all due propriety, with a cold and supercilious bearing toward children, which makes them shrinking and still. I have known one like the latter attempt, with uncouth condescension, to court an open-hearted child who would draw back with an instinctive aversion; and I have felt as if there were a curse upon him. Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children. RICHARD H. DANA be envied than a good-natured man watching | toward another who has gone through life with the workings of children's minds, or overlooking their play. Their eagerness, curious about everything, making out by a quick imagination what they see but a part of their fanciful combinations and magic inventions, creating out of ordinary circumstances and the common things which surround them, strange events and little ideal worlds, and these all working in mystery to form matured thought, is study enough for the most acute minds, and should teach us, also, not too officiously to regulate what we so little understand. The still musing and deep abstraction in which they sometimes sit, affect us as a playful mockery of older heads. These little philosophers have no foolish system, with all its pride and jargon, confusing their brains. Theirs is the natural movement of the soul, intense with new life and busy after truth, working to some purpose, though without a noise. When children are lying about seemingly idle and dull, we, who have become case-hardened by time and satiety, forget that they are all sensation, that their outstretched bodies are drinking in from the common sun and air, that every sound is taken note of by the ear, that every floating shadow and passing form come and touch at the sleepy eye, and that the little circumstances and the material world about them make their best school, and will be the instructors and formers of their characters for life. And it is delightful to look on and see how busily the whole acts, with its countless parts fitted to each other, and moving in harmony. There are none of us who have stolen softly behind a child when labouring in a sunny corner digging a lilliputian well, or fencing in a six-inch barn-yard, and listened to his soliloquies and his dialogues with some imaginary being, without our hearts being touched by it. Nor have we observed the flush which crossed his face when finding himself betrayed, without seeing in it the delicacy and propriety of the after man. EVELYN HOPE.1 Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead! Little has yet been changed, I think: Sixteen years old when she died! Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name; And now was quiet, now astir, Is it too late then, Evelyn Hope? What, your soul was pure and true, And our paths in the world diverged so wide, Is great to grant, as mighty to make, Ere the time be come for taking you. But the time will come,-at last it will, When, Evelyn Hope, what meant, I shall say, A man may have many vices upon him, and have walked long in a bad course, yet if he has a love of children, and can take pleasure in their talk and play, there is something still left in him to act upon-something which can love simplicity and truth. I have seen one in whom some low vice had become a habit, make himself the plaything of a set of riotous children with as much delight in his countenance as if nothing but goodness had ever been expressed in it; and have felt as much of kindness and sympathy toward him as I have of revolting | don: Chapman & Hall. In the new life come in the old one's stead. 1 From Men and Women, by Robert Browning. Lon 86 I have lived, I shall say, so much since then, Ransacked the ages, spoiled the climes; Yet one thing, one, in my soul's full scope, Either I missed or itself missed meAnd I want and find you, Evelyn Hope! What is the issue? let us see! I loved you, Evelyn, all the while; DEATH. My heart seemed full as it could hold→ There was place and to spare for the frank young smile And the red young mouth and the hair's young gold. So, hush,-I will give you this leaf to keepSee, I shut it inside the sweet cold hand. There, that is our secret! go to sleep; You will wake, and remember, and understand. ROBERT BROWNING. DEATH. Death is the same harmless thing that a poor shepherd suffered yesterday or a maidservant to-day; and at the same time in which you die, in that very night a thousand creatures die with you, some wise men, and many fools; and the wisdom of the first will not quit him, and the folly of the latter does not make him unable to die. I have read of a fair young German gentleman, who, while living, often refused to be pictured, but put off the importunity of his friends' desire by giving way that after a few days' burial, they might send a painter to his vault, and if they saw cause for it, draw the image of his death unto the life. They did so, and found his face half-eaten, and his midriff and backbone full of serpents; and so he stands pictured among his armed ancestors. It is a mighty change that is made by the death of every person, and it is visible to us who are alive. Reckon but from the sprightfulness of youth, and the fair cheeks and full eyes of childhood, from the vigorousness and strong flexure of the joints of five-and-twenty, to the hollowness and dead paleness, to the loathsomeness and horror of a three days' burial, and we shall perceive the distance to be very great and very strange. But so have I seen a rose newly springing from the clefts of its hood, and at first it was fair as the morning, and full with the dew of heaven, as the lamb's fleece; but when a ruder breath had forced open its virgin modesty, and dismantled its too youthful and unripe retirements, it began to put on darkness and to decline to softness and the symptoms of a sickly age, it bowed men. the head and broke its stalk, and at night, having lost some of its leaves and all its beauty, it fell into the portion of weeds and outworn faces. So does the fairest beauty change, and it will be as bad with you and me? and then what servants shall we have to wait upon us in the grave? What friends to visit us? What officious people to cleanse away the moist and unwholesome cloud reflected upon our faces from the sides of the weeping vaults, which are the longest weepers for our funerals? A man may read a sermon, the best and most passionate that ever man preached, if he shall but enter into the sepulchres of kings. In the same Escurial where the Spanish princes live in greatness and power, and decree war or peace, they have wisely placed a cemetery where their ashes and their glory shall sleep till time shall be no more: and where our kings have been crowned, their ancestors lie interred, and they must walk over their grandsire's head to take his crown. There is an acre sown with royal seed, the copy of the greatest change from rich to naked, from ceiled roofs to arched coffins, from living like gods to die like There is enough to cool the flames of lust, to abate the heights of pride, to appease the itch of covetous desires, to sully and dash out the dissembling colours of a lustful, artificial, and imaginary beauty. There the warlike and the peaceful, the fortunate and the miserable, the beloved and the despised princes mingle their dust, and pay down their symbol of mortality, and tell all the world that when we die our ashes shall be equal to kings', and our accounts easier, and our pains for our crimes shall be less. To my apprehension it is a sad record which is left by Athenæus concerning Ninus the great Assyrian monarch, whose life and death is summed up in these words: "Ninus the Assyrian had an ocean of gold, and other riches more than the sand in the Caspian Sea; he never saw the stars, and perhaps he never desired it; he never stirred up the holy fire among the magi; nor touched his god with the sacred rod according to the laws: he never offered sacrifice nor worshipped the deity, nor administered justice, nor spake to the people, nor numbered them: but he was most valiant to eat and drink, and having mingled his wines, he threw the rest upon the stones. This man is dead: behold his sepulchre, and now hear where Ninus is. Sometime I was Ninus, and drew the breath of a living man, but now am nothing but clay. I have nothing but what I did eat, and what I served to myself in lust is all my portion: the wealth with which I was blessed my enemies meeting |