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from a quaintly carved pipe which passed round the circle.

During the repast, the natives eyed us with intense curiosity, observing our minutest motions, and appearing to discover abundant matter for comment in the most trifling occurrence. Their surprise mounted the highest, when we began to remove our uncomfortable garments, which were saturated with rain. They scanned the whiteness of our limbs, and seemed utterly unable to account for the contrast they presented to the swarthy hue of our faces, embrowned from a six months' exposure to the scorching sun of the Line. They felt our skin, much in the same way that a silk-mercer would handle a remarkably fine piece of satin; and some of them went so far in their investigation as to apply the olfactory organ.

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS.

In almost every department of literature this author has distinguished himself, but is comparatively little known out of his own country. DR SIMMS is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, born in 1806, and admitted to the bar of that state in 1827. The same year he published two volumes of Lyrical Poems and Early Lays, which were followed by The Vision of Cortes, and other Poems, 1829; The Tri-Colour, 1830; Atalantis, a Drama of the Sea, 1832; Passages and Pictures, 1839; and several other small volumes of poems, descriptive, dramatic, and legendary. Dr Simms has written several volumes of novelettes, colonial romances, revolutionary romances, and border romances, illustrative of North American history A uniform edition of the Revolutionary and Border Romances (completed in 1859) is published in eighteen volumes, and the collected poems of Dr Simms in two volumes. A History of South Carolina, Lives of Francis Marion, Captain Smith (founder of Virginia), Chevalier Bayard, and Nathaniel Greene, various critical disquisitions, and political pamphlets, have also been published by this versatile author.

and manners.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

The most original and popular of American philosophers and essayists is RALPH WALDO EMERSON, born at Boston in the year 1803. His father was a Unitarian minister, and after the usual course of education at Harvard College, young Emerson was ordained minister of the second Unitarian church in Boston. He held this charge for about three years (1829-1832), and resigning it in consequence of some change in his religious views, he devoted himself to a life of study, living chiefly at Concord, New Hampshire. His prose works consist of orations, lectures, and essays. Those published previous to 1870 were collected and printed in two volumes at Boston. He has also produced two volumes of Poems. His principal works are six orationsMan Thinking, 1837; Address to the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, U.S., 1838; Literary Ethics, 1838; The Method of Nature, 1841; Man the Reformer, 1841; and The Young American, 1844. Mr Emerson has also published four series of essays-small volumes, issued in years 1841, 1844, 1870, and 1871. In 1848 he delivered a course of lectures in Exeter Hall, London. The logicians have an incessant triumph over him,' said Harriet Martineau, 'but their

the

triumph is of no avail; he conquers minds as well as hearts.' In 1849 he delivered another course of lectures on Representative Men-namely, Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakspeare, Napoleon, and Goethe. This selection of representative men,' was probably suggested by Mr Carlyle's lectures on hero worship delivered in 1840, and Mr Emerson has been termed 'the American Carlyle,' though he is by no means a slavish imitator of his English friend. For four years (1840-1844) Mr Emerson was associated with Margaret Fuller, Countess d'Ossoli, in conducting a literary journal, entitled The Dial; and on the death of the countess he joined with Mr W. H. Channing in writing a memoir of that learned and remarkable woman, which was published in 1852. The other works of Mr Emerson are-English Traits, 1856; The Conduct of Life, 1860; an Oration on the Death of President Lincoln, 1865; Society and Solitude, twelve chapters or essays, 1870; Parnassus, Selected Poems; a volume of Essays, 1875; &c. In 1866 the university of Harvard conferred upon Mr Emerson the honorary degree of LL.D.

Civilisation.-From Society and Solitude.

Poverty and industry with a healthy mind read very easily the laws of humanity, and love them; place the sexes in right relations of mutual respect, and a severe morality gives that essential charm to woman which educates all that is delicate, poetic, and self-sacrificing, breeds courtesy and learning, conversation and wit in her rough mate; so that I have thought a sufficient measure of civilisation is the influence of good women.

Another measure of culture is the diffusion of know

ledge, overturning all the old barriers of caste, and, by the cheap press, bringing the university to every poor man's door in the newsboy's basket. Scraps of science, of thought, of poetry, are in the coarsest sheet, so that in every house we hesitate to burn a newspaper until we have looked it through.

