THE BRIDE.

I KNOW no sight more charming and touching than that of a young and timid bride, in her robes of virgin white, led up trembling to the altar. When I thus behold a lovely girl, in the tenderness of her years, forsaking the house of her fathers and the home of her childhood, and, with the implicit confidence and the sweet self-abandonment which belong to woman, giving up all the world for the man of her choice-when I hear her, in the good old language of the ritual, yielding herself to him "for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, honour, and obey, till death us do part ❞— it brings to mind the beautiful and affecting devotion of Ruth: "Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."

Washington Irving.

THE CHILD AND THE DEW-DROPS.

"Oh FATHER, dear father! why pass they away -
The dew-drops that sparkle at dawning of day?
That glitter'd like stars in the light of the moon,
Oh! why are the dew-drops dissolving so soon?
Does the sun in his wrath chase their brightness away,
As though nothing that's lovely might live for a day?
The moonlight has faded, the flowers still remain,
But the dew-drops have shrunk in their petals again.
Oh father, dear father! why pass they away -
The dew-drops that sparkled at dawning of day?"

"My child," said the father, "look up to the skies,
Behold that bright rainbow, those beautiful dyes;
There, there are the dew-drops in glory re-set,
'Mid the jewels of heaven they are glittering yet:
Then are we not taught by each beautiful ray

To mourn not earth's fair things though passing away?

For though youth of its beauty and brightness be

riven,

All that withers on earth blooms more sweetly in

heaven.

Look up," said the father, "look up to the skies,
Hope sits on the wings of those beautiful dyes.”

Alas for the father! how little knew he
That the words he had spoken prophetic would be;
That the beautiful cherub, the star of his day,
Was e'en then like the dew-drop dissolving away;
Oh! sad was the father, when, lo! in the skies
The rainbow again spread its beautiful dyes,
And then he remember'd the maxims he'd given,
And thought of his child, and the dew-drops in
heaven:

Yes, then he remember'd the maxims he'd given,

And thought of his child, and the dew-drops in heaven.

THE wick of life emits, in proportion as it lengthens, a dimmer and more languid flame.

THE GRAVE.

THE Grave is the ordeal of true affection. It is there that the divine passion of the soul manifests its superiority to the instinctive impulse of mere animal attachments. The latter must be continually refreshed and kept alive by the presence of its objects; but the love that is seated in the soul can live on long remembrance. The mere inclinations of sense languish and decline, with the charms which excited them, and turn with disgust from the dismal precincts of the tomb; but it is thence that truly spiritual affection rises purified from every sensual desire, and returns, like a holy flame, to illumine and sanctify the heart of the survivor.

The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced. Every other wound we seek to heal every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it as a duty to keep

solitude. Where is the mother who would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang? Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament? Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns? Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved; when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portal; would accept of the consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness?—No, the love which survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul. If it has its woes, it has likewise its delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection; when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved, is softened away into pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness-who would root out such a sorrow from the heart? Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the brightest hours of gaiety; or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom; yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure, or the burst of revelry? No, there is a voice from

C