Who needs ever cull her bloom? Would the wind be still and grave, Let the breezes tenderly THE KNIGHT AND THE FEATHERS. (Versified from the German). BY ADA TREVANION. A youthful Knight, Who rode in summer weather, All fair it shone The Knight had fain made it his own: As in a dream He sought a stream, And lo! upon its shore, A feather blue with golden gleam, More fair than that before. MELANCHOLY. Away with melancholy, Why should we be melancholy, whose business 'tis to secret anguish because he has failed to procure Away with melancholy, it relaxes the nerves, saps purpose, beclouds the mind, and fosters selfishness. What if we have griefs, even total disappointment, we are not alone in the universe, we can yet think and do for others; God never gave us the wonderful machinery of our being, with its great motive-power, to be ever grinding for ourselves. Away with melancholy; overcome the evil with good; fill your mind with pleasant images, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever;" let in thoughts that flow and ripple, not such as stamp or gallop, "printing their hoofs in the receiving" brain. Enjoy yourself to-day, and you will add to the happiness of all your after-life; our life is not a stream gliding under the light that here and there gleams on it. No; no ray shot from between clouds of an overcast sky, no stray moonbeam, no distant-star glimmer, but is borne along till it is not lostbut drowned in the light that never shone on earthly waters. Open your heart to enjoyment; the leaves of the Australian trees can but turn out their edges, lest they should absorb all the moisture of the atmosphere. We nead not thus fear to unfold our souls; our atmosphere is saturated with joy; a great ocean of bliss washes our highland-shores, and its waters are wafted on every breeze. We are as a people too avaricious to take time for enjoyment. It is with us too much work to too little pleasure; ours are the opposite of Falstaff's rations-an intolerable deal of bread to one halfpenny-worth of sack. Have you heavy griefs? sometimes forget them; resolve to enjoy the present time; push back all care, anxiety, all remorse, as the waters of the sea were pushed back for the Israelites to pass over; you will not wade in them this day, or, it may be, but this hour or half-hour, though the next they may in a flood rush over you. How delightful are such moments, though we are continually sprinkled with the spray of the forcibly parted waters. ness, yet inwardly thanking God "that he is not as other men;" or the "patriot" loudly lamenting the distracted state of his country, in a lucrative contract. I haven't much respect for, or faith in the melancholy that finds vent in sighs, woful ballads, groans, and lamentations that are meant for the world's ear. Byron says: "Mute the camel labours with the heaviest load, And the wolf dies in silence." Yet Pollok truly says of him: "His groanings filled the land his numbers filled." He groaned in numbers, "for the numbers came," but I suspect that, had he been limited to plain prose, he would not have groaned audibly; and many an echo had been lost from college halls. for this groaning in numbers, I don't believe in it; pain is silent, or finds 66 no language but a cry.' As is but a myth, only shrill screams can come from "Echoes roll from soul to soul And grow forever and forever." But we have had too much of selfish Byronism; we should not so concentrate our attention on ourselves, that we would lament the breaking of a cog in our machinery, as if it were the snapping of the main spring of the universe. "Why should we be melancholy, whose business 'tis to die ?" We will pluck the flowers and drink of the brooks, and rest under the spreading oaks by the wayside in spring-time and summer. In autumn we will step aside to gather the golden pippins; we will not whimper at the dust and stones, though we must trudge along on foot while others go mounted. There is rest at home. And "when wintry winds begin to blow" and the night air grows chill, we will think of the light and warmth of our Father's house. I never waste sympathy on the melancholy man, who constantly cherishes the sparks of his discontent, lest they should die out, selfishly beclouding the atmosphere of those around Let us not go fasting and sighing, we will him. He has no genuine sorrow, no heart-│“eat, drink, and be merry," not only if "toconsuming grief; the brisk fire emits but morrow we die," but though we die to-day, and little smoke. There is a lack of sincerity, because we must die, for with all our bravery, of heartiness, about all these fumers; whether with all our cheerfulness, the highway of life is it be "the lover sighing like furnace, with a weary road to travel. Well was "the poniard a woful ballad to his mistress' eyebrow;" the with which the knights despatched their Pharisee ever groaning over his own unworthi- enemies called the dagger of mercy." Why should we be melancholy, whose privilege 'tis | what do you think of your sister's? Yours are to die? As for the ills of life, let us remedy those we can-not spend our breath whining over them. For those that we cannot remedy we have the Mahometan formula: Allah akbar-God is great; Islam-we must submit to God. LITTLE