The ship, in its latest complete equipment, is an abridgment and compound of a nation's arts: the ship steered by compass and chart-longitude reckoned by lunar observation and by chronometer-driven by steam;

and in wildest sea-mountains, at vast distances from

home

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The skill that pervades complex details; the man that maintains himself; the chimney taught to burn its own smoke; the farm made to produce all that is consumed on it; the very prison compelled to maintain itself and yield a revenue, and, better still, made a reform school and a manufactory of honest men out of rogues, as the steamer made fresh-water out of saltall these are examples of that tendency to combine antagonisms, and utilise evil, which is the index of high civilisation.

tion. In the snake, all the organs are sheathed; no Civilisation is the result of highly complex organisahands, no feet, no fins, no wings. In bird and beast, the organs are released, and begin to play. In man, they are all unbound, and full of joyful action. With this unswaddling he receives the absolute illumination we call reason, and thereby true liberty.

Beauty. From The Conduct of Life! The poets are quite right in decking their mistresses with the spoils of the landscape, flower-gardens, gems, rainbows, flushes of morning, and stars of night, since all beauty points at identity, and whatsoever thing does not express to me the sea and sky, day and night, is somewhat forbidden and wrong. Into every beautiful object there enters somewhat immeasurable and divine, and just as much bounded by outlines, like mountains on the horizon, as into tones of music or depths of space. Polarised light shewed the secret architecture of bodies; and when the second-sight of the mind is opened, now one colour, or form, or gesture, and now another, has a pungency, as if a more interior ray had been emitted, disclosing its deep holdings in the frame of things.

The laws of this translation we do not know, or why one feature or gesture enchants, why one word or syllable intoxicates, but the fact is familiar that the fine touch of the eye, or a grace of manners, or a phrase of poetry, plants wings at our shoulders; as if the Divinity, in his approaches, lifts away mountains of obstruction, and designs to draw a truer line, which the mind knows and owns. This is that haughty force of beauty, vis superba forma, which the poets praise—under calm and precise outline, the immeasurable and divine-beauty hiding all wisdom and power in its calm sky.

All high beauty has a moral element in it, and I find the antique sculpture as ethical as Marcus Antoninus, and the beauty ever in proportion to the depth of thought. Gross and impure natures, however decorated, seem impure shambles; but character gives splendour to youth, and awe to wrinkled skin and gray hairs. An adorer of truth we cannot choose but obey, and the woman who has shared with us the moral sentiment her locks must appear to us sublime. Thus, there is a climbing scale of culture, from the first agreeable sensation which a sparkling gem or a scarlet stain affords the eye, up through fair outlines and details of the landscape, features of the human face and form, signs and tokens of thought and character in manners, up to the ineffable mysteries of the human intellect. Wherever we begin, thither our steps tend: an ascent from the joy of a horse in his trappings up to the perception of Newton, that the globe on which we ride is only a larger apple falling from a larger tree; up to the perception of Plato, that globe and universe are rude and early expressions of an all-dissolving unity-the first stair on the scale to the temple of the mind.

Old Age-From 'Society and Solitude.' When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what it can well spare-muscular strength, organic instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these. But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is young in fourscore years, and, dropping off obstructions, leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise. I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that, whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill-at the end of life just ready to be born affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral

sentiment.

MR RUSKIN.

JOHN RUSKIN, author of several works on art, was born in London in 1819, the only son of a wealthy wine-merchant. He was entered at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he graduated, and in 1839 took the Newdegate prize for English poetry. Impressed with the idea that

