How does your sad, yet calm and cheerful guise, Ye melancholy Autumn solitudes, With my own feelings softly harmonize! For though I love the hoar and solemn woods, In all their manifold and changing moods— In gloom and sunshine, storm and quietness, By day, or when the dim night on them broods; Their lightsome glades, their darker mysteries— Yet the sad heart loves a still, calm scene like this. Soon will the year like this sweet day have fled, With swift feet speeding noiselessly and fast, As a ghost speeds, to join its kindred dead, In the dark realms of that mysterious vast, The shadow-peopled and eternal past. Life’s current deathward flows—a rapid stream, With clouds and shadows often overcast, Yet lighted often by a sunny beam Of happiness, like sweet thoughts in a gloomy dream. Like the brown leaves, our lov’d ones drop away, One after one, into the dark abyss Of Sleep and Death. The frosts of Trouble lay Their withering touch upon our happiness, Even as the hoar frosts of the Autumn kiss The green lip from the unoffending leaves; And Love and Hope and Youth’s warm cheerfulness Flit from the heart—Age lonely sits and grieves, Or sadly smiles, while Youth fondly his day-dream weaves. Day draweth to its close—night cometh on— Death standeth dimly on Life’s western verge, Casting his shadow o’er the startled sun— A deeper gloom, that seemeth to emerge From gloomy night—and bending forth, to urge His eyeless steeds, fleet as the tempest’s blast: And hear we not eternity’s dim surge Thundering anear? At the dread sound aghast, Time hurries headlong, pale with frantic terror, past. * * * * * THE BROTHER AND SISTER. BY MRS. EMMA C. EMBURY.