Like an army defeated,
The snow hath retreated,
And now doth fare ill

On the top of the bare hill ;
The ploughboy is whooping-anon-anon!

There's joy on the mountains;

There's life in the fountains,

Small clouds are sailing,

Blue sky prevailing ;

The rain is over and gone!

FELLING TIMBER.

"The woodman's heart is in his work,
His axe is sharp and good:
With sturdy arm and steady aim
He smites the gaping wood;

From distant rocks his lusty knocks
Re-echoing many a rood."

E had nearly threaded the wood, and were approaching an open grove of magnificent oaks on the other side, when sounds other than of nightingales burst on our ear, the deep and frequent strokes of the woodman's axe, and emerging from the Penge, we discovered the havoc which that axe had committed. Above twenty of the finest trees lay stretched on the velvet turf. There they lay in every shape and form of devastation; some, bare trunks stripped ready for the timber-carriage, with the bark built up in long piles at the side; some with the spoilers busy about them, stripping, hacking, hewing; others with their noble branches, their brown and fragrant shoots all fresh as if they were alive-majestic corpses, the slain of to-day! The grove was like

a field of battle. The young lads who were stripping the bark, the very children who were picking up the chips, seemed awed and silent, as if conscious that death was around them. The nightingales sang faintly and interruptedly

are felling; they have just hewn round the trunk with those slaughtering axes, and are about to saw it asunder. Into how grand an attitude was that young man thrown as he gave the final strokes round the root; and how wonderful is the effect of that supple and apparently powerless saw, bending like a ribbon, and

yet overmastering that giant of the woods, conquering and overthrowing that thing of life! Now it has passed half through the trunk, and the woodman has begun to calculate which way the tree will fall; he drives a wedge to direct its course; now a few more movements of the noiseless saw; and then a larger wedge. See how the branches tremble! Hark how the trunk begins to crack! Another stroke of the huge hammer on the wedge, and the tree quivers, as with a mortal agony, reels, shakes, and falls. How slow, and solemn, and awful it is! How like to death, to ⚫human death in its grandest forms! Cæsar in the Capitol, Seneca in the bath, could not fall more sublimely than that oak.

Even the heavens seem to sympathize with the devastation. The clouds have gathered into one thick low canopy, dark and vapoury as the smoke which overhangs London; the setting sun is just gleaming underneath with a dim and bloody glare, and the crimson rays spreading upward with a lurid and portentous grandeur, a subdued and dusky glow, like the light reflected on the sky from some vast conflagration. The deep flush fades away, and the rain begins to descend, and we hurry homeward rapidly, yet sadly, forgetful alike of the flowers and the wetting-thinking and talking only of the fallen tree.

DAFFODILS.

"Daffodils that come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty."

AIR Daffodils, we weep to see

You haste away so soon;

As yet the early-rising sun

Has not attained his noon.

H, how wonderful is the advent of Spring!—the great annual miracle of the blossoming of Aaron's rod, repeated on myriads and myriads of branches !-the gentle progression and growth of herbs, flowers, treesgentle, and yet irrepressible-which no force can stay, no violence restrain, like love, that wins its way and cannot be withstood by any human power, because itself is divine power. If Spring came but once in a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation would there be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change!