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art was his vocation in life, he studied painting under Copley Fielding and J. D. Harding; but auxiliary of the pen. In 1843 appeared the first the pencil has long since become merely the portion of his Modern Painters, by an Oxford Graduate, which, though published when the author was only twenty-four years of age, bears the impress of deep thought, and is written with rare eloquence and in choice English. The second part was published in 1846, and the third and fourth volumes ten years later, in 1856. Many other works appeared in the interval. Indeed, Mr Ruskin is now one of the most voluminous writers of the day; but it may be questioned if he has ever risen to the level of the first two works have been little more than hurriedly written volumes of the Modern Painters. Latterly, his pamphlets, reviews, and revisals of popular lectures, which, though often rising into passages of vivid description and eloquence, and possessing the merit of great clearness, are generally loose and colloquial in style. The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1849, and the Stones of Venice, three volumes, 1851-53, are the principal of Mr Ruskin's works, besides the Modern Painters; but we may also mention the following: Letters in Defence of the Pre-Raphaelites, published at various times since 1851; The Construction of Sheepfolds (the discipline of the church), 1851; The Opening of the Crystal Palace, 1854; Notes on the Academy Exhibitions, published in the month of May for the last few years; The Elements of Drawing, 1857; The Political Economy of Art, 1858; The Two Paths, 1859; besides contributions to the Quarterly Review, the Art Journal, the Scotsman, &c. In 1861 a selection from the works of Mr Ruskin was published in one volume-a treasure to all young literary students and lovers of art. His subsequent works have been numerous : Lectures on Civilisation, 1866; The Queen of the Air, being a Study of the Greek Myths of Cloud and Storm, 1869; Lectures on Art, delivered before the university of Oxford in 1870, &c. Mr Ruskin made a munificent offer of £5000 for the endowment of a master of drawing in Oxford, which was accepted by the university authorities in November 1871.

Mr Ruskin's influence upon art and art-literature has been remarkable. The subject has received a degree of consideration among general readers that it had not previously enjoyed in our day, or perhaps in any period of our history; and to Mr Ruskin's veneration for every work of creation, inculcated in all his writings, may be ascribed the origin of the society of young artists, known as the Pre-Raphaelites. Protesting against what they conceived to be lax conventionalism in the style of most modern painters, the innovators went back, as they said, to Nature, preferring her in all her moods and phases, to ideal visions of what she occasionally might, or ought to appear. Mr Ruskin seems often to contradict himself; but on this point his own mind is easy. 'I never met with a question yet,' he says in the inaugural address to the Cambridge School of Art, 'which did not need, for the right solution of it, at least one positive and one negative answer, like an equation of the second degree. Mostly, matters of any consequence are three-sided, or four-sided, or polygonal; and the trotting round a polygon is severe work for people any way stiff in their

opinions. For myself, I am never satisfied that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times.' With this clever apology we may pass over apparent incongruities in the details of his system, and rest satisfied with the great principles which he so eloquently inculcates. These are singularly pure and lofty. The aim and object of his teaching, he says, is to declare that 'whatever is great in human art is the expression of man's delight in God's work,' and he insists upon a pure heart and earnest mind as essential to success.

The Sky.

It is a strange thing how little, in general, people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works; and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organisation; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as we know, be answered if, once in three days or thereabouts, a great, ugly, black rain-cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with, perhaps, a film of morning and evening mist for dew. And, instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives when Nature is not producing, scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain that it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly. The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them: he injures them by his presence; he ceases to feel them if he be always with them. But the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not too bright nor good for human nature's daily food;' it is fitted, in all its functions, for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart; for the soothing it, and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful; never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost Divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinct as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential. And yet we never attend to it; we never make it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accidents, too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness or a glance of admiration. If, in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says it has been wet, and another it has been windy, and another it has been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that gilded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon their summits, until they melted and mouldered away in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds, when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it, like withered leaves? All has passed unregretted or unseen; or, if the apathy be ever

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shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross or what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are fire, but in the still small voice. They are but the blunt developed. God is not in the earthquake nor in the and the low faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lampblack and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty; the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual; that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood; things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally, which are never wanting, and never repeated; which are to be found always, yet each found but once. It is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught and the blessing of beauty given.

The Two Paths.

Ask yourselves what is the leading motive which actuates you while you are at work. I do not ask what your leading motive is for working-that is a different thing; you may have families to supportparents to help-brides to win; you may have all these, or other such sacred and pre-eminent motives, to press the morning's labour and prompt the twilight thought. But when you are fairly at the work, what is the motive which tells upon every touch of it? If it is the love of that which your work represents-if, being a landscapepainter, it is love of hills and trees that moves you-if, being a figure painter, it is love of human beauty and human soul that moves you-if, being a flower or animal painter, it is love, and wonder, and delight in petal and in limb that move you, then the spirit is upon you, and the earth is yours, and the fullness thereof. But if, on the other hand, it is petty self-complacency in your own skill, trust in precepts and laws, hope for academical or popular approbation, or avarice of wealth-it is quite possible that by steady industry, or even by fortunate chance, you may win the applause, the position, the fortune that you desire: but one touch of true art you will never lay on canvas or on stone as long as you live.

