His praise, ye winds, that from four quarters blow, From MILTON's Paradise Lost. DICTIONARY LESSON. Find the meaning of symphonies, extol, orient, quaternion, perpetual, multiform. 41. BOOKS. 1. It is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levelers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race. 2. No matter how poor I am,-no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling, if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof,-if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live. CHANNING. 42. THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH. 1. The kettle began it! Don't tell me what Mrs. Peerybingle said. I know better. Mrs. Peerybingle may leave it on record to the end of time that she could n't say which of them began it; but, I say the kettle did. I ought to know, I hope! The kettle began it, full five minutes by the little waxy-faced Dutch clock in the corner, before the cricket uttered a chirp. 2. Why, I am not naturally positive. Every one knows that I wouldn't set my own opinion against the opinion of Mrs. Peerybingle, unless I were quite sure, on any account whatever. Nothing should induce me. But this is a question of fact. And the fact is, that the kettle began it, at least five minutes before the cricket gave any sign of being in existence. Contradict me, and I'll say ten. 3. Let me narrate exactly how it happened. I should have proceeded to do so, in my very first word, but for this plain consideration-if I am to tell a story I must begin at the beginning; and how is it possible to begin at the beginning, without beginning at the kettle? It appears as if there were a sort of match, or trial of skill, you must understand, between the kettle and the cricket. And this is what led to it, and how it came about. 4. Mrs. Peerybingle, going out into the raw twilight, and clicking over the wet stones in a pair of pattens that worked innumerable rough impressions of the first proposition in Euclid all about the yard-Mrs. Peerybingle filled the kettle at the water-butt. Presently returning, less the pattens (and a good deal less, for they were tall and Mrs. Peerybingle was but short), she set the kettle on the fire. 5. In doing which she lost her temper, or mislaid it for an instant; for, the water being uncomfortably cold, and in that slippy, slushy, sleety sort of state wherein it seems to penetrate through every kind of substance, patten-rings included-had laid hold of Mrs. Peerybingle's toes, and even splashed her. Besides, the kettle was aggravating and obstinate. It would n't allow itself to be adjusted on the top bar; it would n't hear of accommodating itself kindly to the knobs of coal; it would lean forward with a drunken air, and dribble, a very idiot of a kettle, on the hearth. It was quarrelsome, and hissed and spluttered morosely at the fire. 6. To sum up all, the lid, resisting Mrs. Peerybingle's fingers, first of all turned topsy-turvy, and then, with an ingenious pertinacity deserving of a better cause, dived sideways in-down to the very bottom of the kettle. And the hull of the Royal George has never made half the monstrous resistance to coming out of the water, which the lid of that kettle employed against Mrs. Peerybingle, before she got it up again. It looked sullen and pig-headed enough, even then; carrying its handle with an air of defiance, and cocking its spout pertly and mockingly at Mrs. Peerybingle, as if it said, "I won't boil. Nothing shall induce me." 7. Now it was, you observe, that the kettle began to spend the evening. Now it was, that the kettle, growing mellow and musical, began to have irrepressible gurglings in its throat, and to indulge in short vocal snorts, which it checked in the bud, as if it had n't quite made up its mind yet to be good company. Now it was, that after two or three such vain attempts to stifle its convivial sentiments, it threw off all moroseness, all reserve, and burst into a stream of song so cosy and hilarious, as never maudlin nightingale yet formed the least idea of. 8. And here, if you like, the cricket did chime in with a chirrup, chirrup, chirrup, of such magnitude, by way of chorus; with a voice, so astoundingly disproportionate to its size, as compared with the kettle, (size! you could n't see it!) that if it had, then and there, burst itself like an overcharged gun, if it had fallen a victim on the spot, and chirruped its little body into fifty pieces, it would have seemed a natural and inevitable consequence, for which it had expressly labored. 9. There was all the excitement of a race about it. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket a mile ahead. Hum, hum, hum-m-m! Kettle making play in the distance, like a great top. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket round the corner. Hum, hum, hum-m-m! Kettle sticking to him in his own way; no idea of giving in. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket fresher than ever. Hum, hum, humm-m! Kettle slow and steady. Chirp, chirp, chirp! Cricket going in to finish him. Hum, hum, hum-mm! Kettle not to be finished. Until at last, they got so jumbled together, in the hurry-skurry, helter-skelter of the match, that whether the kettle chirped and the cricket hummed, or the cricket chirped and the kettle hummed, or they both chirped and both hummed, it would have taken a clearer head than yours or mine to have decided with any thing like certainty. 10. But, of this, there is no doubt: that the kettle and the cricket, at one and the same moment, and by some power of amalgamation best known to themselves, sent, each, his fireside song of comfort streaming into a ray of the candle that shone out through the window, and a long way down the lane. And this light, bursting on a certain person who, on the instant, approached towards it through the gloom, expressed the whole thing to him, literally in a twinkling, and cried, "Welcome home, old fellow! Welcome home, my boy!" CHARLES DICKENS. USING WORDS. Use each of these words in a sentence of your own: patten-rings, moroseness, hilarious, water-butt, jumbled, amalgamation. 43. BRUTUS AND CASSIUS. Cassius. That you have wronged me doth appear in this: You have condemned and noted Lucius Pella, For taking bribes here of the Sardians; Brutus. You wronged yourself, to write in such a case. Cassius. I an itching palm! You know that you are Brutus that speak this, Cassius. Chastisement! Brutus. Remember March, the ides of March re member! Did not great Julius bleed for justice' sake? Cassius. Brutus, bay not me, I'll not endure it. You forget yourself, |