cession of ages, mail-clad barons, mitred ecclesiastics, people's representatives, tyrants, serfs, and freemen. Here has shouted a stormy multitude while a king was tried. Here Cromwell, Vane, and Hampden have trod; and in later times, Pitt, Burke, Chatham, Fox, and Sheridan, have passed to the scene of their triumph and glory; and there opposite, stands the statue of Canning pointing towards the place where his great spirit was consumed and wasted. But the interest of Palace and Westminster Yard does not consist merely in associations with the past; there is not a spot in London which presents more objects of profound interest to the mind which feels concern in the great movements of the present time. During the sitting of the Houses, the men who wield the destinies of this great empire are constantly to be seen passing and repassing. See that little man of slender appearance, of obviously nervous temperament, and of pale pointed features, which bear upon them too obvious indications of anxiety, care, and the "fret that doth consume us;" in that person see the Prime Minister of Great Britain Lord John Russell. And who is this tall, well-proportioned man, carelessly dressed, in a dark frock-coat, and grey trowsers, his shirt-collar turned down at one side, and his hat pressed nearly over his eyes-of handsome countenance, but containing an expression which is altogether indefinable, and which no artist has yet succeded in bitting? A buzz follows his steps-"it is Sir Robert Peel !' And here comes the unmistakeable rolling Baronet-the large square prominent-nosed Sir J. Graham. Then observe this delicately-featured man, of pale and anxious countenance, as if he were suffering from some internal pain, his frame attenuated and shrunken, his gait drooping and faltering; that body contains a great and noble soul-he is Roebuck, the new member for Sheffield, one of the men of true mark, who, if his life be spared, will yet be heard of. Another follows, tall and pale-here you have the face of a thinker and a student; his black curly locks, and large dark eyes, indicate his race of eastern origin; yet, here he is about to take his place among British legislators, where he is already a man of no mean note; for the philippics of Benjamin D'Israeli must certainly be acknowledged as among the most brilliant specimens of modern Parliamentary eloquence. After him comes Shiel, a man anything but good-looking, exhibiting a round and pale face, a projecting chin, a sarcastic mouth, and an expression not at all pleasing. Yet this man is the orator of the House, and when he speaks, all memory of his external uncouthness fades away. Then follow in a stream other well known members,-Colonel Thompson, the honest sailor-looking member for Bradford; Reynolds, the "original," of Dublin; the unassuming-looking Cobden; honest Muntz of Birmingham, with his thick stick, and bushy beard; sturdy John Bright in his quaker-cut coat, and many others of equal notoriety. fame as a warrior; though we fervently trust that with him may expire the race of "great military heroes." Scarcely has the Duke's cab driven away from the porch, ere up comes a wiry, fussy, hurried, fidgetylooking man, in shepherd's-plaid trowsers, and a blue swallow-tailed coat, and darts into the lobby-door. We catch a glimpse of his nose; it is Brougham!--the same active, restless, speaking, plodding parliamentarian as ever. We have thus set down a few, and but a very few, of the Impressions of London on the mind of the visitor. The subject is one which is almost boundless; and we feel, on leaving it, as if we had scarcely done more than touch it. We might further have spoken of the admirable police of London, and the perfect security in which these two millions of people go about their business from day to day; and yet, at the same time, the entire and perfect liberty which they enjoy. London is a centre of all free movements; it is a very refuge from despotism and oppression of all kinds. The refugees of all countries flock to it,-Poles, French, Italians, and Spanish. There you may at present find Louis Blanc and Metternich; Guizot, Caussidiere and Polignac; refugees from the vengeance of people and their governments. But a year ago, London was equally the resort of refugees from the despotism of kings; of such men as Mazzini the Italian, Bem the Hungarian, and Freiligrath the German patriot. These men are now engaged in manfully working out the emancipation of their countrymen; and may all success attend them in their efforts. We might further speak of the extreme mental liberty which is enjoyed by the people of London. There each man may think and speak as he likes. No man is muzzled, or exposed, on account of his opinions, to the petty persecutions and oppression he has so often to endure in the country. Hence the general absence of hypocrisy among Londoners. No man needs any pretence for being a hypocrite, for he is perfectly free to think and do as he chooses. Public opinion in London may be inactive, and slow to manifest itself; but private opinion is ever active, free, and independent. This, to any strong mind, forms one of the chief attractions of London life, for it is one of the greatest privileges and enjoyments which freeminded men can desire. This great and glorious freedom of thought is certainly one of the deepest and most grateful of all our “Impressions of London." MAN loves the