leaf. May all classes lay them to heart, and profit thereby. Especially let the young be duly affected by the impressive warnings the fading leaf addresses to them. Gay, beautiful, active, and buoyant with health and spirits, as you may be, it assures you that you are frail, and that in the very, hey-day of your life, you may pass away. You and I know it must be so, for we have seen it. I have seen the young man, amid his brightest hopes, cut down. I have seen the young woman, in all her loveliness, fading like a leaf in its greenness. I have seen her, when preparing as a bride for her husband, putting off the nuptial array for the simple white raiment of the sepul-* chre. I have heard the lament of father and mother-of brothers and sisters, and friends, over some loved one, who has fallen like a bright leaf torn from its branch; and a similar wail may go up over your early and untimely departure. Remember, therefore, now your Creator in the days of your youth, so that if you early fade as the leaf, you may be transplanted to bloom and flourish with immortal beauty, in the Paradise of God.

The subject solemnly and loudly admonishes those advancing in years. The fading process with you is fast progressing; and ere long will be complete. Are you ready? Have you truly subserved the great purpose of your being? Do you feel that when you shall return dust to dust, an eternal life will be our's beyond the grave? If you have no such glorious hope, it not time to seek for it, lest your change come, and it be too e for ever?

To those consciously impenitent, the fading leaf speaks in nder tones. Soon with you probation will be over-time ded-eternity begun. And will you trifle? Will you say to the Savior, knocking at the door of your hearts, "Go thy way for this time, when I have a convenient season I will call for thee."? Alas! before that time has come, you may have faded as a leaf, and your iniquities like the wind have taken you away. To-day, then, if ye will hear his voice, harden not your hearts."

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It becomes, also, the children of God to be affected by the admonition. You, too, must fade as the leaf, and become dust again. But blessed are the dead, who die in the Lord. Death to you is the beginning of life; and as the perished leaf may appear in another, and even more beauteous form, so shall your vile body be fashioned like unto Christ's glorious body, in the day when he shall come and call your mouldered dust from the long sleep of the grave, to walk with him in white, amid the trees, and beside the rivers of the water of life,

which flow from his throne. Oh! Christian, it is your unutterable privilege to say, "I know that my Redeemer liveth; and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though after my skin worms shall destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God: whom I shall see for myself, and mine eyes shall behold, and not another, though my reins be consumed within me.' Let not sorrow fill your heart on account of your decaying mortality, but rather rejoice and be glad ; for when absent from the body, you will be present with the Lord, and when Christ, who is your life, shall appear, ye, also, shall appear with him in glory.

THE OLD AGE OF A TEMPÉRATE MAN.

Lewis Cornaro, a Venetian nobleman, memorable for having lived to an extreme old age, he being 105 years old at the time of his death, wrote a treatise on "The Advantages of a Temperate Life." He was induced, it appears, to compose this at the request, and for the instruction of some ingenious young men, for whom he had a regard, who, seeing him, then eighty-one years old, in a fine florid state of health, were extremely desirous to be made acquainted with the means by which he had been enabled to preserve the vigor of his mind and body to so advanced an age. He describes to them, accordingly, his whole manner of living, and the regimen he invariably pursued. He states, that when he was young he was very intemperate that this intemperance had brought upon him many and grievous disorders; that from his thirty-fifth to his fortieth year, he spent his days and nights in the utmost anxiety and pain-and that, in short, his life became a burthen to him. His physicians, after many fruitless attempts to restore him to health, told him there was but one medicine remaining, which had not yet been tried; but which if he could but prevail upon himself to use with perseverance, would free him from all his complaints-and that was a regular and temperate plan of ife. Upon this he immediately prepared himself for a new

regimen, and confined himself to a very moderate portion of plain and wholesome food.-This diet was at first very dis agreeable to him, and he longed to return to his former course of living. Occasionally, indeed, without the knowledge of his physicians, he did indulge himself in a greater freedom of diet, but, as he informs us, much to his uneasiness and detriment. Compelled by necessity, and exerting resolutely all the powers of his mind, he became at length, confirmed in a settled and uninterrupted course of the strictest temperance; by virtue of which, as he states, all his disorders had left him in less than a year, and he enjoyed, subsequently, perfect and uninterrupted health. Some sensualists, it appears, had objected to this mode of living, insisting that it was useless to mortify one's appetite, as he did, for the sake of becoming old, since all that remained of life after the age of sixty-five, could not properly be called vito viva, sed vita, mortue, not a living but a dead life.

