[Footnote 1: This and the following poems are used by the courteous permission of the publishers, Messrs. Bobbs, Merrill, & Co., Indianapolis.] HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW AMERICA, 1807-1882 KAVANAGH Ah, how wonderful is the advent of the spring!-- the great annual miracle of the blossoming of Aaron's rod, repeated on myriads and myriads of branches! --the gentle progression and growth of herbs, flowers, trees,--gentle, and yet irrepressible,-- which no force can stay, no violence restrain, like love, that wins its way and cannot be withstood by any human power, because itself is divine power. If spring came but once a century, instead of once a year, or burst forth with a sound of an earthquake and not in silence, what wonder and expectation would there be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men, only the cessation of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual exercise of God's power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be. We are like children who are astonished and delighted only by the second-hand of the clock, not by the hour-hand. In the fields and woods, meanwhile, there were other signs and signals of the summer. The darkening foliage; the embrowning grain; the golden dragonfly haunting the blackberry bushes; the cawing crows, that looked down from the mountain on the cornfield, and waited day after day for the scarecrow to finish his work and depart; and the smoke of far-off burning woods, that pervaded the air and hung in purple haze about the summits of the mountains, --these were the vaunt-couriers and attendants of the hot August. The brown autumn came. Out of doors, it brought to the fields the prodigality of the golden harvest,-- to the forest, revelations of light,--and to the sky, the sharp air, the morning mist, the red clouds at evening. Within doors, the sense of seclusion, the stillness of closed and curtained windows, musings by the fireside, books, friends, conversation, and the long, meditative evenings. To the farmer, it brought surcease