BEAUTY OF TRUTH.

AFTER all, the most natural beauty in the world is honesty and moral truth. For all beauty is truth. True features make the beauty of a face; and true proportions the beauty of architecture; as true measures that of harmony and music. In poetry, which is all fable, truth still is the perfection.

Shaftesbury.

THE ORPHAN.

An orphan with my parents lived, whose eyes
Were load-stars of delight, which drew me home
When I might wander forth; nor did I prize
Aught human thing beneath heaven's mighty dome
Beyond this child.

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* A child most infantine,

Yet wandering far beyond that innocent age
In all but its sweet looks and mien divine.

She moved upon this earth a shape of brightness,
A power, that from its objects scarcely drew
One impulse of her being-in her lightness
Most like some radiant cloud of morning dew,

Which wanders through the waste air's pathless blue,
To nourish some far desert; she did seem

Beside me, gathering beauty as she grew,

Like the bright shade of some immortal dream

Which walks, when tempest sleeps, the wave of life's

dark stream.

As mine own shadow was this child to me,
A second self, far dearer and more fair.

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*She was all I had

To love in human life-this playmate sweet,
This child of twelve years old-so she was made
My sole associate, and her willing feet

Wandered with mine where earth and ocean meet,
Beyond the aërial mountains whose vast cells
The unreposing billows ever beat,

Through forests wide and old, and lawny dells

And warm and light I felt her clasping hand
When twined in mine: she followed where I went,
Through the lone paths of our immortal land.

And when the pauses of the lulling air
Of noon beside the sea had made a lair
For her soothed senses, in my arms she slept,
And I kept watch over her slumbers there,
While, as the shifting visions o'er her swept,

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Amid her innocent rest by turns she smiled and wept.

She would arise, and like the secret bird
Whom sunset wakens, fill the shore and sky
With her sweet accents-a wild melody!

Triumphant strains, which, like a spirit's tongue,
To the enchanted waves that child of glory sung,
Her white arms lifted through the shadowy stream
Of her loose hair.

Shelley.

PERSON AND CHARACTER.

O, IF the money and the pains that we bestow upon perfumes and adornments of the body, were applied to the purification of the mind! O, if we were as careful to polish our manners as our teeth; to make our temper as sweet as our breath; to cut off our peccadilloes as to pare our nails; to be as upright in character as in person; to save our souls as to shave our chins,-what an immaculate race we should become!

Dr. Chatfield.

INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY.

SPIRIT of Beauty, that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away, and leave our state,
This dim, vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate ?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever

Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river;

Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown;
Why fear, and dream, and death, and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth

Such gloom; why man has such a scope
For love and hate, despondency and hope?

Love, hope, and self-esteem, like clouds, depart for some uncertain moments lent.

And come,

Man were immortal, and omnipotent,

Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,

Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies

That wax and wane in lovers' eyes;
Thou, that to human thought art nourishment

Like darkness to a dying flame!

Depart not as thy shadow came :
Depart not, lest the grave should be,
Like life and fear, a dark reality.

Shelley.

WOMAN.

As the vine, which has long twined its graceful foliage about the oak, and been lifted by it into sunshine, will, when the hardy plant is rifted by the thunderbolt, cling round it with its caressing tendrils, and bind up its shattered boughs; so is it beautifully ordained by Providence, that woman, who is the mere dependant and ornament of man in his happier hours, should be his stay and solace when smitten with sudden calamity; winding herself into the rugged recesses of his nature, tenderly supporting the drooping head, and binding up the broken heart. W. Irving.

ORNAMENTS.

SOME to conceit alone their taste confine,
And glittering thoughts struck out at every line;
Pleased with a work where nothing's just or fit;
One glaring chaos and wild heap of wit.

Poets, like painters, thus, unskilled to trace
The naked nature and the living grace,
With gold and jewels cover every part,
And hide with ornaments their want of art.
True wit is nature to advantage dressed,

What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed;
Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
As shades more sweetly recommend the light,
So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit.

Pope.

SIMPLICITY.

IT is with books as with women; where a certain plainness of manner and of dress is more engaging, than that glare of paint and airs and apparel, which may dazzle the eye, but reaches not the affections.

Hume.

GRAVE OF AMBITION.

HERE the mighty troublers of the earth,

Who swam to sovereign rule through seas of blood:
The oppressive, sturdy, man-destroying villains,
Who ravaged kingdoms, and laid empires waste,
And in a cruel wantonness of power,

Thinned states of half their people, and gave up
To want the rest; now, like a storm that's spent,
Lie hushed, and meanly sneak behind thy covert.

Blair.