faculty which is held the great distinction between men and brutes; and how little advantage we make of that, which might be the greatest, the most lasting, and the most innocent, as well as useful, pleasure of life.-Jonathan Swift.

It suffices not that beauty should keep solitary festival in life; it has to become a festival of every day.-Maeterlinck.

WHEN

HEN those difficult cases occur, they are difficult, chiefly because, while we have them under consideration, all the reasons pro and con are not present to the mind at the same time; but sometimes one set present themselves, and at other times another, the first being out of sight. Hence the various purposes or inclinations that alternately prevail, and the uncertainty that perplexes us do

To get over this, my way is, to divide half a sheet of paper by a line into two columns; writing over the one pro and the other con; then during three or four days' consideration, I put down under the different heads short hints of the different motives, that at different times occur to me, for or against the measure. When I have thus got them all together in one view, I endeavor to estimate their respective weights; and, where I find two (one on each side) that seem equal, I strike them both out. If I find a reason pro equal to some two reasons con, I strike out the three. If I judge some two reasons con, equal to some three reasons pro, I strike out the five; and thus proceeding I find at length where the balance lies; and if, after a day or two of further consideration, nothing new that is of importance occurs on either side, I come to a determination accordingly. And, though the weight of reasons can not be taken with the precision of algebraic quantities, yet, when each is thus considered separately and comparatively, and the whole lies before me, I think I can judge better, and am less liable to make a rash step; and in fact I have found great value from this kind of equation, in what may be called moral or prudential algebra.-Franklin.

you

may believe me, when I assure you in the most solemn manner that, so far from 'seeking this employment, I have used every effort in my power to avoid it, not only from my unwillingness to part with you and the family, but from a consciousness of its being a trust too great for my capacity; and I should enjoy more real happiness in one month with you at home than I have the most distant prospect of finding abroad, if my stay were to be seven times seven years. But as it has been kind of destiny that has thrown me upon this service, I shall hope that my undertaking it is designed to answer some good purpose.

I shall rely confidently on that Providence which has heretofore preserved and been bountiful to me, not doubting but that I shall return safe to you in the fall. I shall feel no pain from the toil or danger of the campaign; my unhappiness will flow from the uneasiness I know you will feel from being left alone. I therefore beg that you will summon your whole fortitude, and pass your time as agreeably as possible. Nothing will give me so much sincere satisfaction as to hear this, and to hear it from your own pen.-George Washington, Letter to His Wife, 1775.

GREAT factory with the'machinery

all working and revolving with absolute and rhythmic regularity and with the men all driven by one impulse and moving in unison as though a constituent part of the mighty machine, is one of the most inspiring examples of directed force that the world shows. I have rarely seen the face of a mechanic in the act of creation which was not fine, never one which was not earnest and impressive.-Thomas Nelson Page.

HERE is no moment like the pres

ent. The man who will not execute his resolutions when they are fresh upon him can have no hope from them afterwards: they will be dissipated, lost, and perish in the hurry and scurry of the world, or sunk in the slough of indolence.-Maria Edgeworth.

seems to me as if

of these brave young hearts, which lie buried on the banks of the Shenandoah, thoughts of them mingled with love to God and hope for the slave.

bore are brittle,

He has abolished slavery in Virginia. You may say this is too much. Our neighbors are the last men we know. The hours that pass us are the ones that we appreciate least. Men walked Boston streets when night fell on Bunker's Hill, and pitied Warren, saying, "Foolish man! Threw away his life! Why did n't he measure his means better?”

