taken Lillo's cheeks between her hands, and his young eyes were meeting hers. Ц "There was a man to whom I was very near, so that I could see a great deal of his life, who made almost every one fond of him, for he was young, and clever, and beautiful, and his manners to all were gentle and kind. I believe, when I first knew him, he never thought of

T is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts, and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good. There are so many things wrong and difficult in the world that no man can be great-he can hardly keep himself from wickedness-unless he gives up thinking much about his pleasure or his rewards, and gets strength to endure what is hard and painful. My father had the greatness that belongs to integrity; he chose poverty and obscurity rather than falsehood. And there was Fra Girolamo (Savonarola);

anything cruel or base. But because he tried to slip away from everything that was unpleasant, and cared for nothing else as much as his own safety, he came at last to commit some of the basest deeds-such as make men infamous. He denied his father, and left him to misery; he betrayed every trust that was reposed in him, that he might keep himself safe and get rich and prosperous. Yet calamity overtook him.' Again Romola paused. Her voice was unsteady, and Lillo was looking at her with awed wonder. "Another time, my Lillo-I will tell youanother time."-From the Epilogue to Romola by George Eliot.

he had the greatness which belongs to a life spent in struggling against powerful wrong, and in trying to raise men to the highest deeds they are capable of. And so, my Lillo, if you mean to act nobly and seek to know the best things God has put within reach of men, you must learn to fix your mind on that end, and not on what will happen to you because of it.

And remember, if you were to choose something lower, and make it the rule of your life to seek your own pleasure and escape from what is disagreeable, calamity might come just the same; and it would be calamity falling on a base mind, which is the one form of sorrow that has no balm in it, and that may well make a man say-' It would have been better for me if I had never been born." I will tell you something, Lillo." Romola paused for a moment. She had

Books are the true levelers. They give to all who faithfully use them the society, the spiritual presence, of the best and greatest of our race.-W. E. Channing.

Some people have a perfect genius for doing nothing, and doing it assiduously.

-Thomas C. Haliburton.

HE delusive idea that men merely

toil and work for the sake of preserving their bodies, and procuring for themselves bread, houses, and clothes, is degrading and not to be encouraged s The true origin of man's activity and creativeness lies in his unceasing impulse to embody outside himself the divine and spiritual element within him.-Froebel.

HUS after four months of anxious toil, through the whole of a scorching Philadelphia summer, after earnest but sometimes bitter discussion, in which more than once the meeting had seemed on the point of breaking up, a colossal work had at last been accomplished, the results of which were powerfully to affect the whole future career of the human race.

There was still, no doubt, a chance of failure, but hope now reigned in the old man's breast. On the back of the President's quaint black armchair there was emblazoned a half-sun, brilliant with its gilded rays. As the meeting was about to break up and Washington arose, Franklin pointed to the chair, and made it the text for prophecy "As I have been sitting here all these weeks," said he, I have often wondered whether yonder sun is rising or setting. But now I know that it is a rising sun!' -John Fiske.

In spite of the highwrought intensity of feeling which had been now and then displayed, grave decorum had ruled the proceedings; and now, though few were really satisfied, the approach to acquiescent unanimiity was very remarkable. When all was over, it is said that many of the members seemed awestruck. Washington sat with head bowed in solemn meditation. The scene was ended by a characteristic bit of homely pleasantry from Franklin Thirty-three years ago, in the days of George II, before the first mutterings of the Revolution had been heard, and when the French dominion in America was still untouched, before the banishment of the Acadians or the rout of Braddock, while Washington was still surveying lands in the wilderness, while Madison was playing in the nursery and Hamilton was not yet born, Franklin had endeavored to bring together the thirteen colonies in a federal union. Of the famous Albany plan of 1754, the first complete outline of a federal constitution for America that ever was made, he was the principal if not the sole author When he signed his name to the Declaration of Independence in this very room, his years had rounded the full period of threescore and ten. Eleven years more had passed, and he had been spared to see the noble aim of his life accomplished.

DAN is a land-animal.

A land-animal can not live without land. All that man produces comes from the land; all productive labor, in the final analysis, consists in working up land, or materials drawn from land, into such forms as fit them for the satisfaction of human wants and desires. Man's very body is drawn from the land Children of the soil, we come from the land, and to the land we must return. Take away from man all that belongs to the land, and what have you but a disembodied spirit? Therefore, he who holds the land on which and from which another man must live is that man's master; and the man is his slave. The man who holds the land on which I must live, can command me to life or to death just as absolutely as though I were his chattel.

Talk about abolishing slavery! We have not abolished slavery; we have only abolished one rude form of it-chattel slavery. There is a deeper and more insidious form, a more cursed form yet before us to abolish, in this industrial slavery that makes a man a virtual slave, while taunting him and mocking him in the name of freedom.

-Henry George.

