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 abideabide, 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

DANY 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.

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! so do

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.

IR-The bearer of this, who is going to America, presses me to give him a letter of recommendation, though I know nothing of him, not even his name. This may seem extraordinary, but I assure you it is not uncommon here. Sometimes, indeed, one unknown person brings another equally unknown, to recommend him; and sometimes they recommend one another! As to this gentleman, I must refer you to himself for his character and merits, with which he is certainly better acquainted than I can possibly be. I recommend him, however, to those civilities which every stranger, of whom one knows no harm, has a right to; and I request you will do him all the favor that, on further acquaintance, you shall find him to deserve. I have the honor to be, etc.-Paris, April 2, 1777.-Franklin.

Я

HUSBANDMAN who had a quarrelsome family, after having tried in vain to reconcile them by words, thought he might more readily prevail by an example. So he called his sons and bade them lay a bundle of sticks. before him. Then having tied them up into a fagot, he told the lads, one after another, to take it up and break it. They all tried, but tried in vain. Then, untying the fagot, he gave them the sticks to break one by one. This they did with the greatest ease. Then said the father: Thus, my sons, as long as you remain united, you are a match for all your enemies; but differ and separate, and you are undone."-Esop.

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HOEVER examines, with due cir

cumspection, into the Annual Records of Time, will find it remarked, that war is the child of pride, and pride the daughter of riches the former of which assertions may be soon granted, but one can not so easily subscribe to the latter; for pride is nearly related to beggary and want, either by father or mother, and sometimes by both: and to speak naturally, it very seldom happens among men to fall out when all have enough: invasions usually travelling from north to south, that is to say, from poverty to plenty. The most ancient and natural grounds of quarrels, are lust and avarice; which, though we may allow to be brethren, or collateral branches of pride, are certainly the issues of want.-Jonathan Swift.

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ERHAPS none of Shelley's poems is more purely and typically Shelleian than" The Cloud," and it is interesting to note how essentially it springs from the faculty of make-believe. The same thing is conspicuous, though less purely conspicuous, throughout his singing; it is the child's faculty of makebelieve raised to the nth power. He is still at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The universe is the box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall. He is gold-dusty with tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the moon meteors nuzzle their noses in his hand. He teases into growling the kennelled thunder, and laughs at the shaking of its fiery chain. He dances in and out of the gates of heaven; its floor is littered with his broken fancies. He runs wild over the fields of ether. He chases the rolling world. He gets between the feet of the horses of the sun. He stands in the lap of patient Nature, and twines her loosened tresses after a hundred wilful fashions, to see how she will look nicest in his song.-Francis Thompson.

The

longer change yesterday: it arches over us as fate, but we can influence decidedly the factor of today's life which is multiplied into the whole achievement of the past de

That is why the margin of time we have to spend as we please is so sacred; and the briefer the margin, the more precious it becomes. If you have ten hours a day to spend as you please, you may perhaps afford to waste an hour of it—perhaps; but if you have only half an hour each day at

EN differ from each other in quality rather than in quantity of life. It is true, some are granted more years than others; but after all that is not so important. One would rather live a year than vegetate for a century, though I grant you it would be better to live for a hundred years than for one, if we could be sure we were living all the time and not simply staying above the ground. Yet everyone interprets life in terms of its quality rather than its quantity. Looking back over the past one often finds a day or a week standing out longer in memory than years that preceded and followed it It was longer in significance, one lived more, and so the day had deeper meaning for the spirit than years

of mere routine existence. We have lived, not so many days and years, but so much work and love and struggle and joy and heart-ache. Life is always measured in terms of its quality by the standards of the souls de

There is, morever, one most encouraging and consoling law in human development: we grow, not in an arithmetical, but in a geometrical ratio, the increment of new life being multiplied into the old and not simply added to it. A new thought achieved is not added to the sum of one's past thinking, but multiplied into it, becoming a new point of view, from which one sees in changing perspective all other facts and ideas. One step up in the mountain widens the horizon in all directions.

It is the increment of new life multiplied into the old that so largely determines the whole product of life, as far as it is within our own controls We can no

your own free disposal that halfhour becomes a sacred opportunity of life, the chance to change the quality of your existence, to multiply the capital on which you are doing business in the vocation of living. . No, the river of time sweeps on with regular, remorseless current. There are hours when we would give all we possess if we could but check the flow of its waters, there are other hours when we long to speed them more rapidly; but desire and effort alike are futile. Whether we work or sleep, are earnest or idle, rejoice or moan in agony, the river of time flows on with the same resistless flood; and it is only while the water of the river of time flows over the mill-wheel of today's life that we can utilize it. Once it is past, it is in the great, unreturning sea of eternity. Other opportunities will come, other waters will flow; but that which has slipped by unused is lost utterly and will return not again.

-Edward Howard Griggs.

I don't think much of a man who is not wiser today than he was yesterday. -Abraham Lincoln.