What new thoughts are suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid movement of the railway car!  Nay, the most wonted objects (make a very slight change in the point of vision) please us most.  In a camera obscura the butcher’s cart and the figure of one of our own family amuse us.  So a portrait of a well-known face gratifies us.  Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs, and how agreeable is the picture, though you have seen it any time these twenty years!

In these cases, by mechanical means, is suggested the difference between the observer and the spectacle, between the man and nature.  Hence arises a pleasure mixed with awe; I may say, a low degree of the sublime is felt from the fact, probably, that man is hereby apprised, that whilst the world is a spectacle, something in himself is stable.

  THE RHODORA.[1]

  In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
  I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
  Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
  To please the desert and the sluggish brook. 
  The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
  Made the black water with their beauty gay;
  Here might the red bird come his plumes to cool,
  And court the flower that cheapens his array. 
  Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why
  This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
  Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,
  Then Beauty is its own excuse for being: 
  Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose,
  I never thought to ask, I never knew: 
  But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
  The self-same power that brought me there brought you.

  [1] On being asked, Whence is the flower?

  HYMN.

  [Sung at the completion of the Concord Monument, April 19, 1836.]

  By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
    Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
  Here once the embattled farmers stood,
    And fired the shot heard round the world.

  The foe long since in silence slept;
    Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
  And time the ruined bridge has swept
    Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

  On this green bank, by this soft stream,
    We set to-day a votive stone;
  That memory may their deed redeem,
    When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

  Spirit, that made those heroes dare
    To die, and leave their children free,
  Bid time and nature gently spare
    The shaft we raise to them and thee.

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

THE HAUNTED MIND.