THINGS. "The impious Nimrod, enraged at the destruction of his gods" by Abraham, "sought to slay him and waged war against him. "God, in order to punish Nimrod, "sent a gnat, which vexed him night and day, so that he built himself a room of glass in his palace that he might dwell therein and shut out the insect. But the gnat entered also, and passed by his car into his brain, upon which it fed and increased in size day by day, so that the servants of Nimrod beat his head with a hammer continually that he might have some ease from his pain; but he died after suffering these torments for four hundred years." "It is the little rift within the lute That by and by will make the music mute, "The little rift within the lover's lute, Or little, pitted speck in garnered fruit, How many, like poor Nimrod, are constantly annoyed by a gnat. We know when a great shark-like grief that has perhaps been lying in wait for a man, or following in his wake, seizes him as its prey. We know when one more is incidentally crushed beneath the wheels of Fate, as the blind and deaf victim is mangled by the merciless engine, that with swift but measured tread, so like the strides of Fate, passes on. But the gnat that is ever with the man, that hums him to sleep at night and stings him awake in the morning, that nothing that would not exclude the life-sustaining air can shut out, that the swiftness of no railway-train can leave behind, who sees it or knows its vexatious stings? God never sent it, therefore he may rid himself of it. Alas! too many attempt to do so by wallowing in the mire of intemperance. He should rid himself of it before it enters his brain and feeds itself into an insanity that death alone can dispossess of its royal banquet-room. | He should call to his aid religion or philosophy whatever is his surest help to crush, drive away, or extract the sting of the gnat, "That settles beaten back, and beaten back Settles, till one could yield for weariness." Why, a great grief even is often a benefit to a man, it drives away the little annoying trouble; somewhat you may think, as Paddy drove the fly from the man's nose-with a club. But, man, if you have annoyances, vexations, but as one gnat-hers are as a swarm of mosquitoes. But "the women, God bless them!" many of them know how to extract the stings. The vegetation, trampled down by the elephant, will spring up again; the insect stings the plant at the root, and it withers and dies beyond the help of Nature's sunshine and rain. The pulsations of the warm heart of Mother Earth, that send the life-blood into the veins of her poor crushed ones, are but idle beatings for these. Our first parents did not leave Eden to be devoured by wild beasts or stricken by lightning; Heaven's wrath did not meet them in some fearful form. No; the ground was cursed to bring forth briars and thorns, so that they could not pluck a rose even without being pierced. These little cares, little sorrows, little remorses-were it not for them earth would be an Eden to more than half the human race... The peace of but few souls is destroyed by a whale-like grief or leviathan sin. It is too often but a mollusk care or coraline imaginery sin, that, snatching the happiness that the soul holds in solution, ever increases its unrest till it becomes like the "troubled sea that cannot rest, whose waters cast up mire and dirt." Happy the soul, and rare as happy, that has no such sediment! Speak respectfully of little things; you know not how they may influence your destiny. . . . The moon looks on earth, and not only the ocean surges towards her, but the great molten heart, beating against the rocky breast that encloses it, ever throbs towards her; yet she is but the little satellite that seems to circle around earth, but as the moth around the candle. Young man, is there no sweet, pale face towards which your whole being surges ? Little things, despise them not"It is the little rift within the lute That by and by will make the music mute, And, ever widening, slowly silence all." Is your heart that lute? The time was when friendship awakened its soft, sweet tones; when its strings thrilled to the touch of Love and the music surged in great passion-waves; when Hope and Joy swept them, and the soul itself was one "exulting swell" of harmony; when they vibrated from the rude snatches of Sorrow, or her hand slowly, heavily pressed out the long, long wail, or gently the dirge, the requiemAgony, Misery, Sadness; but-Music. Now "the little rift," made, perhaps, by avarice or some other selfishness, has widened till the music has become mute. Oh! this silence! better the low murmuring waves of Sadness, better even the wild surges of Misery. You have lost the chances that the future held for you, the chances of beautiful, even sublime, heart-music. The Israelites, amid Egyptian darkness, had light in their dwellings; you, amid all the harsh discords of life, might have had music in yourself. Alas! for the "little rift." The little sin, do not neglect it "It is the little pitted speck in garnered fruit, The little sin, do you know the regret, finally remorse, its reverberation? The echo of a pistol fired on one of the lakes in the Bavarian Highlands, is at first but a low mutter, then "it gathers along the cliffs like a gradual roll of thunder, increasing in volume till it breaks over the head in a deafening crash, louder than the broadside of a ship-of-the-line." SATAN. "Only supreme in misery All good to me is lost. Evil, be thou my good.' Why on this beautiful day, when the "blue sky, like God's great pity," holds in its bosom soft, fleecy clouds, like the exhalations from a poor earthly heart; when the mountains are beautiful, and hazy, and shadowy-heaven's colour deepened with earth's-like the Christian's horizon, where earth and heaven really meet; when the grasshoppers are chirping their song of rest, and all is peace; why should I dwell on that personation of despair, that "God's great pity" bends not over, shut in by adamantine rocks of evil, of hatred, of obstinacy, from all influence of the sweet heavens, exhaling only blighting curses in his tremendous unrest, shaking and destroying earth's most pleasant places or flooding them with his own hot misery? No hope, no peace, no songs of rest for that utterly miserable one. Is he not the centre, the ever-raging nucleus of this earth of ours? Can you not pity him, though he must ever bear the name of Enemythe name which he received at his terrible baptism by immersion in the floods of eternal woe? Whatever to the shining ones may have been the signification of that angelic name, now never pronounced in heaven, to us, had he not first fallen it would have been Friend. But now the utter misery of that being, who must in his never-ending unquiet, in his awful writhings, produce ruin, and only ruin. I can pity him. He who has heard the strains of the angels must dwell amid eternal discords, he whose eye has been familiar with the beauty of heaven must forever mingle with terrible shapes. Was he not pitied by his great biographer, Milton-Milton, whose mind was a cameraobscura, a darkened chamber, on the wall of which was pencilled, by a ray of heaven's own light, all celestial beauty, while a gleam shot from hell threw there hell's horrid imagery? He more than pitied him, his Satan was subjective. It seems that God himself could pity that soul that, like the ocean, forever holds in its depths untold treasures that enrich it not. It was a strange fancy of the Dark Ages-the incarnation of the Devil as a "mild, ruminant, How many good people avoid mentioning the common name of this individual, as though it think that, like the Yezidis, they were devilwere blasphemous to say devil! One would worshippers. I shall call him devil. What cares he, the chef d'oeuvre of the Almighty, the "star of the morning," that dared stand alone, unawed, almost in the Presence unveiled, while the others "hid their diminished heads"-what cares he by what name human pigmies may curse him? Yes, I shall call him devil, though he may be leering over my shoulder as I write. He can probably even read my writing; he has had a hand in penning most paragraphs, articles, books, rolls, parchments, in engraving most inscriptions (even some on tombstones), since the art of writing by pictures, by hieroglyphs, or by letters was known. He has now all over the writing world busy "writing mediums;" various are his styles to suit his readers, an odour of brimstone for coarse, an "odour of sanctity" for refined olfactories. Should he now make a "medium" of me, and, with my hand and pen, write his own life, beginning far back before he lost his place among the "stars of the morning," what a record would it be; as beautiful and grand as heaven, as gloomy and bitter as hell! What are our petty joys and miseries to his, in their sublime heights and depths? He may be near me invisible. I could not have heard the clatter of his hoofs on the stairs-they were long since shed-they may have been handed down by some witch as heirlooms to her great great granddaughter, and now, shod with felt, may be hidden beneath crinoline and balmoral. I could almost swear that, the other day, I saw the tips of one peep from under Mrs. -'s skirts; but it was so quickly withdrawn, like a turtle's head, that I am not, after all, quite positive that it was there. If I should ever be called upon to give testimony in regard to it in a court of justice, say, for instance, in a divorce case, I shall look into those heavenly blue eyes, and remember only angels that never wore the disgusting livery. Why do I furtively glance over my shoulder? what if he is here, my room is not such an Eden that he need throw into it the seeds of his own misery. Come, old fel-, I beg your pardon, I meant to say, "Gentleman of the old school," look around, you see my furniture is of the plainest sort, on an ink-stained table, a writing desk containing a few trifling scribblings that couldn't harm you, by its side a few books-you who have dipped so deep in lore cannot begrudge me them-a volume of Shakspeare, which even you might read with interest, your own celebrated biography by John Milton, a few novels, and so on, all indicating the unrest of a soul vainly endeavouring to escape |ing of her own. I cannot tell whether from the dusky earth, to which she so trustingly clings; from the chill air, which she so bravely inhales, she has drawn her perfume and colour, or if she reflects the delicate tint