confiding love, and the solace of a cheerful and contented mind. Happy, thrice happy are they who have not listened to the voice of the charmer, or cast their lot amid the turbulence of mighty cities: creation's heirs, the earth is to them a goodly heritage, the little flower that lurks half hidden from the eye, is a familiar friend. Cheerful are your smiles, children of nature, for your hearts are innocent and pure; light your slumbers, unbroken by the disappointments of the day, or the cares of the coming morrow; — uncorrupted by the vices of the town, your ignorance is truly bliss. While we are ab

sorbed in the vanity, that is, business of life, you pursue more wisely its enjoyments; while with us soul and body are absorbed in striving for the emptiness of a name, or the incumbrances of fortune, you are blessed in the pursuit of another and a better ambition the ambition to live, not

greatly, nor wealthily, but that which is, at once and all of living well.

Anonymous.

THE cedar tree perfumes the axe that cuts it down.

THE GRAVE.

I LOVE to muse, when none are nigh, Where yew-tree branches wave, And hear the winds, with softest sigh, Sweep o'er the grassy grave.

It seems a mournful music, meet
To soothe à lonely hour;

Sad though it be, it is more sweet
Than that from Pleasure's bower.

I know not why it should be sad,
Or seem a mournful tone,
Unless by man the spot be clad
With terrors not its own.

To nature it seems just as dear
As earth's most cheerful site;
The dew-drops glitter there as clear,
The sun-beams shine as bright.

The showers descend as softly there

As on the loveliest flowers;

Nor does the moonlight seem more fair
On Beauty's sweetest bowers.

"Ah! but within-within, there sleeps

One, o'er whose mouldering clay

The loathsome earth-worm winds and creeps,
And wastes that form away."

And what of that? The frame that feeds

The reptile tribe below

As little of their banquet heeds,

As of the winds that blow.

Bernard Barton.

THE excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age, payable, with interest, about thirty years after date.

MEMORY.

THERE is a wonderful power in memory, when made to array before the guilty days and scenes of comparative innocence. It is with an absolutely crushing might, that the remembrance of the years and home of his boyhood will come upon the criminal, when brought to a pause in his career of misdoing, and perhaps about to suffer its penalties. If we knew his early history, and it would bear us out in the attempt, we should make it our business to set before him the scenery of his native village the cottage where he was born the school to which he was sent the Church where he first heard the preached Gospel; and we should call to his recollection the father and the mother, long since gathered to their rest, who made him kneel down night and morning, and who instructed him out of the Bible, and who warned him, even with tears, against evil ways and evil companions. We should remind him how

peace

fully his days then glided away; with how much of happiness he was blessed in possession, how much of hope in prospect. And he may be now a hardened and desperate man; but we will never believe that, as his young days were thus passing before him, and the reverend forms of his parents came back from the grave, and the trees that grew around his birthplace waved over him their foliage, and he saw himself once more as he was in early life, when he knew crime but by name, and knew it only to

never believe

that he could be

abhor we will proof against this mustering of the past — he might be proof against invective, proof against reproach, proof against remonstrance; but when we brought memory to bear upon him, and bade it people itself with all the imagery of youth, we believe that, for the moment at least, the obdurate being would be subdued, and a sudden gush of tears prove that we had opened a long sealed-up fountain.

Rev. H. Melvill.

RELIGION without its mysteries, is a temple without

a God.