OW feeble words seem here! How can I hope to utter what your hearts are full of? I fear to disturb the harmony which his life breathes round this home. One and another of you, his neighbors, say, "I have known him five years, 66 I have known him ten years. It we had none of us known him. How our admiring, loving wonder has grown, day by day, as he has unfolded trait after trait of earnest, brave, tender, Christian life! We see him walking with radiant, serene face to the scaffold, and think, what an iron heart, what devoted faith! We take up his letters, beginning, "My dear wife and children, every one,”-see

Now we see him standing colossal on that bloodstained sod, and severing that day the tie which bound Boston to Great Britain. That night George III ceased to rule in New England. History will date Virginia Emancipation from Harper's Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on your hills, it looks green for months a year or two. Still it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slavery system; it only breathes it does not live-hereafter.-"The Burial of John Brown," by Wendell Phillips.

him stoop on the way to the scaffold and kiss that negro child-and this iron heart seems all tenderness. Marvelous old man! We hardly said it when the loved forms of his sons, in the bloom of young devotion, encircle him, and we remember he is not alone, only the majestic center of a group. Your neighbor farmer went, surrounded by his household, to tell the slaves there will still be hearts and right arms ready and nerved for the service. From this roof four, from a neighboring roof two, to make up that score of heroes. How resolutely each looked into the face of Virginia, how loyally each stood at his forlorn post, meeting death cheerfully, till that master voice said, " It is enough." And these weeping children and widow see so lifted up and consecrated by long, singlehearted devotion to his great purpose that we dare, even at this moment, to remind them how blessed they are in the privilege of thinking that in the last throbs

HE house-builder at work in cities or anywhere,

The preparatory jointing, squaring, sawing, mortising,

The hoist-up of beams, the push of them

in their places, laying them regular. Setting the studs by their tenons in the mortises, according as they were prepared,

The blows of the mallets and hammersPæans and praises to him!

-Walt Whitman.

Today is yesterday's pupil.-Franklin.

HE functions of the poetical

bring light and fire from those eternal regions where the owl-winged faculty of calculation dare not ever soar?

Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man can not say it: "I will compose poetry." The greatest poet even can not say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some

find the reason,

faculty are twofold; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power, and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. The body has then become too unwieldy for that which animates it.

Poetry is indeed something divine.

a season:

done.

It is at once the center and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science, and that to which all science must be referred. It is at the same time the root and blossom of all other systems of thought; it is that from which all spring, and that which adorns all; and that which, if blighted, denies the fruit and the seed, and withholds from the barren world the nourishment and the succession of the scions of the tree of life. It is the perfect and consummate surface and bloom of all things; it is as the odor and the color of the rose to the texture of the elements which compose it, as the form and splendor of unfaded beauty to the secrets of anatomy and curruptions What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendshipwhat were the scenery of this beautiful universe which we inhabit-what were our consolations on this side of the grave and what were our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did not ascend to

invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory, brightness; this power arises from within,

like the color of a

flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departures Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the

greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet. Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds. We are aware of evanescent visitations of thought and feeling sometimes associated with place or person, sometimes regarding our own mind alone, and always arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, but elevating and delightful beyond all expression: so that even in the desire and the regret they leave, there can not but be pleasure, participating as it does in the nature of its object. It is as it were the interpenetration of a diviner nature through our own; but its footsteps are like those of a wind over the sea which the coming calm erases, and whose traces remain only, as on the wrinkled sand which paves it.

These and corresponding conditions of being are experienced principally by those of the most delicate sensibility and the most enlarged imagination; and the state of mind produced by them is at war with every base desire. The enthusiasm of virtue, love, patriotism, and friendship is essentially linked with such emotions; and while they last, self appears as what it is, an atom to a universe. Poets are not only subject to these experiences as spirits of the most refined organization, but they can color all that they combine with the evanescent hues of this ethereal world; a word, a trait in the representation of a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted chord, and reanimate, in those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold, the buried image of the past. Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit which they inhabit into the universe of things. Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley

Patience is bitter, but its fruit sweet. -Rousseau.

Every man is a volume, if you know how to read him-Channing.

Wit consists in knowing the resemblance of things which differ, and the difference of things which are alike.

-Madame De Stael.

Our whole social life is in essence but a long, slow striving for the victory of justice over force.-John Galsworthy.

There would be no perceptible influence on the morals of the race if Hell were quenched and Heaven burned.