green, sunny spots of earth. A tradition seems to lurk in the memory even of the dweller amidst bricks and mortar which inclines his soul with an undefined longing towards nature arrayed in her unadorned simplicity. There is a charm about the idea of the greenwood shade, and a couch of velvet grass, which fascinates the man in his childhood, and grows with him, as years increase, into absolute fondness; as if the capacity for But who is this driving up to the lobby of the House the original nomade existence he enjoyed was destined of Lords, about whom so much interest seems to be by the unalterable laws of his constitution never to be excited? A plain, high-wheeled cab, driven by an ordi- eradicated. Hence the flowers we see tended with so nary looking servant in plain livery, draws up underneath much eare in the squalid districts of our large towns, and the porch, and forth steps, hesitatingly and feebly, an old the arid patches, with plants pining in the shade, cultivated and decrepid man, spare and slender in figure, dressed in with an assiduity which apologizes for many a grave error. a plain black frock-coat, and, though the day is cold, in But of all the places which Providence, by the instrumenwhite ducks; he walks slowly into the lobby. We catch tality of an advanced degree of civilization, has created for a sight of his profile, and instantly recognise in the the comfort of man, there is none like home; and of all shrunken old man-THE DUKE! Yes; we have before homes the English one is the best. An Englishman inus the victor of Assyo-the constructor of the lines at stinctively loves the russet and green amid which his remote Torres Vedras-the vanquisher of Soult and Massena-ancestors freely roved; but he also loves his home, and, the conqueror of Salamanca and Vittoria-the hero of when he can, places it on the margin of the huge town from Waterloo the rival of Napoleon! Alas, unconquered which he draws the means of subsistence; so that he may, Wellington, like the greatest of earth's heroes, cannot in his hours of relaxation, scent the thorn, and watch those resist the ruthless attacks of Time. The "Iron Duke" pretty day-stars, the daisies, dot the green fields over has shrunk into the "lean and slippered pantaloon." It which comes the healthful breeze that brings the bloom is something, however, to have seen a man of so great a to his cheeks. A SOUL AMONGST THE VAGRANTS. BY SILVERPEN. OVER a little dell in Epping Forest, the high trees arched, and made a night at noon! Yet here in dampness, and in shade, beneath old winter leaves and brambles intertwined, the violets gave sweet odour to the air; and had a dye as rich as purple clouds that curtain round the glory of the setting sun! unseen they were! untouched they were! Pity! pity! that such a waste should be; for what dear heaven makes beautiful, it makes for man! Yet sudden here a streak of light, a thorny bramble thrust aside; a glorious, flickering strip of sun, a light hand moving wintry leaves away; and lo! they were plucked from out their grassy nooks, from brambles interlaced and shade of trees, and grew more scented in the broadening sun. So scented, that nature owned the balm, and scattered it most lavishly upon the noontide air! Be odorous, be beautiful small flowers; and own thy nurture of the woods and fields: For beauty is most needed where human tears fall most; and fragrance where fetid odours make the only atmosphere; and the purity, typified by thy sylvan loveliness sweet flowers, most where pollution festers, and where human nature is a fallen angel, wingless, and in the dust! It was a spring evening in the sweetest May, that the vagrant girl after filling her long flat basket from these solitary nooks, and treading the forest paths with rapid feet, went on towards London. The dew fell thick upon the bending grass; the sun sank far away behind the distant boughs; and night, stealing up the glades, and over harebells and the waving fern, at last closed in, and round the plucked violets themselves. Yet it was not quite dark, when, with shoeless dusty feet she reached a rustic cottage between Forest Gate and Stratford-le-Bow. A decent clad countryman was leaning over the little garden gate smoking his pipe, and the cottage door standing open, showed a pleasant glimpse within. As the girl passed by this garden gate, a very little child came running out with tottering feet, and cried out in a little voice which was the very music of delight, "Dad! the cakes are done," and the kindly father after stooping to kiss the little upraised baby face, took its small hand, and went merrily within. The tea-table had been placed so near the door, as to enable any passer-by to see what covered it, and now the cakes, being added, they could be seen too; and such tempting cakes, so crisp, so hot, so full, and thick, and dark with plums, as to make some six or seven baby faces, looking on around the table, beam with the sweetest baby smiles. It seemed as if this were some little birthday night, the tea hour late, and the cakes made to wel come it. The shoeless vagrant was hungry; nothing but a dram had passed her lips that day, and she but yet thirteen! She took a root of violets from the leaves and mould which lay within the basket, and leaning across the garden gate, offered it for sale. "Violets," answered the labourer, as well as his mouthful of hot cake would permit. "What's them