"Now," he says, "to show the gentleman how much they are mistaken, I will briefly run over the satisfactions and pleasures which I now enjoy, in this eighty-third year of my age. In the first place, I am always well, and so active withal, that I can with ease mount a horse upon a flat, and walk to the top of a very high mountain. In the next place, I am always cheerful, pleasant, perfectly contented, and free from all perturbation, and every unpleasant thought. Joy and peace have so firmly fixed their residence in my bosom as never to depart from it. I have none of that satiety of life so often met with in persons of age, for I am enabled to spend every hour of my time with the greatest delight and pleasure. I frequently converse with men of talent and learning, and spend much of my time in reading and writing. I have another way of diverting myself-by going every spring and autumn to enjoy, for some days, an eminence which I possess in the most beautiful part of the Euganian hills, adorned with fountains and gardens; and above all, a convenient and handsome lodge, in which place I also, now and then, make one in some hunting party, suitable to my taste and age.

At the same season of every year, I re-visit some of the neighboring cities, and enjoy the company of such of my friends as live there, and through them, the conversation of other men of parts, who reside in those places—such as architects, painters, sculptors, musicians, and husbandmen. I visit their new works; I re-visit their former ones, and always learn something which gives me satisfaction. I see the palaces, gardens, antiquities; and, with these, the squares and other public

piaces, the churches, the fortifications-leaving nothing unobserved, from which I may reap either entertainment or instruction. But what delights me most is my journeys backwards and forwards, to contemplate the situation and other beauties of the places I pass through; some in the plain, others on hills, adjoining to rivers or fountains, with beautiful houses and gardens. Nor are my recreations rendered less agreeable and entertaining by my not seeing well, or not hearing readily every thing that is said to me-or by any other of my senses not being perfect; for they are all, thank God, in the highest perfection, particularly my palate, which now relishes better the simple fare I meet with wherever I happen to be, than it did formerly the most delicate dishes, when I led an irregular life. I sleep, too, everywhere, soundly and quietly, without experiencing the least disturbance, and all my dreams are pleasant and delightful.

"These are the delights and comforts of my old age, from which I presume, that the life I spend is not a dead, morose, and melancholy one; but a living, active, and pleasant existence, which I would not change with the most robust of those youths, who indulge and riot in all the luxury of the sensesbecause I know them to be exposed to a thousand diseases, a thousand unavoidable sources of unhappiness, and a thousand kinds of death. I, on the contrary, am free from all such apprehensions of disease, because I have nothing for disease to feed upon-from the apprehension of death, because I have spent a life of reason. Besides death, I am persuaded, is not I know that, barring accidents, no violent disease can touch me. I must be dissolved by a gentle and gradual decay, when the radical moisture is consumed, like oil in a lamp, which affords no longer life to the dying taper."

near me.

Truly did this philosopher, for so he may be called, prophecy concerning his future health and happiness, for he lived, as has been remarked, to be upwards of a hundred years old, after publishing another tract in his ninety-fifth year.

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MUSIC.

Music is the court dress of thought. The enlivening and soul-inspiring thoughts which issue from every note of the march the tender sentiments of the song-the sublime praises of the psalin-were once unadorned, but inspired conceptions of a single mind. Their presence arrested and stimulated its every faculty; and imagination, memory and intellect combined to clothe them in the splendid and attractive garb of eloquence, or the more graceful and flowing robe of poetry. Men saw and heard, and confessed that there were "thoughts that breathed, and words that burned." But these breathing thoughts put on other robes. So artfully were they formed, so exquisitely adorned, that they awaken in the mind of the beholder the very passions of the mind in which they originated, and thrill and fire his intellect and his fancy. This last-this most skilful-this court dress of thought, is Music,-the eloquence of eloquence, the poetry of poetry, the breathing of the very souls of the poet and the orator, into the hearts of others the inspiring their lips to utter the sentiments which first enraptured him.

It requires genius of a very high order to compose such Music; a soul highly sensitive to the stirring, the subduing, the eleva ting emotions; an intellect of great grasp, and vast powers of concentration; a taste, delicate almost to painfulness; a moral His work is to produce in sense, enlightened and correct. other minds what he feels himself; to utter in one strain the whole sentiment of the orator; to produce by a single tune the effect of protracted meditation. History celebrates the triumph of eloquence, by showing an Athenian assembly at the close of an oration by Demosthenes, crying as one man, " let us go and fight Philip!" The composer of martial music produces Under his guidance the that very spirit by a single tune. "stiffen rolling drum, the shrill fife, the clear-sounding bugle, the sinews, summon up the blood, and bend every spirit to the full height." So with the religious emotions. The devout medgrateful, itation of sacred truth may awaken penitential, or trustful or rapturous emotions; but the successful composer of sacred music must produce this effect at once; and in the compass of a single tune, raise the soul from earth, and bear it to

the skies.

From these remarks, the conclusion is unavoidable, that all musical composition has reference to some one thought which