The following eloquent passage is from Modern Painters:

The Dangers of National Security.

That is to everything created pre-eminently useful which enables it rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it by its Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful to man, it is necessary first to determine the use of man himself. Man's use and function (and let him who will not grant me this, follow me no further; for this I purpose always to assume) is to be the witness of the glory of God, and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant happiness.

Whatever enables us to fulfil this function is in the pure and first sense of the word useful to us. Preeminently, therefore, whatever sets the glory of God more brightly before us. But things that only help us to exist are in a secondary and mean sense useful; or rather, if they be looked for alone they are useless and worse; for it would be better that we should not exist than that we should guiltily disappoint the purposes of existence. And yet people speak in this working-age, when they speak from their hearts, as if houses and lands, and food and raiment, were alone useful, and as if sight, thought, and admiration were all profitless; so that men insolently call themselves utilitarians, who would turn, if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables. Men who think, as far as such can be said to think, that the meat is more than the life and the raiment than the body, who look to this.

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earth as a stable and to its fruit as fodder; vine-dressers and husbandmen who love the corn they grind, and the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that the wood they hew, and the water they draw, are better than the pine-forests that cover the mountain like the shadow of God, and than the great rivers that move like His eternity. And so comes upon us that woe of the Preacher, that though God hath made everything beautiful in His time: also he hath set the world in their heart, so that no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.' This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends us to grass like oxen, seems to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national power and peace. In the perplexities of nations in their struggles for existence, in their infancy, their impotence, or even their disorganisation, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out of the suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the grateful heart; out of endurance, fortitude; out of deliverance, faith. But when they have learned to live under providence of laws, and with decency and justice of regard for each other; and when they have done away with violent and external sources of suffering, worse evils seem arising out of their rest-evils that vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood, though they do not shed it, and ossify the heart, though they do not torture it. And deep though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace with others, and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear also-a fear greater than that of sword and sedition-that dependence on God may be forgotten because the bread is given and the water sure, that gratitude to Him may cease because His constancy of protection has taken the semblance of a natural law, that heavenly hope may grow faint amidst the full fruition of the world, that selfishness may take place of undemanded devotion; compassion be lost in vainglory, and love in dissimulation; that enervation may succeed to strength, apathy to patience, and the noise of jesting words and foulness of dark thoughts to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning lamp. About the river of human life there is a wintry wind, though a heavenly sunshine; the iris colours its agitation, the frost fixes upon its repose. Let us beware that our rest become not the rest of stones, which so long as they are torrent-tossed and thunder-stricken maintain their majesty; but when the stream is silent and the storm passed, suffer the grass to cover them, and the lichen to feed upon them, and are ploughed down into dust.

And though I believe we have salt enough of ardent and holy mind amongst us to keep us in some measure from this moral decay, yet the signs of it must be watched with anxiety in all matters however trivial, in all directions however distant. And at this time... there is need, bitter need, to bring back, if we may, into men's minds, that to live is nothing unless to live be to know Him by whom we live, and that He is not to be known by marring His fair works, and blotting out the evidence of His influences upon His creatures, not amidst the hurry of crowds and crash of innovation, but in solitary places, and out of the glowing intelligences which He gave to men of old. He did not teach them how to build for glory and for beauty; He did not give them the fearless, faithful, inherited energies that worked on and down from death to death, generation after generation, that we, foul and sensual as we are, might give the carved work of their poured-out spirit to the axe and the hammer; He has not cloven the earth with rivers, that their white wild waves might turn wheels and push paddles, nor turned it up under, as it were fire, that it might heat wells and cure diseases; He brings not up His quails by the east wind only to let them fall in flesh about the camp of men; He has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field only for the

oven.

We give another extract from the same work :

What is Truly Practical.