HAT to which the great

sacred books of the world conform, and our own most of all, is the evolution of the highest conceptions, beliefs and aspirations of our race from its childhood through the great turningpoints in its history. Herein lies the truth of all bibles, and especially of our own. Of vast value they indeed often are as a record of historical outward fact; recent researches in the East are constantly increasing this value; but it is not for this that we prize them most: they are eminently precious, not as a record of outward fact, but as a mirror of the evolving heart, soul and mind of man. They are true because they have been developed in accordance with the laws governing the evolution of truth in human history, and because in poem, chronicle, code, legend, myth, apologue or parable they reflect this development of what is best in the onward march of humanity. To say that they are not true is as if one should say that a flower or a tree or a planet is not true; to scoff at them is to scoff at the law of the universe. In welding together into noble form, whether in the book of Genesis, or in the Psalms, or in the book of Job, or elsewhere, the great conceptions of men acting under earlier inspiration, whether in Egypt, or Chaldea, or India, or Persia, the compilers of our sacred books have given to humanity a possession ever becoming more and more precious; and modern science, in substituting a new heaven and a new earth for the old -the reign of law for the reign of caprice, and the idea of evolution for that of creation-has added and is steadily adding a new revelation divinely inspired

In the light of these two evolutions, then one of the visible universe, the other of a sacred creation-legendscience and theology, if the master minds in both are wise, may at last be reconciled.-Andrew D. White.

Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; (I am large. I contain multitudes).-Walt Whitman.

IT

is Criticism, as Arnold points out, that creates the intellectual atmosphere of the age. It is Criticism . . that makes the mind a fine instrument.. It is Criticism, again, that, by concentration, makes culture possible It takes the cumbersome mass of creative work, and distils it into a finer essence...

The thread that is to guide us across the wearisome labyrinth is in the hands of Criticism. Nay more, where there is no record, and history is either lost or was never written, Criticism can re-create the past for us from the very smallest fragment of language or art, just as surely as the man of science can from some tiny bone, or the mere impress of a foot upon a rock, re-create for us the winged dragon or the Titan lizard that once made the earth shake beneath its tread, can call Behemoth out of his cave, and make Leviathan swim once more across the startled sea. Prehistoric history belongs to the philological and archæological critic It is to him that the origins of things are revealed.

The self-conscious deposits of an age are nearly always misleading... It is Criticism that makes us cosmopolitan It is only by the cultivation of the habit of intellectual criticism that we shall be able to rise superior to race prejudices... Criticism will annihilate race prejudices, by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms... It is Criticism that, recognizing no position as final, and refusing to bind itself by the shallow shibboleths of any sect or school, creates that serene philosophic temper which loves truth for its own sake, and loves it not the less because it knows it to be unattainable.

HE changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth. Evermore it is the order of nature to grow, and every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house.

may come in ☛ We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in today to rival or re-create that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We can not again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep

June,

in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, "Up and onward for evermore!" We can not stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters

larks,

shell,

the green valleys.

In proportion to the vigor of the individual these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant, and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming as it were a transparent fluid membrane through which the form is always seen and not as in most men an indurated heterogeneous fabricofmanydates and of no settled character, in which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement and the man of today scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed state, resting not advancing, resisting not co-operating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks.

weariness,

66

We can not part with our friends. We can not let our angels go. We do not see that they only go out that archangels

wards o And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, the loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable

But the sure years reveal the deep underlies all facts.

remedial force that The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly

There can be no such thing as a nation flourishing alone in commerce; she can only participate; and the destruction of it in any part must necessarily affect all. When, therefore, governments are at war, the attack is made upon the common stock of commerce, and the consequence is the same as if each had attacked his own.

The prosperity of any commercial nation is regulated by the prosperity of the rest. If they are poor, she can not be rich; and her condition, be it what it may, is an index of the height of the commercial tide in other nations.

-Thomas Paine.

A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.

-James Freeman Clarke.

ITH respect to what are called denominations of religion, if every one is left judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge of each other's religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore, all the world is right, or all the world is wrong.

But with respect to religion itself, without regard to names, and as directing itself from the universal family of mankind to the divine object of all adoration, it is man bringing to his Maker the fruits of his heart; and though these fruits may differ from each other like the fruits of the earth, the grateful tribute of every one is accepted.

If we suppose a large family of children who on any particular day, or particular occasion, make it a custom to present to their parents some token of their affection and gratitude, each of them would make a different offering, and most probably in a different manner.

Some would pay their congratulations in themes of verse and prose, by some little devices, as their genius dictated, or according to what they thought would please; and, perhaps, the least of all, not able to do any one of those things, would ramble into the garden, or the field, and gather what it thought the prettiest flower it could find, though, perhaps, it might be but a simple weed. The parents would be more gratified by such a variety than if the whole of them had acted on a concerted plan, and each had made exactly the same offering

This would have the cold appearance of contrivance, or the harsh one of control.

But of all unwelcome things, nothing would more afflict the parents than to know that the whole of them had afterwards got together by the ears, boys and girls, fighting, reviling and abusing each other about which was the best or the worst present.-Thomas Paine.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.-Samuel Johnson.