-Charles W. Eliot.

ANY lovable people miss each other

in the world, or meet under some unfavorable star. There is the nice and critical moment of declaration to be got over. From timidity or lack of opportunity a good half of possible love cases never get so far, and at least another quarter do there cease and determine. A very adroit person, to be sure, manages to prepare the way and out with his declaration in the nick of time. And then there is a fine, solid sort of man, who goes on from snub to snub; and if he has to declare forty times will continue imperturbably declaring amid the astonished consideration of men and angels, until he has a favorable answer I daresay, if one were a woman, one would like to marry a man who was capable of doing this, but not quite one who had done so. It is just a little bit abject, and somehow just a little bit gross; and marriages in which one of the parties has been thus battered into consent scarcely form agreeable subjects for meditation. Love should run out to meet love with open arms. Indeed, the ideal story is that of two people who go into love step for step, with a fluttered consciousness, like a pair of children venturing together in a dark room. From the first moment when they see each other, with a pang of curiosity, through stage after stage of growing pleasure and embarrassment, they can read the expression of their own trouble in each other's eyes. There is here no declaration properly so called; the feeling is so plainly shared, that as soon as the man knows what is in his own heart, he is sure of what is in the woman's.-Robert Louis Stevenson.

VERY man, however obscure, however far removed from the general recognition, is one of a group of men impressible for good, and impressible for evil, and it is in the nature of things that he can not really improve himself without in some degree improving other men.-Charles Dickens.

Be not prodigal of your opinions, lest by sharing them with others you be left without.-Ambrose Bierce.

HERE is something extremely fascinating in quickness; and most men are desirous of appearing quick. The great rule for becoming so is, by not attempting to appear quicker than you really are; by resolving to understand yourself and others, and to know what you mean, and what they mean, before you speak or answer.

Every man must submit to be slow before he is quick; and insignificant before he is important. The too early struggle against the pain of obscurity corrupts no small share of understandings Well and happily has that man conducted his understanding who has learned to derive

as they have flowed on in the ages that are past; to see why nations have risen, and why they have fallen; to speak of heat, and light, and winds; to know what man has discovered in the heavens above, and in the earth beneath; to hear the chemist unfold the marvelous properties that the Creator has locked up in a speck of earth; to be told that there

are worlds so dis

tant from our sun that the quickness of light traveling from the world's creation has never yet reached us; to wander in the creations of poetry, and grow warm again, with that eloquence which swayed the democracies of the old world; to go up with great reasoners

from the exercise of it regular occupation and rational delight; who, after having overcome the first pain of application, and acquired a habit of looking inwardly upon his own mind, perceives that every day is multiplying the relations confirming the accuracy, and augmenting the number of his ideas; who feels that he is rising in the scale of intellectual beings, gathering new strength with every new difficulty which he subdues, and enjoying today as his pleasure that which yesterday he labored at as his toil.

There are many consolations in the mind of such a man which no common life can ever afford, and many enjoyments which it has not to give! It is not the mere cry of moralists, and the flourish of rhetoricians; but it is noble to seek truth, and it is beautiful to find it. It is the ancient feeling of the human heart-that knowledge is better than riches; and it is deeply and sacredly true! ses

To mark the course of human passions

of all, and to per

ceive in the midst of all this dissolution and decay, and cruel separation, that there is one thing unchangeable, indestructible, and everlasting;-it is worth while in the days of our youth to strive hard for this great discipline; to pass sleepless nights for it, to give up to it laborious days; to spurn for it present pleasures; to endure for it afflicting poverty; to wade for it through darkness, and sorrow, and contempt, as the great spirits of the world have done in all ages and all times.-Sidney Smith.

LAY is pleasurable mental and phys

ical competitive exercise where the issues involved are trivial and transient. It is a fit preparation for more important tasks. And it is the law of life that you only do those important tasks well at which you have played in childhood. Stanley Hall.

The worst sorrows in life are not in its losses and misfortunes, but its fears.

-A. C. Benson.