The church owes it to her mission to preach and to teach the enforcement of the "bird's nest commandment;" the principle recognized by Moses in the Hebrew world, and echoed by Cowper in English poetry, and Burns in the "Meadow Mouse," and by our own Longfellow in songs of many keys.

Convicting Longfellow of a mistake, they did descend "from their stations," on solemn Blomidon, and fell in a slow, unpleasant drizzle in the streets of Wolfville and Horton.

Miss Prudence remembered her own time of loving Mrs. Hemans and had given this copy to Marjorie; later, she had laid her aside for Longfellow, as Marjorie would do by and by, and, in his turn, she had given up Longfellow for Tennyson and Mrs. Browning, as, perhaps, Marjorie would never do.

Its ease sometimes leads Mr. Longfellow into prose,as in the verse "Combed and wattled gules and all the rest of the blazon," and into a prosaic phraseology which has now and then infected his style in other metres, as where he says "Spectral gleam their snow-white dresses," using a word as essentially unpoetic as surtout or pea-jacket.