All science and all art may be divided into that which is subservient to life and which is the object of it + , practical , or theoretical + +. Yet the step between practical and theoretic science is the step between the miner and the geologist, the apothecary and the chemist, and the step between practical and theoretic art is that between the bricklayer and the architect, between the plumber and the artist; and this is a step allowed on all hands to be from less to greater, so that the so-called useless part of each profession does by the authoritative and right instinct of mankind assume the superior and more noble place. Only it is ordained that, for our encouragement, every step we make in the more exalted range of science, adds something also to its practical applicabilities; that all the great phenomena of nature, the knowledge of which is desired by the angels only, by us partly as it reveals to further vision the being and the glory of Him in whom they rejoice and we live, dispense yet such kind influences and so much of material blessing as to be joyfully felt by all inferior creatures, and to be desired by them with such single desire as the imperfection of their nature may admit; that the strong torrents which in their own gladness fill the hills with hollow thunder and the vales with winding light, have yet their bounden charge of field to feed and barge to bear; that the fierce flames to which the Alps owes its upheaval and the volcano its terror, temper for us the metal vein and quickening spring; and that for our incitement, I say not our reward, for knowledge is its own reward, herbs have their healing, stones their preciousness, and stars their times.

It would appear, therefore, that those pursuits which are altogether theoretic, whose results are desirable or admirable in themselves, and for their own sake, and in which no further end to which their productions or discoveries are referred, can interrupt the contemplation of things as they are, by the endeavour to discover of what selfish uses they are capable (and of this order are painting and sculpture), ought to take rank above all pursuits which have any taint in them of subserviency to life, in so far as all such tendency is the sign of less eternal and less holy function.

The Beautiful alone not Good for Man.

I believe that it is not good for man to live amongst what is most beautiful; that he is a creature incapable of satisfaction by anything upon earth; and that to allow him habitually to possess, in any kind whatsoever, the utmost that earth can give, is the surest way to cast him into lassitude or discontent.

If the most exquisite orchestral music could be continued without a pause for a series of years, and children were brought up and educated in the room in which it was perpetually resounding, I believe their enjoyment of music, or understanding of it, would be very small. And an accurately parallel effect seems to be produced upon the powers of contemplation by the redundant and ceaseless loveliness of the high mountain districts. The faculties are paralysed by the abundance, and cease, as we before noticed of the imagination, to be capable of excitement, except by other subjects of interest than those which present themselves to the eye. So that it is, in reality, better for mankind that the forms of their common landscape should offer no violent stimulus to the emotions-that the gentle upland, browned by the bending furrows of the plough, and the fresh sweep of the chalk down, and the narrow winding of the copseclad dingle, should be more frequent scenes of human life than the Arcadias of cloud-capped mountain or luxuriant vale; and that, while humbler (though always infinite) sources of interest are given to each of us around

the homes to which we are restrained for the greater part of our lives, these mightier and stranger glories should become the objects of adventure-at once the cynosures of the fancies of childhood, and themes of the happy memory and the winter's tale of age.

Nor is it always that the inferiority is felt. For, so natural is it to the human heart to fix itself in hope rather than in present possession, and so subtle is the charm which the imagination casts over what is distant or denied, that there is often a more touching power in the scenes which contain far-away promise of something greater than themselves, than in those which exhaust the treasures and powers of Nature in an unconquerable and excellent glory, leaving nothing more to be by the fancy pictured or pursued.

Precipices of the Alps.

Dark in colour, robed with everlasting mourning, for ever tottering like a great fortress shaken by war, fearful as much in their weakness as in their strength, and yet gathered after every fall into darker frowns and unhumiliating threatening; for ever incapable of comfort or healing from herb or flower, nourishing no root in their crevices, touched by no hue of life on buttress or ledge, but to the utmost desolate; knowing no shaking of leaves in the wind, nor of grass beside the stream-no other motion but their own mortal shivering, the dreadful crumbling of atom from atom in their corrupting stones; knowing no sound of living voice or living tread, cheered neither by the kid's bleat nor the marmot's cry: haunted only by uninterrupted echoes from afar off, wandering hither and thither among their walls unable to escape, and by the hiss of angry torrents, and sometimes the shriek of a bird that flits near the face of them, and sweeps frightened back from under their shadow into the gulf of air; and sometimes, when the echo has fainted, and the wind has carried the sound of the torrent away, and the bird has vanished, and the mouldering stones are still for a little time-a brown moth, opening and shutting its wings upon a grain of dust, may be the only thing that moves or feels in all the waste of weary precipice darkening five thousand feet of the blue depth of heaven.

The Fall of the Leaf.

If ever, in autumn, a pensiveness falls upon us as the leaves drift by in their fading, may we not wisely look up in hope to their mighty monuments? Behold how fair, how far prolonged in arch and aisle, the avenues of the valleys, the fringes of the hills! So stately-so eternal; the joy of man, the comfort of all living creatures, the glory of the earth-they are but the monuments of those poor leaves that flit faintly past us to die. Let them not pass without our understanding their last counsel and example; that we also, careless of monument by the grave, may build it in the world-monument by which men may be taught to remember, not where we died, but where we lived.

JOHN STERLING.

JOHN STERLING (1806-1844) was born at Kaimes Castle, Isle of Bute. His father, Captain Sterling, became editor of the Times daily journal, and his son John, after being educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, was early familiar with literary society. Frederick Maurice, Coleridge, Carlyle, and other distinguished men of that period, were among his friends. He contributed essays, tales, and poems to the periodicals, all marked by fine taste and culture. Having taken holy orders in the church, he officiated for eight months as curate at Hurstmonceaux, in Sussex, where Mr Hare was rector. Delicate health, and some

change in his religious opinions, induced him to resign this charge, and he continued afterwards to reside chiefly abroad or in the south of England, occupying himself with occasional contributions in prose and verse to Blackwood's Magazine and the Westminster Review. also a volume of Poems, 1839; The Election, a He published poem, 1841; and Stafford, a tragedy, 1843. He charmed every society into which he entered by his conversation and the amiable qualities of his mind and heart. His prose works have been collected and edited in two volumes, 1848, with a memoir of his life by his friend, Archdeacon Hare. That memoir, with the letters it contains, and the subsequent memoir by Mr Carlyle, have given an interest and fame to John Sterling, which his writings alone would have failed to produce.

The Miseries of Old Age and the Misfortunes of Early Death.

There are two frequent lamentations which might well teach us to doubt the wisdom of popular opinions: men bewail in themselves the miseries of old age, and in others the misfortune of an early death. They do not reflect that life is made up of emotions and thoughts, some cares and doubts and hopes and scattered handfuls of sorrow and pleasure, elements incapable of being measured by rule or dated by an almanac. It is not from the calendar or the parish-register that we can justly learn for what to grieve, and wherefore to rejoice; and it is rather an affected refinement than a sage instinct, to pour out tears in proportion as Our wasting days, or those of our friends, are marked by clepsydra. And even as old age, if it be the fruit of natural and regular existence, is full, not of aches and melancholy, but of lightness and joy; so there are men who perform their course in a small circle of years, whose maturity is to be reckoned, not by the number of their springs and summers, but of their inward seasons of greenness and glory, and who by a native kindliness have enjoyed, during a brief and northern period, more sunshine of the soul than ever came to the clouded breast of a basking Ethiop.

Yet the many men of exalted genius who have died in early life, have all been lamented, as if they had perished by some strange and unnatural chance, and as if He, without whose will no sparrow falls to the ground, only suspended His providence with regard to the eagle ministers of truth and beauty. Happy indeed, thrice happy, are such beings as Sophocles and Titian, in whom the golden chain runs out to the last link, and whose hearts are fed by a bright calm current until they fall asleep in a fresh and blooming antiquity. But happy also were Raphael, Sidney, and Schiller, who accomplished in the half of man's permitted term, the fulfilment of their aim, and gained sight of the rising stars, when others were still labouring in the heats of noon. Happy we may even call the more disturbed and incomplete career of Byron and Shelley and Burns, who were so much clogged by earthly impediments, and vexed with mental disease, nourished by the disease of the material frame, that death would rather seem, if we may humbly speak what perhaps we but ignorantly and wildly fancy, a setting free to further improvement, than a final cutting off in the midst of imperfection.

The Worth of Knowledge.

the writers holding up to admiration, or relating with Read the oldest records of our race, and you will find heart-felt emotion, the facts that we ourselves most delight in. The fidelity of Joseph to his master, the love of Hector for his wife and child, come home to our hearts as suddenly as to those of the ancient Hebrew

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