Thou blossom! bright with autumn dew, And colour's with the heaven's own blue, That openest when the quiet light Succeeds the keen and frosty night.

And the blue gentian-flower, that, in the breeze, Nods lonely, of her beauteous race the last.

Beside the brook and on the umbered meadow, Where yellow fern-tufts fleck the faded ground, With folded lids beneath their palmy shadow The gentian nods in dewy slumbers bound.

Blue thou art, intensely blue; Flower, whence came thy dazzling hue?

The birch-bark canoe of the savage seems to me one of the most beautiful and perfect things of the kind constructed by human art.

And we wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief;