The following bears the title, 'I've been Gathering Flowers, Mother,' and is the simple utterance of a little boy, whose child-sister has gone before him to heaven:

'On! I've been gathering flowers, Mother,
For JULIA's grave, to-day;

Oh! I've been wandering down the glen
Where once we used to play;

And there, beside the grape-vine swing,
Where mountain flocks repose,
I found this dear soft silken band,
Twined round a lonely rose.
O Mother! 't is the braid of hair
Dear little JULIA used to wear!

'And farther down the vale, Mother,
Where morning zephyrs rise,
I found this dear, dear little book,
These ribbons, and these toys;
And there I found this little doll,
Within our play-house shed;
Its little hood and silken shawl
Lay on a violet bed.

Within the book, dear Mother, see,

Here are the words, 'Remember me!'

Now I have plucked the rose, Mother,
The silken band to save,

And gathered all the summer flowers
For little JULIA's grave.

I've plucked the daisy from its mould,
The lily from its lair;

For such were all the gems, Mother,

Dear sister used to wear;

Now, gently, 'mid the sweet perfume,
I'm going with them to her tomb.'

If it were not a little boy who was speaking here, we should tell him that the lair of a lily is scarcely allowable. Beasts and reptiles of prey are more apt to occupy 'lairs' than the flowers of the field. With Butterfly Days' we must take our leave of the 'lyttel boke' before us:

'Tis sweet to look back on our butterfly days,

When the sun-shine of pleasure beamed clearly;
When the fire blazed bright on the old cottage-hearth,
And old 'SANTA-CLAUS' came around yearly.

The volume is neatly executed upon good paper, an attraction for which the author is indebted to the kind care of a generous friend, ('G. C. M.,') who undertook its publication. It is dedicated briefly and modestly to Mr. SAMUEL A. ROLLO, Esq., of the publishing house of Messrs. A. S. BARNES AND COMPANY, a gentleman whose name is in many mouths as a liberal encourager of literature and the fine arts.

ARIEL AND OTHER POEMS. By W. W. FOSDICK. Illustrated with Designs by Dallas. In one volume: pp. 316. New-York: BUNCE AND Brother.

In introducing this handsome volume to our readers, we shall forbear quotation from, or comment upon, the initial poem which gives it its principal title: partly because it should be read consecutively, and not in segregated portions, but mainly for the reason that while 'our will consents, our space does not.' In justice to Mr. FOSDICK, howeyer, we shall briefly state his idea in the poem. Taking up ARIEL where PROSPERO parts with him, he has endeavored to show how much he would be discontented when confined to the sphere of earth; spiritual and earthly love are contrasted and contradistinguished; and the union of two beings, blending qualities inherently attractive to each other, set forth: so that 'ARIEL, with the wealth of the world at his command, is unhappy; lacking that society which is the life of enjoyment, and that reciprocated love which is the talisman of existence.' Mr. FOSDICK is a western poet; and it has been well remarked by one who is himself an American poet of the very first rank, that 'almost every page of his work is suggestive of a residence in the back-woods. There is an unpruned luxuriance of imagination and language about them, in which they resemble the forests of his native region.' The subjoined is from a very descriptive poetical sketch of DANIEL BOONE, the pioneer Hunter of Kentucky :'

'STRANGE, fair Kentucky! though no cannon shook
Thy giant hills, yet every stream and brook
Could tell a tale, that somewhere on its course,
Knife had met knife, and force encountered force,
And tomahawks gleamed in the sun-light's flood,
Descended swift, and dyed themselves in blood!
What then the feelings of the man that dared
This perilled place, alone, and unprepared;
Who knew not that the hut which he should leave
At daylight's dawn, would still be there at eve,
Or only ashes left to tell the tale

Where once its smoke arose above the vale?
For here no succor or support could aid
The single hunter in the forest shade;

No hand could stretch to give its kind supply;
No ear to bear, or heed his helpless cry;

If sickness came, no eye to watch his bed;

No soul to smooth the pillow 'neath his head;

