite in the eyes of infants at their first looking abroad into a new world, as nothing, perhaps, afterwards can equal. The heat and vigour of the succeeding summer of youth ripen for us new pleasures--the blooming maid, the nightly revel, and the jovial chase. The serene autumn of complete manhood feasts with the golden harvest of our worldly pursuits. Nor is the hoary winter of old age destitute of its peculiar coniforts and enjoyments, of which the recollection and relation of those past are perhaps none of the least; and at last death opens to us a new prospect, from whence we shall probably look back upon the diversions and occupations of this world with the same contempt we do now on our tops and hobby-horses, and with the same surprise that they could ever so much entertain or engage us!" "These," says Dr. Johnson, "are sentiments which, though not new, may be read with pleasure and profit in the thousandth repetition.' Ay! true indeed, for let us always reflect that though a summer fly may die with age in a single hour, an immortal spirit cannot be old even though the body lives far beyond the allotted threescore and ten years.