[Footnote A:  The Laplanders are said to entertain the idea that the coruscations of the Aurora Borealis, are occasioned by the sports of the fishes in the polar seas.]

[Footnote B:  The loss of the United States Sloop-of-War Hornet, in the Gulf of Mexico, 1829, suggested this passage.  She was supposed to have gone down in a hurricane, but as nothing is positively known on the subject, it is not beyond lawful poetical license to imagine, at least in a dream, that the powder magazine was set on fire by the lightning, and the ship rent in pieces, by the explosion.]

[Illustration:  Vignette]

The First Frost of Autumn.

[Illustration:  The First Frost of Autumn]

    At evening it rose in the hollow glade,
    Where wild-flowers blushed ’mid silence and shade;
    Where, hid from the gaze of the garish noon,
    They were slily wooed by the trembling moon. 
    It rose—­for the guardian zephyrs had flown,
    And left the valley that night alone. 
    No sigh was borne from the leafy hill,
    No murmur came from the lapsing rill;
    The boughs of the willow in silence wept,
    And the aspen leaves in that sabbath slept. 
    The valley dreamed, and the fairy lute
    Of the whispering reed by the brook was mute. 
    The slender rush o’er the glassy rill,
    As a marble shaft, was erect and still,
    And no airy sylph on the mirror wave,
    A dimpling trace of its footstep gave. 
    The moon shone down, but the shadows deep
    Of the pensile flowers, were hushed in sleep. 
    The pulse was still in that vale of bloom,
    And the Spirit rose from its marshy tomb. 
    It rose o’er the breast of a silver spring,
    Where the mist at morn shook its snowy wing,
    And robed like the dew, when it woos the flowers. 
    It stole away to their secret bowers.

    With a lover’s sigh, and a zephyr’s breath,
    It whispered bliss, but its work was death: 
    It kissed the lip of a rose asleep,
    And left it there on its stem to weep: 
    It froze the drop on a lily’s leaf,
    And the shivering blossom was bowed in grief. 
    O’er the gentian it breathed, and the withered flower
    Fell blackened and scathed in its lonely bower;
    It stooped to the asters all blooming around,
    And kissed the buds as they slept on the ground. 
    They slept, but no morrow could waken their bloom,
    And shrouded by moonlight, they lay in their tomb.

    The Frost Spirit went, like the lover light,
    In search of fresh beauty and bloom that night
    Its wing was plumed by the moon’s cold ray,
    And noiseless it flew o’er the hills away. 
    It flew, yet its dallying fingers played,
    With a thrilling touch, through the maple’s shade;
    It toyed with the leaves of the sturdy oak,
    It sighed o’er the aspen,