natural and satisfying as that rest which seems such an irksomeness to youth, but which gradually grows into the best blessings of our lives; and there is another solitude, so full of peace and hope, that it is like Jacob's sleep in the wilderness, at the foot of the ladder of angels.

"All things are less dreadful than they seem.”

And it may be that the extreme loneliness which, viewed afar off, appears to an unmarried woman as one of the saddest of the inevitable results of her lot, shall by that time have lost all its pain, and be regarded but as the quiet dreamy hour "between the lights;" when the day's work is done, and we lean back, closing our eyes, to think it all over before we finally go to rest, or to look forward, in faith and hope, unto the coming morning.

A finished life-a life which has made the best of all the materials granted to it, and through which, be its web dark or bright, its pattern clear or clouded, can now be traced plainly the hand of the Great Designer; surely this is worth living. for. And though at its end it may be somewhat lonely; though a servant's and not a daughter's arm may guide the failing step; though most likely it will be strangers only who come about the dying bed, close the eyes that no husband ever kissed, and draw the shroud kindly over the poor withered breast where no child's head has ever lain; still, such a life is not to be pitied, for it is a completed life. It has fulfilled its appointed course, and returns to the Giver of all breath, as pure as He gave it."

Dinah Muloch.

I HAVE lived to know that the secret of happiness is never

to allow your energies to stagnate.

Adam Clarke.

MIDDLE LIFE.

SUCH

is the burden of our thought concerning the middle age: Experience without worldliness; equanimity without indifference; progress without instability.

EXPECTATION.

HE looked from out the window

SHE

With long and asking gaze,

From the gold-clear light of morning

To the twilight's purple haze.
Cold and pale the planets shone,
Still the girl kept gazing on.

From her white and weary forehead
Droopeth the dark hair,
Heavy with the dews of evening,

Heavier with her care;

Falling as the shadows fall

Till flung round her like a pall.

When from the carvéd lattice
First she leant to look,

Her bright face was written
Like some pleasant book,

Her warm cheek the red air quaffed,
And her eyes looked out and laughed.

She is leaning back now languid,

And her cheek is white;

Only on the drooping eyelash
Glistens tearful light;

S. Osgood.

Color, sunshine hours are gone,
Yet the maiden watches on.

Human heart, this history
Is thy faded lot;
Even such thy watching

For what cometh not,

Till with anxious waiting dull,

Round thee fades the beautiful.

Still thou seekest on, though weary,
Seeking still in vain;

Daylight deepens into twilight,

What has been thy gain?

Death and night are closing round

All that thou hast sought, unfound.

L. E. Landon.

то
TO die for what we love! Oh! there is power

In the true heart, and strength and joy for this:
It is to live without the vanished light
That strength is needed!

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN.

God pity us all

Who vainly the dreams of youth recall,

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: "It might have been !"

Ah well! for us all some sweet hope lies
Deeply buried from human eyes,

And, in the hereafter, angels may

Roll the stone from its grave away

J. G. Whittier.

THE UNLOVED.

THE great mystery of God's providence is the permitted crushing out of flowering instincts. Life is maintained by the respiration of oxygen and of sentiments. In the long catalogue of scientific cruelties, there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump, and exhausting the air from it. [I never saw the accursed trick performed. Laus Deo!] There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe. Then it is that society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments. The element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her crystalline prison. Watch her through its transparent walls; her bosom is heaving, but it is in a vacuum. Death is no riddle, compared to this. I remember a poor girl's story in the “Book of Martyrs." The "dry pan and the gradual fire" were the images that frightened her most. How many have withered and wasted under as slow a torment in the walls of that larger inquisition which we call civilization !

For that great procession of the unloved, who not only wear the crown of thorns, but must hide it under the locks of brown or gray, under the snowy cap, under the chilling turban; hide it even from themselves; perhaps never know they wear it, though it kills them; there is no depth of tenderness in my nature that pity has not sounded. Somewhere, somewhere love is in store for them; the universe must not be allowed to

fool them so cruelly. What infinite pathos in the small, halfunconscious artifices by which unattractive young persons seek to recommend themselves to the favor of those towards whom our dear sisters, the unloved, like the rest, are impelled by God-given instincts!

O. W. Holmes.

FROM ENDYMION.

No

one is so accursed by fate,

No one so utterly desolate,

But some heart, though unknown,
Responds unto his own.

Responds, as if with unseen wings,

A breath from heaven had touched its strings;
And whispers, in its song,

"Where hast thou stayed so long?"

H. W. Longfellow.

I

REFLECTED HAPPINESS.

Do not know when I have been better pleased than at being invited last week to be present at the wedding of a friend's daughter. I like to make one at these ceremonies, and am sure to be in good humor for a week or two after, and enjoy a reflected honey-moon. Being without a family, I am flattered with these temporary adoptions into a friend's family; I feel a sort of cousinship or uncleship for the season; I am inducted into degrees of affinity; and, in the participated socialities of the little community, I lay down for a brief while my solitory bachelorship. I carry this humor so far, that I take it unkindly to be left out, even when a funeral is going on in the house of a dear friend.

Charles Lamb.