A couple of wicked kings,

Three hundred years agone,

Had played at a royal game of chess,
And the Church had been a pawn.
And so the cruel word was spoken;
And so it was two hearts were broken.

THE BRIEFLESS BARRISTER.

A BALLAD.

AN Attorney was taking a turn,

In shabby habiliments drest;
His coat it was shockingly worn,
And the rust had invested his vest.

His breeches had suffered a breach,

His linen and worsted were worse;
He had scarce a whole crown in his hat,
And not half a crown in his purse.

And thus as he wandered along,

A cheerless and comfortless elf,

He sought for relief in a song,

Or complainingly talked to himself:

"Unfortunate man that I am!

I've never a client but grief:

The case is, I've no case at all,

And in brief, I've ne'er had a brief!

"I've waited and waited in vain,

Expecting an opening' to find, Where an honest young lawyer might gain Some reward for toil of his mind.

""Tis not that I'm wanting in law, Or lack an intelligent face, That others have cases to plead,

While I have to plead for a case.

"O, how can a modest young man

E'er hope for the smallest progression,

The profession 's already so full

Of lawyers so full of profession!"

While thus he was strolling around,
His eye accidentally fell

WHEN the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days

had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter,-life-everlasting, golden-rods, pin-weeds, and graceful wild grasses, more obvious and interesting frequently than in summer even, as if their beauty was not ripe till then; even cotton-grass, cat-tails, mulleins, johnswort, hardhack, meadow-sweet, and other strong-stemmed plants, those unexhausted granaries which entertain the earliest birds,-decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears.

I am particularly attracted by the arch

ing and sheaf-like top of the wool-grass; it brings back the summer to our winter memories, and is among the forms which art loves to copy, and which, in the vegetable kingdom, have the same relation to types already in the mind of man that astronomy has. It is an antique style older than Greek or Egyptian. Many of the phenomena of Winter are suggestive of an inexpressible tenderness and fragile delicacy. We are accustomed to hear this king described as a rude and boisterous tyrant; but with the gentleness of a lover he adorns the tresses of Summer.

At the approach of spring the red-squirrels got under my house, two at a time, directly under my feet as I sat reading or writing, and kept up the queerest chuckling and chirruping and vocal pirouetting and gurgling sounds that ever were heard; and when I stamped they only chirruped the louder, as if past all fear and respect in their mad pranks, defying humanity to stop them. No you don't-chickaree-chickaree. They were wholly deaf to my arguments, or failed to perceive their force, and fell into a strain of invective that was irresistible.

The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the blue-bird, the song-sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and all written revelations? The brooks sing carols and glees to the spring. The marsh-hawk sailing low over the meadow is already seeking the first slimy life that awakes. The sinking sound of melting snow is heard in all dells, and the ice dissolves apace in the ponds. The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire, et primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata,-as if the earth sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but green is the color of its flame;-the symbol of perpetual youth, the grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again, lifting its spear of last year's bay with the fresh life below. It grows as steadily as the rill oozes out of the ground. It is almost identical with that, for in the growing days of June, when the rills are dry, the grassblades are their channels, and from year to year the herds drink at this perennial green stream, and the mower draws from it betimes their winter supply. So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.

Walden is melting apace. There is a canal two rods wide along the northerly and westerly sides, and wider still at the east end. A great field of ice has cracked off from the main body. I hear a song-sparrow singing from the bushes on the shore,―olit, olit, olit-chip, chip, chip, che, char,―che wiss, wiss, wiss. He too is helping to crack it. How handsome the great sweeping curves in the edge of the ice, answering somewhat to