5. Especially powerful is this appeal upon an American, who is so unused to anything of the kind, who comes from a country where everything-except the hills, streams, fields, forests, and stars-is new, where a prosaic and garish procession of duties and struggles is ever drifting in the way where the prizes, impartially flung open to all, engender conflict, a morbid ambition and self-assertion, a haggard worldliness. To such an one how surprisingly benign and redeeming are the subduing emotions of tenderness, wonder, and awe poured over the spirit as he opens the mediæval door, and for the first time finds himself enveloped in the enigmatical dimness of human life and death. A flood of plaintive wonder and delicious sorrow falls on the soul like the contents of a baptismal vase dashed on its burning fever, and the weeping worshipper, hardly knowing whether he is on earth or in heaven, yields to the spirit of the place in a blended feeling of self-surrender and divine desire.

6. The first religious impression made on the visitor to the churches is the profound sense of his own nothingness. Their prodigious magnitude, capable of holding the population of a city, the suggestion of endlessness in the aspiring lines and vaulted arches, the symbols of infinity in the silence, humble man to the dust, make him feel himself and his fellows to be as insignificant as so many insects creeping across the eternal floors, and vanishing while the hoary edifice still reverberates, as before, the thunders of chant and dirge.

7. The same influences that thus convince man of his personal littleness and helplessness also create

in him an irresistible persuasion of the nothingness of his life, the nothingness of the pomp, pride, and cares with which he vexes himself. In contrast with these weather-beaten walls, by which the successive waves of humanity for a thousand years have rippled and sunk into the grave, he cannot help feeling that his existence is but a bubble that breaks in a moment on a river that flows for

ever.

8. The ecclesiastical idea claimed the whole epoch from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, rolling wave after wave of its contagious fervor through the Christian nations, and leaving these peerless edifices scattered over half Europe as its trophies. The doctrines and hopes of Christianity were taken into the social imagination of Christendom with such realizing vividness that it took fire under them with creative impulse, and the people began to build. Moved by a common desire to perpetuate their faith in sensible forms, entire populations toiled at the sacred task age after age, lavishing all that they held most precious on the work.

9. The results which they produced were less the products of individual designers than exhalations of the imagination, concretions of the feeling of society, symbolical embodiments of a common faith and a public inspiration. The great artists in whom this impulse of the age attained its height, who contrived and oversaw the marvellous erections, are, in most instances, utterly unknown. This lofty self-abnegation, this hiding away of pride and vanity in sacred oblivion, this fusion of private feeling in public feeling, of man in God, is profoundly religious and is most appropriate in a

work symbolical of religion, and surely those meek and patient builders have their reward.

10. Pausing before the grand perspectives of Salisbury, Rouen, Strasbourg, one feels in each instance, while he gazes, as if the aspirations of millions of believing souls had suddenly materialized themselves on their way to heaven and formed-a cathedral. The music-like sweetness of some of these structures suggest that they are translations into visible forms of the delicate carolling of some band of celestials. The chords of exquisite lines of small arches that sweep along in successive ranges flow out with effects like audible harmonies. They are successive waves of beauty, which rolled along after one another till, in the distance, they dissolved into light.

11. When an American, a representative of this young and rash democracy, confronts the venerable antiquity, the accumulated beliefs, and affections, and sorrows, the victorious perseverance, the awful authority typified in the old churches of Europe, he experiences a religious impression in the feeling that although he and his are but momentary vapors, these are things which endure for ever. Though he arose but yesterday, and dies to-morrow, there were shadowy ages full of men before, and will be mysterious ages full of men after.

ALGER.

LESSON XCIV.

AT THE SHRINE.

1. THE sunset's dying radiance falls

On chancel-gloom and sculptured shrine, A splendor wraps the pictured walls, Where painted saints in glory shine! And blent with sweet-tongued vesper-bells, Through echoing aisles and arches dim The organ's solemn music swells,

The sweetly-chanted evening hymn.

2. Low at Our Lady's spotless feet

A white-robed woman kneels in prayer:
The Deus Meus murmurs sweet,

While Glorias throb on perfumed air;
Before the circling altar-rail

She breathes her Aves soft and low-
The golden hair beneath her veil

Wreathed like a glory on her brow.

3. The sunset's purple splendors fade,
The dark'ning shades of twilight fall,
The moonbeam's silver touch is laid
On sculptured saint and pictured wall:
And while the weeping watcher kneels,
And silence weaves her magic spells,
The gray dawn thro' the oriel steals,
And morning wakes the matin-bells.

1. THE other day, as I was walking on one of the streets of Newport, I saw a little girl standing before the window of a milliner's shop. It was a very rainy day. The pavement of the sidewalks on this street is so sunken and irregular that in wet weather, unless one walks with very great care, he steps continually into small wells of water. Up to her ankles in one of these wells stood the little girl, apparently as unconscious as if she were high and dry before a fire. It was a very cold