Are lying in their lowly beds with the fair and
good of ours.

The rain is falling where they lie; but the cold
November rain

Calls not from out the gloomy earth the lovely
ones again.

The wind-flower and the violet, they perished long

ago,

And the brier-rose and the orchis died amid the summer glow;

But on the hill the golden-rod, and the aster in the wood,

And the yellow sunflower by the brook in autumn beauty stood,

Till fell the frost from the clear cold heaven, as falls the plague on men,

And the brightness of their smile was gone from upland, glade, and glen.

And now, when comes the calm mild day, as still such days will come,

To call the squirrel and the bee from out their winter home;

Whole ages have fled, and their works decayed, When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though

And nations have scattered been;

But the stout old ivy shall never fade
From its hale and hearty green.

The brave old plant in its lonely days
Shall fatten upon the past;

For the stateliest building man can raise
Is the ivy's food at last.

Creeping where no life is seen,

A rare old plant is the ivy green.

CHARLES DICKENS.

THE DEATH OF THE FLOWERS.

THE melancholy days are come, the saddest of And we wept that one so lovely should have a

life so brief;

the year, Of wailing winds, and naked woods, and meadows Yet not unmeet it was that one, like that young brown and sear. friend of ours,

Heaped in the hollows of the grove, the autumn So gentle and so beautiful, should perish with the leaves lie dead;

They rustle to the eddying gust, and to the rab

bit's tread.

flowers.

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.

THE USE OF FLOWERS.

Gon might have bade the earth bring forth
Enough for great and small,

The oak-tree and the cedar-tree,
Without a flower at all.

We might have had enough, enough
For every want of ours,

For luxury, medicine, and toil,
And yet have had no flowers.

"When the sound of dropping nuts is heard, though all the trees are still,

And twinkle in the smoky light the waters of the rill."