of the cheek, and inhales the perfumed breath of some overbending angel, her own special attendant. I know the primrose is associated in my mind with those first years, when such angels might have walked the earth, and thus might their breath and colour have been exhaled and reflected. Now that perfume is to me but a sigh from those glad spring days, when, in my first rambles in the woods, with my first friends, I tore it from the earth, with its rich mould clinging to it. First friends did I say? can I forget the friend first of all, and dearest of all, so early taken from me, that yearning thoughts and a mound in the grave-yard are all that is left to me of that dear one? But from the rich mould of a mother's grave blossoms sweet remembrance-perhaps an angel has breathed into it its perfume-sweet it is as the primrose, but no frail spring flower. the present and the real-"walking through dry places, seeking rest and finding none," did you say? I see you retain your old kuack at quoting Scripture. That volume of the Rev. -'s sermons, on the dusty cover of which you have left your sign-manual, probably would be dry to you. I am glad to see such a manifestation of parental affection. Look further. I am, indeed, anxious to conciliate you: turn your eyes from the bed where I have so often slept, "full of rest from head to foot." You frown so, I fear you didn't rest well last night; and that sigh, perhaps you cannot breathe freely in our atmosphere; yonder hangs a match-safe, light a bunch of the matches, they may improve the air. Yes, they are called lucifer-matches! You are thinking of another kind. Is it possible that your commanding intellect can stoop to a pun, and a borrowed one at that? Sir, you are getting obtrusive; like many other "gentlemen of the old school," you are rather tedious. Bon jour, Monsieur, I will not say à dieu-our blessing is a devil's curse-this, alas! is the misery of miseries-there is no God to whom you would be commended. What! not going yet? I hate to be uncivilbut avaunt! Get thee hence! Skedaddle! I beg your pardon, you need not extend your hand, for though no hoof-on the contrary, a soft, velvety paw-I fear the claws, for, after all your fine names, you are still the "Old-it seems as if immortality had crystallized it Scratch." THE FIRST AND THE LAST-PRIMROSE LOBELIA OR CARDINAL FLOWER. Texts taken from no inspired or uninspired human writer, translated from no "original tongue:" God's utterances in His own language, which, in its beautiful simplicity, may be understood by you and me without an interpreter; yet, in the sublime depths of the thoughts expressed, unfathomable by an archangel. It is as emblems, or from their associations, that I have chosen these beautiful flowers as texts. First and Last? they are among the results of ages of formations and transformations. Let us trace these froin the "shoreless sea," whose ceaseless murmur was heard alone by those who broke in with a chorus of joyful shouts, down through the upheaving of the first Ararat, on which there was no ark to rest. Think of the long, nightmare sleep of earth, her agony, her throes under the incubus of waters; think of the seaming, grinding attrition of glaciers, the centuries of life, death, before she could bear on her bosom the sweet, delicate primrose, and the rich, passionate lobelia. The primrose whence did she draw her fragrance and delicate hue? From the rich, dark mould of mingled oak and pine leaves, and all the refuse of the forest; from the breath of Spring that lies shivering with still half-stiffened blood, the drapery her mother Winter flung off, and yet with but little cover The first-the first youthful friendship terminated only when the friend had passed through the river beyond the mist. How now, as I recall it, even the most mirthful smile that flitted over that dear face has a depth, an earnestness, that belongs to all spiritual things almost into sadness. The first love, pervading the being, making the whole soul tremulous. The first great success, before the vanishing of the morning dew, that every young heart condenses for itself from the surrounding atmosphere. No wonder poets have ever dwelt on the spring-time of life, the morning when everything was first. But "The last! the last! the last! How many thoughts are stirred! Nature does her last as if she would leave a glowing impression, as if she had been but rehearsing for the final performance; she would be encored. She is beautiful and strong in her mornings and noons; but she is glorious in her sunsets: she is sweet and lovely in her springs and summers, but she is gorgeous in her autumns. Like a good general she has a corps de reserve for the final struggle; you go to bed on a chilly night in October, feeling that Winter, the conqueror, is advancing, and that it is almost over with her; you awake the next morning, and lo! she has, in defiance, flung out all her banners. Alas! that these glorious ensigns should trail the ground, torn to shreds, with only the flag-staffs left. She is brave, Queen Nature, her last heartbeats are her strongest. The anemone, pale as if the first feeble pulsations of that heart sent snow into her veins-the faintly-flushed primrose-the delicate spring-beauty, before |