No friendly face beside him sit, to cheer,

Or tell old tales, to every bosom dear;
No loving wife, to mingle soul with soul,

Like blended streams which with one current roll;
No simple child his hours to beguile,

To meet his look with upturned eye and smile;
No hand to press his own with cordial clasp,
And thrill his heart with friendship's fervid grasp.
He saw no tear, save those the fountains shed,
And heard no mourner, save the dove o'erhead;
The sable raven sweeping through the sky,
Turned down on him his bare and burnished eye;
Lured by the game he scented as he passed,
His husky voice came croaking on the blast;
And o'er the height of woody mountain-peaks,
The circling eagle wheels aloft and shrieks,
To hear beneath, his stranger footsteps press
The brown leaves 'mid the silent wilderness.
But still, to be alone, was not to pine,
And BOONE! true loneliness was only thine.
To stand upon some mountain's craggy crest,
And see the sun sink silent in the west,

The night's dark curtains drawn across day's red,
And all the vale grow silent as the dead,

Oh! then it is when light's fair form hath flown,
That man may feel how much he is alone.
To sit at night beside thy cabin fire,

And watch the flames of blazing wood expire,
With statue Silence, dumb, and all alone,
And not a voice to answer to thine own,
Nor household spirit for the empty chair:
But noiseless Darkness, with her vacant stare,
Peers through the shadows of the lonely room,
Then seeks the forest with her sister, Gloom.'

Very spirited is the song of The Maize.' We must admit that we never saw this graceful plant in such perfection, nor to such a wonderful extent, as in our recent visit to the author's own native West:'

'A SONG for the plant of my own native West,
Where nature and freedom reside,

By plenty still crowned, and by peace ever blest,
To the corn! the green corn of her pride!

In climes of the East has the olive been sung;

And the grape been the theme of their lays,

But for thee shall a harp of the back-woods be strung,
Thou bright, ever-beautiful Maize!

'Afar in the forest where rude cabins rise,

And send up their pillars of smoke,

And the tops of their columns are lost in the skies

O'er the heads of the cloud-kissing oak

Near the skirt of the grove, where the sturdy arm swings

The axe till the old giant sways,

And echo repeats every blow as it rings,

Shoots the green and the glorious Maize!

'There buds of the buck-eye in spring are the first,
And the willow's gold hair then appears,

And snowy the cups of the dog-wood that burst
By the red-bud, with pink-tinted tears;

And striped the bowls which the poplar holds up
For the dew and the sun's yellow rays,

And brown is the papaw's shade-blossoming cup,
In the wood, near the sun-loving Maize!

Not a few passages had we indicated for extract, as we turned over Mr. FOSDICK'S pages; and it almost 'gars us greet' to leave unquoted the 'Health to Auld Scotia,' and 'Mary Lyle, a Ballad.' But simply, it may not be. We have barely room to commend the book to our readers.

EDITOR'S TABLE.

A DAY'S ANGLING AMONG THE MOUNTAINS. We hope we have as little envy as is consistent with a tolerably good moral character; but when we read the following, from our 'Up-River' and Green-Mountain correspondent, we did incontinently not only wish that we had been there, but experienced also, we are afraid, a slight twinge of envy toward our more favored friend. But perish the ignoble thought! Whatsoever things are pleasant, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are good, he deserves to enjoy them all:

'I WILL give you an account of a day's trout-fishing in a mountain-stream, not expecting to shed any new charm upon a theme which has been already illustrated with every literary embellishment. For HAWES, HERBERT, and many professed anglers and university-bred sportsmen have so piously followed in the steps of St. IZAAK WALTON and S'RUMPHREY DAVY, and have so exhausted the brooks, that it is like fishing for minnows now-a-days. Moreover, for the last hundred years, in our own country, during which a taste for the recreation of angling has survived, and every stream has been whipped and thrashed with rods, so many note-books have been kept, that little remains to be said about the 'scaly people.'

