See you! some are such beautiful animals, so lofty looking; Some are buff-color'd, some mottled, one has a white line running

along his back, some are brindled,

Some have wide flaring horns (a good sign)-see you! the bright hides,

See, the two with stars on their foreheads

and broad backs,

- see, the round bodies

How straight and square they stand on their legs - what fine

sagacious eyes!

How they watch their tamer - they wish him near them - how

they turn to look after him!

What yearning expression! how uneasy they are when he moves away from them;

Now I marvel what it can be he appears to them, (books, politics,

poems, depart — all else departs,)

I confess I envy only his fascination my silent, illiterate friend,
Whom a hundred oxen love there in his life on farms,
In the northern county far, in the placid pastoral region.

An Old Man's Thought of School.

For the Inauguration of a Public School, Camden, New Jersey, 1874.

AN old man's thought of school,

[itself cannot.

An old man gathering youthful memories and blooms that youth

Now only do I know you,

O fair auroral skies - O morning dew upon the grass!

And these I see, these sparkling eyes,

These stores of mystic meaning, these young lives,

Building, equipping like a fleet of ships, immortal ships,

Soon to sail out over the measureless seas,

On the soul's voyage.

Only a lot of boys and girls?

Only the tiresome spelling, writing, ciphering classes?
Only a public school?

Ah more, infinitely more;

(As George Fox rais'd his warning cry, "Is it this pile of brick and mortar, these dead floors, windows, rails, you call the

church?

Why this is not the church at all— the church is living, ever living souls.")

And you America,

Cast you the real reckoning for your present?

The lights and shadows of your future, good or evil?
To girlhood, boyhood look, the teacher and the school.

Wandering at Dorn.

WANDERING at morn,

Emerging from the night from gloomy thoughts, thee in my

thoughts,

Yearning for thee harmonious Union! thee, singing bird divine! Thee coil'd in evil times my country, with craft and black dismay, with every meanness, treason thrust upon thee,

This common marvel I beheld the parent thrush I watch'd feeding its young,

The singing thrush whose tones of joy and faith ecstatic

Fail not to certify and cheer my soul.

There ponder'd, felt I,

If worms, snakes, loathsome grubs, may to sweet spiritual songs

be turn'd,

If vermin so transposed, so used and bless'd may be,

Then may I trust in you, your fortunes, days, my country;

Who knows but these may be the lessons fit for you?

From these your future song may rise with joyous trills,
Destin'd to fill the world.

Italian Music in Dakota.

("The Seventeenth- the finest Regimental Band I ever heard.")

THROUGH the Soft evening air enwinding all,

Rocks, woods, fort, cannon, pacing sentries, endless wilds,

In dulcet streams, in flutes' and cornets' notes,

Electric, pensive, turbulent, artificial,

(Yet strangely fitting even here, meanings unknown before, Subtler than ever, more harmony, as if born here, related

here,

Not to the city's fresco'd rooms, not to the audience of the opera

house,

Sounds, echoes, wandering strains, as really here at home,

Sonnambula's innocent love, trios with Norma's anguish,
And thy ecstatic chorus Poliuto ;)

Ray'd in the limpid yellow slanting sundown,

Music, Italian music in Dakota.

While Nature, sovereign of this gnarl'd realm,
Lurking in hidden barbaric grim recesses,

Acknowledging rapport however far remov'd,

(As some old root or soil of earth its last-born flower or fruit,) Listens well pleas'd.

With All tby Gifts.

WITH all thy gifts America,

Standing secure, rapidly tending, overlooking the world,

Power, wealth, extent, vouchsafed to thee with these and like

of these vouchsafed to thee,

What if one gift thou lackest? (the ultimate human problem

never solving,)

The gift of perfect women fit for thee-what if that gift of gifts thou lackest ?

The towering feminine of thee? the beauty, health, completion, fit for thee?

The mothers fit for thee?

My Picture-Gallery.

In a little house keep I pictures suspended, it is not a fix'd house, It is round, it is only a few inches from one side to the other; Yet behold, it has room for all the shows of the world, all memo

ries!

Here the tableaus of life, and here the groupings of death;

Here, do you know this? this is cicerone himself,

With finger rais'd he points to the prodigal pictures.

The Prairie States.

A NEWER garden of creation, no primal solitude,

Dense, joyous, modern, populous millions, cities and farms,
With iron interlaced, composite, tied, many in one,

By all the world contributed - freedom's and law's and thrift's

society,

The crown and teeming paradise, so far, of time's accumulations, To justify the past.