out o' th' leaves and grass o' th' forest, to the double 'uns in the border yander, with a scent as strong as gill' flower, or a June rose? No, no, flowers be like t'other things. Them as get muck and dressing, and the early sun, are on course a pretty deal fragranter, than sich as is plucked out on a ditch. Jist as much difference atween 'em, as atween a thief and a gentleman." "There, send her off, John," said the goodly wife, as she placed a cake in the baby's hand, with a kiss upon its little sugar stained mouth, "the forest brings so many London thieves and vagrants to these parts, that But the baby's eyes (newer from the fashioning hand of God) saw with an intuition, yet, untouched by earth, truth in the hungry face which looked so keenly on its own; and instantly holding forth the unbitten cake within | its little hand, lisped, "give." To this the loving mother not saying nay, the vagrant set down her basket, and went in. "Well, I declare," said the good woman, as soon as she had looked closer at the girl, "if it isn't the very lass as helped me so kindly last summer when I fell with the pitcher! So take the cake; and may be you'll have a sup of milk too; though ye see, I'm not specially fond of trampers." The girl saying "yes," the woman rose, and going to a sort of little dairy, or pantry across the kitchen, fetched her a jug of milk, yet warm, from the cow. Instead, however, of drinking it quickly, as her visible hunger and thirst seemed to prompt, the drooping vagrant, after some little hesitation, asked for a broken basin, or phial, in which she could carry a drop "to little Irish Pat, a blind lad, who lodged with his mother, at Huggins's." "Well! thou hast a tender heart, though a vagrant," replied the woman, "so I'll lend thee little Tom's school bottle; and if thee 'It bring it back, thee shalt be welcome to a cup of milk, or a round of bread, any day thee be going by." So saying, the good woman filled the sehool boy's bottle, and giving her a penny, and saying "God's speed," allowed the girl to go. Once out of sight of the cottage, the poor vagrant robbed her ravenous appetite of the cake; and hiding its larger portion beneath the forest grass and violet leaves, came on with fleeter steps towards town. By a little after nine she reached the middle of Shoreditch; and though the prime freshness of the violets had passed away, their still lovely odour made many turn to catch a glimpse of these forest flowers; and God help such poor humanity-the degraded loveliness of the young creature who bore them! As she passed a glaring gin-shop, a group of halfdrunken women, of evil character, seized her by the arm, and would not let her go on. "Lord bless us!' as the prison-make-us-good says, you've turned into the honest line have you, since the fortnight at Horsemonger. But, it won't do, Miss Modesty, out o' the jug, so stump up, and take a dram for acquaintance sake." The young and wearied creature protested that she had but one penny about her, and that must be deposited with Slink, as part payment of her night's lodging; but, they would not hear reason, and dragging the penny from the bosom of her frock, pushed her through the easy door, and swore they would stand the rest. They did so; and each taking a dram, sipped and looked, with a sort of fiendish pleasure, at the glass uplifted to the childish vagrant's lip, as if they stood and measured drop by drop; and laughed at heart, as drop went after drop, to paralyze, to imbrutify, to bring to their own last stage of infamy, disease, and ruin, poor Frailty (over which the largest mercy might have wept) that linked with extreme youth, with Hebe rounded beauty, and a tender heart, was sin so light beside their own, as to be a feather to a mountain! This their sad knowledge told them; but, then malignity and envy are the last and deadliest of human sins, and still cleave to such sad and lamentable natures, when all presence of the divinity which humanizes seems passed away. Seems! but thank God is not so! The soul has too divine a Giver to be wholly or irretrievably corrupt! Soon flushed by the dram, and callous to their brutal taunts, the childish vagrant moved queenlike, as if rags and ruin were no longer hers, to take up the violets and go; but, as soon as these women saw the movement, they hurried, with a vociferous laugh, from the glaring shop, and when the girl had gained the street, she found they had robbed the basket of the better portion of the flowers, the piece of cake, the bottle of milk, and scattered them with wanton cruelty upon the pavement. She had nothing now to pay even a portion of that night's lodging with; though, with the flushed glory of the dram ELIZA COOK'S JOURNAL. upon her, she was careless of hunger and want of shelter. There had been a great meeting hard by at the London will help to teach man that evil in most shapes, especially within the boundaries of disease and crime, spring from causes governable by man himself, and that their eradication is a necessary portion of his own great progress; because, through such progress, less and less will be narrowed his divergencies from the perfect laws of nature; till, at last, like sweet harmonies blending into one still sweeter, love and faith shall pervade the actions of his material, and his spiritual life! The vagrant left the violets on the door-step, and stood on the pavement-cdge with Verney, till an