'The present season has been remarkably good for anglers. In the beginning of the summer, when there was every reason to apprehend a drought, the windows of heaven were opened, and a gentle, soaking, and abundant rain came down; and up to the present time, at intervals of a few days, we have had copious showers and magnificent thunder-storms, filling up all the ponds and streams to the very brims. Never did the waving forests present a richer and more glorious freshness. in all their shades and varieties of living green; never did the grass promise a more abundant harvest, or the shining blade of the corn a better crop. Verily the little hills and the big mountains rejoice on every side. I have a few rural matters to dispose of before speaking of the trout-fishing.

'Not long since, a hen of the old barn-yard breed walked down to the banks of the Winooski River, a little below the falls in this place, and leisurely swam across, with all the facility of a duck. This can be abundantly proved out of the mouths of two or three witnesses, all good men and true, and is as solemn a fact, so far as

the truth is concerned, as any on record. She was not scared into the stream by a dog, nor driven in by a stick, but of her own free will descended to the brink glided into the wave, and having safely reached the opposite shore, dressed her feathers with the grace of an accomplished web-foot. Several philosophical theories have occurred to me, by which to account for this unnatural conduct. She was probably hatched by a duck, and learned something of her amphibious nature from the progeny with which she was reared. Or she herself unexpectedly found her. self the mother of yellow goslings, and tenderly ventured after them, out of parental regard, until at last she learned the 'art of swimming,' and loved to 'practise what she knew.' Or it may be that, oppressed with heat, tortured and infested by small insects, which it is indelicate to name, rumpled in plumage and ruffled in temper, with the spirit and decision of a true hen, she boldly swam the flood to enjoy the refreshment of the bath, and to drown her multitudinous foes. And that she gained a point so soon as she had gained the point, was testified by triumphant cacklings, while the astounded philosophers who witnessed the exploit went home to consult their natural histories again.

'I once knew of a cat who superintended a brood of young chickens, which is also a solemn fact, and as well testified to as the above. 'Natur is natur,' is a proverbial and homely remark in the country; but there are certain varieties, exceptions, eccentricities, so that the 'wonder-book' never ceases to present a new page. Had it been a Shanghai rooster who accomplished this exploit, the lookerson would have said, no doubt, that he was fording the stream; but it was a demure, low-built, little 'quiet-heart' of a barn-yard fowl.

'Another feat of bathing, by a biped, (not feathered,) I have to record, the most curious from the days of the 'tired CESAR' down to those of the gentle MUSIDORA. I was in a deep romantic gorge, where a way is cloven by the headlong current through the solid rocks. Sixty feet on each hand they rise as even as a wall, and extend for five hundred yards perhaps, where they stop, and the agitated current slides into a smooth enamelled meadow. The Little Palisades, I call them, although the real name of the place is the Falls of Middlesex. In the middle of the boiling current, just beyond a narrow bridge which lacks little of having been completed by Nature, is a high shaft of rocks, which cause it to make a sudden bend, and by opposing, excites the flood into a yeasty foam and roaring passion at the base. I took a notion to clamber to the top of this promontory or peninsula, which required the scrambling agility of a goat, and thence to look down upon the rapids, which resembled those of a cataract, and through the palisades. Whether any one had been there before or not (for most people content themselves with looking down from the bridge) is uncertain; but I found no foot-steps of 'gi-yants' upon the rock. On the summit of this place I discovered a natural bathing-tub, scooped clean out by the hand of Nature, filled to the brim with pure rain-drops, as they had fallen from the clouds. As I lay stretched on my back in this remarkable bath, this columnar reservoir, (for after considerable consideration I got into it,) refreshed and recreated, with the skies above and the agitated flood beneath, it struck me that it was a tub worthy of NAPOLEON BONAPARTE, and I would not have come out of it in a hurry, but I heard carriage-wheels approaching, and the cavern was cold as the grotto of Antiparos.

'We will now proceed on the trouting expedition, which for once was accompanied with good luck, and is worthy of record. The morning was cool, cloudy, and gave some indication of showers. All the better. Trouts bite more readily when pattering rain-drops break the glassy surface of the brook which mirrors the crouching