its covering. Ye admirers of his greatness, ye emulous of his talents and his fame, approach, and behold him now. How pale! how silent! No martial bands admire the adroitness of his movements. No fascinated throng weep, and melt, and tremble at his eloquence. Amazing change! A shroud! a coffin! a narrow, subterraneous cabin! This is all that now remains of Hamilton! And is this all that remains of him? During a life so transitory, what lasting monument, then, can our fondest hopes erect?

My brethren! we stand on the borders of an awful gulf, which is swallowing up all things human. And is there, amidst this universal wreck, nothing stable, nothing abiding, nothing immortal, on which poor, frail, dying man can fasten?

Ask the hero, ask the statesman, whose wisdom you have been accustomed to revere, and he will tell you. He will tell you, did I say? He has already told you from his death-bed, and his illumined spirit still whispers from the heavens, with well-known eloquence, the solemn admonition: "Mortals! hastening to the tomb, and once the companions of my pilgrimage, take warning and avoid my errors cultivate the virtues I have recommended -- choose the Saviour I have chosen. Live disinterestedly. Live for immortality. And would you rescue anything from final dissolution, lay it up in God."

-Eliphalet Nott.

It is sweet and glorious to die for one's country.

-Horace.

APRIL.

Dear to the poet and to the lover of nature is the month of April, when she first timidly plants her footsteps upon the dank meadow and the mossy hillside, clothing the dark brown sods with tufts of greenery, waking the early birds, and cherishing the tender field-flowers.

Her hands are ever busy, hanging purple fringes upon the elm and golden tassels upon the willow bough, and weaving for the maple a vesture of crimson. She brings life to the frozen streams, verdure to the seared meadows, and music to the woods, which have heard nothing for months save the solemn moaning of their own boughs and the echoes of the woodman's ax from an adjoining fell.

We welcome April as the comforter of our weariness after long confinement, as the bearer of pleasures which her bounty only can offer, as a sweet maiden entering the door of our prison with hands full of budding flowers and breath scented with violets. A gladness and hopefulness attend us on the return of spring which are unfelt at other seasons, and produce a sensation like that of the renewal of youth. We are certainly more hopeful at this time than in the autumn, and we look back upon the lapse of the three winter months with a less painful sense of the loss of so much of our allotted period of life than upon the lapse of the three summer months.

Spring, the true season of hopefulness and action, is unfavorable to thought. So many delightful objects are constantly inviting us to pleasure, that we are tempted to neglect our serious pursuits, and we feel too much exhila

When the rising flowers, music of the animated

ration for confinement or study. the perfumed breezes, and the tenants of the streams, woods, and orchards, are all inviting us to come forth and partake of the pleasures they proffer, it is wearisome to sit down apart from all these delights to the comparatively dull task of describing them.

But, as childhood is not always happy, and as youth is liable to the sorrows and afflictions of later life, the spring is not always cheerful, and the vernal skies are sometimes blackened with wintry tempests, and the earth bound in ice and frost. Even in April the little flowers that are just peeping out from their winter coverts are often greeted by snow, and spring's "ethereal mildness" is exchanged for harsh winds and cloudy skies.

In vain do the crocus, the snowdrop, and the yellow narcissus appear in the gardens, or the blue violet and the saxifrage spangle the southern slopes of the hills-the north wind is not tempered by their beauty nor beguiled into softness by the songs of the early birds. April-the morning of the year, as March was its twilight-that uncertain time when the clouds seem like exiled wanderers over the blue field of light, hurrying in disorganized cohorts to some place of rest or dissolution- daily flatters us with hopes which she seems reluctant to fulfil.

But every invisible agent of nature is silently weaving a drapery of verdure to spread around the footsteps of the more lovely month that is soon to arrive. We see the beginnings of this work of resurrection in thousands of small tufted rings of herbage scattered over the fields, and daily multiplying, until every knoll is crowned with blue,

white, and crimson flowers that will join to gladden the heyday of spring.

When at length the south wind calls together his vernal messengers, and leads them forth in the sunshine to their work of gladness, the frosty conqueror resigns his sceptre, and beauty springs up in the place of desolation. The bee rebuilds his honeyed masonry, the swelling buds redden in the maples, and every spray of the forest and orchard is brightened with a peculiar gloss that gives character to the vernal tinting of the woods.

The ices that have bound the earth for half the year are dissolved; the mountain snows are spread out in fertilizing lakes upon the plains, and the redwing pipes his garrulous notes over the abiding-place of the trillium and the meadow cowslip. The lowlands, so magnificent in auturnn, when glowing with a profusion of asters and golden-rods, are now whitened with this sheet of glistening waters, put into constant agitation by multitudes of frogs tumbling about in the shallows while engaged in their croaking frolics.

April is the month of brilliant skies, constantly shadowed by dark, rapidly-moving clouds, of brown meadows and plashy foot-paths. The barren hills are velveted with moss of a perfect greenness, delicately shaded with a profusion of glossy purple stems, like so many hairs, terminated with the peculiar flower of the plant; and long stripes of verdure mark the progress of the new-born rivulets, as they pursue their irregular course down the hillside into the valleys.

The damp grounds, frequently almost impassable from

standing water, are interspersed with little dry knolls covered with mosses and lycopodiums, where the early flowers of spring delight to nestle, embosomed in their soft verdure. We discover, here and there, a delicate woodanemone, with its mild eyes not yet open to the light of day. But so few flowers are abroad that the bee, when it comes forth in quest of honey, must feel like one who is lost and wandering in space. It can revel only in gardens where the sweet-scented flowers of another clime spread abroad a perfume that is but a false signal of the weather of its adopted climate.

The odors that perfume the air in the latter part of this month are chiefly exhaled from the unfolding buds of the flowering trees and shrubs, and from pine woods. The balin of Gilead and other poplars, while the scales are dropping to loose the young leaves and flowers from their confinement, afford the most grateful of odors, and are a part of the peculiar incense of spring. And there are exhalations from the soil in April, when the ploughman is turning his furrows, that afford an agreeable sensation of freshness, almost like fragrance, resembling the scent of the cool breezes, which, wafted over beds of dulses and sea-weeds, when the tide is low, often rise up suddenly in the heat of summer. As April advances, the familiar bluebirds are busy among the hollows of old trees, where they rear their young, secure from depredation, their clear, sweet songs and beautiful plumage adding the crowning charm to this most elusive of months.

Wilson Flagg.