empty cab, he had hailed, drew up. Just as it came, and the door was opened, she turned her head at the sound of footsteps, and saw passing, between where she stood and the doorstep, a young man, his gaze bent towards the ground, as if lost in thought, and a mass of light hair falling round, and down upon his shoulders, joined to a face of singular sweetness and beauty; so much so, as to make it, to the pregnant fancy, like as one of those beautiful countenances which smiled godlike at the Marriage at Cana in Galilee, or bending, heard the Sermon on the Mount. The vagrant saw that face, and could not sin, if even only in thought, before it; she moved aside, dropped the hand of the seducing judge, took up the violets, and fled in an opposite direction. Secretly annoyed that the girl had thus escaped, though hiding his chagrin under an habitual gravity common to him, he entered the cab, and was driven to his costly chambers in Stone Buildings, Temple. Several friends presently dropped in, to talk over that night's meeting at the London Tavern. After some conversation, other topics were incidentally broached. 66 I have had a letter, full of singular news, from Camand have been bridge, to-day," said one who was a professor in the London University; "both disappointed in their hopes of gaining the Mathematical True to his nature now, and seeing few passers by were Prize. It has been awarded, with extraordinary honours up or down the street, he stopped abruptly before the-specific analogy being made to the greatest mathe-to that poor sizar of St. John's, named was usher at the village school in vagrant. The few remaining flowers had still some maticians Well, John Plowdon has got the gold native odour left, and her childish figure, in its cowering Plowdon, who Girl," he said gently, Lincolnshire. attitude, impersonated grace. after regarding her for a few minutes, "have you got no medal; but this is not all, for the most extraordinary home and as she lifted up her face at the question, part of my story has to come; indeed, so extraordinary, his interest was at once increased, for he had noticed its that I should have at once doubted its authenticity, but beauty a short time before, when he had passed a sen- that little Redtape, of Furnival's Inn, recapitulated the tence of three months' imprisonment upon the possessor, whole of it to me not an hour since. The same day this And prize was awarded, Redtape, being attorney in the matter, for a petty theft of some description or another. daresay," he continued, went down to Cambridge, to acquaint Plowdon that he would be glad of a good home "and would like to wear new clothes." At first she was discovered to be heir-at-law, by the mother's side, to scarcely answered, for her senses were dull from the the miser, Huggins, the notorious lodging-house owner, narcotic of the gin-glass, and her exhaustion and fatigue who died some months since intestate, leaving freehold overwhelming; but, as he followed up his words with and funded property to the amount, it is said, of more more seducing ones, and thrusting his hand into his than £500,000." full of gold, this pocket, brought it out, and showed promise to hunger, to weariness, to destitution, brightened the dull senses at last to comprehension, and she stood up hand in hand with him who had passed judg"" no to nothing which was said. ment, and said " 66 Oh! do not let us who stand triply guarded by our education, by the fruits of our self-denying industry, by the great soul armour of our dear religion, condemn the guilty, though passive affirmation to this more guilty seduction of hunger, destitution, and ignorance. The IMMORTAL ONE in his great spiritual wisdom did not condemn, when ages long ago, he through forsin no more," showed giving much of sin, and saying how much good shall and will conquer evil, and be the master victor; and showing so, founded a divine philosophy of sovereign and pregnant import to the world. A philosophy so pregnant with truth, and justice, and beneficence, as to have lying within its course of destined action the beautiful province through lessening evil and enlarging good, of narrowing the need of mercy-a philosophy which it is the destiny of the sciences to elucidate, because they "Well," interrupted Verney, with one of his satirical, iron-soul'd laughs, "I suppose he'll cast mathematics to the winds, and keep to the single figure of his gold.” "No! the truth is still more extraordinary; and little Redtape, who is by no means a sentimental man, was so struck by it, as to relate it verbatim. Rather as one who had been disappointed of, rather than rewarded with the highest honours the University can bestow, he found him in the topmost story of St. John's, quietly reading, in the gathering twilight, some French book. He was sitting without his coat, the gyp being in one corner of the room inking its white seams, so as to be respectable for the great dinner in the Hall that night. The window was open, and the chapel organ was, at intervals, to be heard distinctly. 