Volume 32 / Part 4 — THE SUNBEAM.

(FROM THE FRENCH OF LAMARTINE.)

Come! watch with me this sunbeam, as o'er the moss bank green It glides, and enters swiftly the foliage dark between; Resting its golden lever, of mystic length and line, Upon the dewy herbage, in an oblique decline: Toward its moving column the stamen of the flowers Whirl, as by strong attraction; and through the daylight hours Gay insects, azure atoms, with every-colored wing, Swim 'mid the light, still lending fresh sparkles as they spring. See! how in cadenced measure they gravitate below, Now linking, then unlinking, in quick, harmonious flow; Of Plato's worlds ideal the semblance here appears, Those worlds that danced in circles to the music of the spheres: So small is every atom, amid yon countless band, That hosts of them were needful to make a grain of sand; They form the lowest step of that brilliant ladder trod, Ascending from the light mote to the all-present God. And yet a separate being exists in every part, Within each airy globule there dwells a beating heart; One world, perchance, presiding o'er worlds unnumbered, free, To which the lightning's passage is an eternity; Yet, doubtless, each enjoying, within their drop of space, Days, nights, in all fulfilling their order and their place; And while in wondrous ecstasy, man's throbbing eye looks on, A thousand worlds are ended, their destinies are won! O God! how vast the sources which feed such life and death, How piercing is that vision which marks out every breath; How infinite that Spirit which cherishes each grade; And more than all, how boundless that love, free, unrepaid, Which nurtures into being each particle that floats, Descending from far sun-worlds to microscopic motes; O God! so grand and awful in yonder little ray, What thought dare seek to fathom the blaze of thy full day?

MARY E. LEE.