Take down now your flaunting banner, for a scout comes breathless and
     pale,
  With the terror of death upon him; of failure is all his tale: 
  “They have fled while the flag waved o’er them! they’ve turned to the
     foe their back! 
  They are scattered, pursued, and slaughtered! the fields are all rout
     and wrack!”

  Pass hence, then, the friends I gathered, a goodly company! 
  All ye that have manhood in you, go, perish for Liberty! 
  But I and the babes God gave me will wait with uplifted hearts,
  With the firm smile ready to kindle, and the will to perform our parts.

  When the last true heart lies bloodless, when the fierce and the false
     have won,
  I’ll press in turn to my bosom each daughter and either son;
  Bid them loose the flag from its bearings, and we’ll lay us down to rest
  With the glory of home about us, and its freedom locked in our breast.

WET-WEATHER WORK.

BY A FARMER.

I.

It is raining; and being in-doors, I look out from my library-window, across a quiet country-road, so near that I could toss my pen into the middle of it.

A thatched stile is opposite, flanked by a straggling hedge of Osage-orange; and from the stile the ground falls away in green and gradual slope to a great plateau of measured and fenced fields, checkered, a month since, with bluish lines of Swedes, with the ragged purple of mangels, and the feathery emerald-green of carrots.  There are umber-colored patches of fresh-turned furrows; here and there the mossy, luxurious verdure of new-springing rye; gray stubble; the ragged brown of discolored, frost-bitten rag-weed; next, a line of tree-tops, thickening as they drop to the near bed of a river, and beyond the river-basin showing again, with tufts of hemlock among naked oaks and maples; then roofs, cupolas; ambitious lookouts of suburban houses, spires, belfries, turrets:  all these commingling in a long line of white, brown, and gray, which in sunny weather is backed by purple hills, and flanked one way by a shining streak of water, and the other by a stretch of low, wooded mountains that turn from purple to blue, and so blend with the northern sky.

Is the picture clear?  A road; a farm-flat of party-colored checkers; a near wood, that conceals the sunken meadow of a river; a farther wood, that skirts a town,—­that seems to overgrow the town, so that only a confused line of roofs, belfries, spires, towers, rise above the wood; and these tallest spires and turrets lying in relief against a purple hill-side, that is as far beyond the town as the town is beyond my window; and the purple hill-side trending southward to a lake-like gleam of water, where a light-house shines upon a point; and northward, as I said, these same purple hills bearing away to paler purple, and then to blue, and then to haze.