And future good, we yet shall find, Was hidden in thy heart; Its witness shall be left behind, When thou like all thy tender kind, Thy minutes summed, shalt be resigned Forever to depart. Thy ruin I would not forestall; Yet soon, I know, to thee Must come, what happens once to all:-- Thy life will fail, and thou must fall-- Must fade and perish, past recall, To vanish from the tree. Then, on the bough where thou wast sent To pass thy fleeting days, At work for which thine hours were lent, In silent, balmy, mild content, A rich and shining monument To thee will nature raise. Now, not in pride--in purpose high, Awhile in beauty shine; And speak, through man's admiring eye, Forbidding every passer by To wish to live, or dare to die With object less than thine. THE PLYMOUTH APPLE DECLINED. Visiting at the house of a friend in Boston, I was shown an apple which he told me had been sent to him from Plymouth, and was the fruit of a tree that was planted by Peregrine White, the first child born of Pilgrim parents in New England. I praised the apple for its beauty, and the venerable associations connected with it. He wished me to keep it; but, as he had no other of the tree, I declined the gift. I wanted the apple, when offered to me By its generous owner, but thought it not right To take it, because it had grown on a tree, That sprang from a seed sown by PEREGRINE WHITE. And he, who thus proffered it, had none beside it; While diffidence checked the words,--"Let us divide it." Now Peregrine White was the first _white_, you know, Who drew his first breath in New England--the child, Whose parents were making to bud and to blow, With its earliest blossoms, America's wild: But he with the fruit never questioned me, whether We might partake of the apple together. Though a fabled divinity once had let fall An apple of gold, where his favorites thronged, Inscribed, "Of the fair, to the fairest of all!" It was not to me this whole apple belonged: My friend was no god--and then I, but a woman; I thought that to halve it were just about human. The whole I declined; still I did not deny A wish that, unuttered, was strong in my heart; And from it _entire_, while averting my eye, I own I was secretly coveting _part_; And had he divided the offering presented, Preserving one half, I had come off contented.