Light as the down of the thistle, free as the winds that blow,

We roved there the beautiful summers-the summers of long ago;

But his feet on the hills grew weary, and one of the

autumn eves

I made for my little brother a bed of the yellow leaves.

3. Sweetly his pale arms folded my neck in a meek embrace,

As the light of immortal beauty silently covered his

face;

And when the arrows of sunset lodged in the treetop's height,

He fell, in his saint-like beauty, asleep by the gates

of light!

Therefore of all the pictures that hang on memory's wall,

The one of the dim old forest seemeth the best

of all.

ALICE CARY.

LESSON LXXXV.

SOME THOUGHTS ON WOMEN.

1. WOMAN, in the substance of humanity, feels less than man the changes of ages and civilization. Revolution does not act on woman as it does on man; it does not enter so radically into her mental organization; therefore, throughout the mutations of history, she remains a clear and exhaustless spring in the depths of life, for its perennial beauty and

refreshment; a constant heart in the midst of nations, for their vitality, purity, and charities. Her being, more than man's, entrenched in everlasting instincts and affections, is not as his-so moulded by the outward world! Thus woman is not so transformed as man is by the influence of successive generations.

2. That elemental humanity which institutions, laws, manners, cannot alter, is more a necessity of her consciousness than it is of man's; she, therefore, preserves, through all vicissitudes, a constitution, in mind and body, nearer than his to primitive simplicity. Creature as she may seem of art, of artifice, of fantasy, she is never able effectually to overlay nature, nor long successfully to disguise it. Solomon was aware of this when he ordered the dividing of the child. In spite of any training, in spite of any seeming, when there is aught to touch her nearly she quickly reveals herself; and though at times equal to the most insidious deceit, yet all her contrivance, her stratagems, her cunning and skill are ever at the mercy of an impulse.

3. Woman lives always more in home than man; and there she lives amidst those relations in which the world is again young, in which the life is begun anew in the nursery of society. There she sees the material from which society is evolved by tradition, custom, and education. There she has before her the radicalism of society-society in its roots; and whether she understands her position or does not understand it, the facts of a philosophy are within the touch of her hand, more original than any which metaphysicians or statesmen have faculty or time to study.

4. Womanhood thus, by its own instinctive life, and by its constant nearness to the world's instinctive life, reveals itself with a peculiar unity amidst the diversities of time; it shows itself with no less of unity amidst the diversities of condition. Women may be proud, haughty, vain, exclusive, sensitively jealous of privilege and station; but with all outward divisions sharply defined and severely guarded, women are yet more really in unity than men. Nay, the very instinct of this unity adds force to the restrictive conventionalism which rules so despotically among women. They know how vitally near they are to each other. Nature, therefore, the more securely entrenches itself within the barriers of rank, fashion, and ceremony.

5. A woman knows that she could not keep separate from a woman as a man can from a man. Intimacy among women merges into equality, companionship into community, and all into confidence. When women thus come together, they meet in the centre of a deep common life; for women have in common, more than men, feelings that are strong, natural, and sacred. Men, at the extremes of life in station or experience, never thus come together in the interchange of feelings and ideas essential to their life. In the most cordial outward familiarity, they would still be as far as could be from any approach to the intercourse of equal and reciprocal sympathies. A king would speak familiarly with his shepherd or his ploughman, but the king and the hind would never meet in a point at which the differences of station were lost in unity of nature. Yet we would not say that the king's conversation

was not manly; we do not look for any such intercommunion as a condition of his manliness.

6. But let the queen talk familiarly with the shepherd's or the ploughman's wife-both would soon forget the difference of stations in the unity of sex; monarch and menial would gradually melt into the gossip of matrons and mothers, and, before they were aware of it, would be deep in the philosophy of babies and the mysteries of husbands. Exactly in the degree that the conversation was womanly, it would be an intercommunion of essential feminine life, and the woman of the throne would in this be one with the woman of the hut. If, then, women have antagonisms which men have not, woman has a sympathy for woman which man has nothing like for man. Every woman feels in herself the totality of womanhood. The individual woman identifies herself with sex; she makes the dignity of her sex her own, and any word hurtful to it she takes as a personal insult. Thus, through her very sense of instinctive community, she often seems towards the sins of her sisterhood hard, intolerant, and unmerciful. The reason is that she feels as if she herself in some way shared in their dishonor and suffered by their obloquy.

HENRY GILES.

1. ELIZABETH ANN BAYLEY, the foundress of the Sisterhood of Charity in the United States, was born in the city of New York, on the 28th of August, 1774. Her father, Dr. Richard Bayley, was a physician of good family and distinguished position, a member of the Protestant Episcopal Church. and a man of many natural virtues. Her mother