'At first,' Redtape says, 'Plowdon seemed paralyzed by the news, and doubted the relationship; but when the pedigree was traced, and every doubt removed, there was elation and joy, with so little of self about it,' said Redtape, that, for the first time in my life, I felt that there are men, whom man may justly worship; and this was one. For he stood up in the increasing moonlight, with clasped hands, and said, "Thank God for means to prove, means gathered out of sin, misery, and poverty, means from a dunghill, means from hell itself, to teach the world that in mere figures lie one great accord of spiritual truth; teach it that the straightest lines run up from earth towards heaven, or rather, that the laws of nature are the inflexible, the undiverging lines, which help to carry man forward to his God. Thank God, I shall sink into no feeding tutor, no stereotyper of exploded jargon, into no patentee of steam locomotives, into no improver of the spinning jenny or jacquard loom, into no mere analyzer of Euclid! but that I shall have power to show, something more lies in this great science of numbers and form, than what tends to the mere development of material laws; that the spiritual is a portion too; that in the formal lie the flowing tendencies of the sublimest human progress.' 'Do I not behold,' he continued, as the open window before which he stood showed him the broad heavens above the college gardens, 'in those calm depths of infinite space, that there, where they are uncontrolled by the ignorance of man, the sublime laws of nature produce effects in harmony with their undisturbed causes; and peace, order, and sublimity make up the entireness of a lesson, not yet spelt out by those who gaze upon it." "Ha, ha!" laughed Verney "this MORAL NEWTON, is going to reform the world, is he? Well, let him try. "But let me finish with the poetical Blackstone, Redtape. As they stood, the organ in the college chapel was again touched by some one officiating at the evening service, and the magnificent chords which swelled upon the ear, read from what he said, this plain truth to the metaphysical mind of the mathematician. Were such notes in ignorance wrongly touched, absolute and distressing disharmony would follow. But governed by a hand, which through diligence has ascertained the fixed laws of their proportions, sweetness and richness combine and make the result magnificent and holy. Therefore, in the physical and spiritual laws which govern man and his nature, who knows the depth, the worth, the greatness of their harmony, when he shall be capable of evoking it ?" "Ha! ha!" laughed the great lawyer still louder, "he had better stop in college, and settle the inflections of a Greek participle, or the altitude of the disputed triangle, than preach such nonsense to the world." "He's not likely to follow your advice, Verney, for he came up to town yesterday with Redtape, and is going with him incognito to-night, to see a precious portion of the Huggins' estate-that is Slink's lodging-house on Saffron Hill!" "Ha! ha! the moral Newton." The girl never stayed till she reached the pestiferous court, running towards Peter Street, at the back of Saffron Hill, where one Slink farmed Huggins' accommodation to the general public at two-pence per night. She stayed here, however, for she did not possess the open sesame" of a penny, and Slink was as inexorable as the Fates themselves. Just, however, as any new form of temptation, that had crossed her path, would have found her frail, (so unstable are the motives and resolves of ignorance and misery,) an old beggar on crutches crawled through the archway. An old violin in a green bag was swung round his neck, and a little dog, called Kite, was at his side. pou'nd of sausages, and the bran new loaf, (th' wee drap o' comfortable is swinging in the kit here,) and don't muckle pick th' one, and sip th' other, I'll be no against a word to Slink, till ye can be up o' th' morn, and sell the wee bit o' flowers-so be rinning. Ay, ay, and ye'll no be objecting to free the sassangers bru'ne too when ye come back." With this necessary per centage upon his good word, Mr. Sawney, with a jerk at the kit and "comfortable," pushed open the lodging-house door and entered. Over and above immediate payment of his nightly twopence, Mr. Sawney had the policy to add an additional penny, namely, one halfpenny for the next use of the frying pan (a thing of importance to the sausages,) and another for the use of an old easy chair, which he was in the habit of making soft, by spreading the green bag, generally devoted to the kit and "comfortable,' upon his seat; the general company being less elegantly accommodated upon benches, and down-turned barrels. By the time the girl entered, her basket on one arm, and Sawney's goods on the other, two hundred and fifty to three hundred vagrants, of every age and character, were huddled in the infectious den; some lying on the floor, some crouched on the benches, some leaning forward on the dirty tables, some gambling with a few coppers, some feeding luxuriously, others greedily, some glancing on with ravenous and covetous gaze; some around the fire cooking their suppers; but heaven help such! the majority without supper at all. She glanced timidly round, as if she expected a blow, or a rebuke, and then moved forward to a corner of the room, filled with a huddled group of women and children. But the Scotch fiddler called her peremptorily back.-"Tout lassie, the guid word's spoken, so come quickly to th' bru'ning o' th' sassangers, and th' mixing o' th' wee bit o' mustard. D'ye hear, lass?" She obeyed; and the violets covered by her ragged apron, drooped in the warmth of the fire, whilst the coarse viands spluttered in the seething pan, and hissed, and leapt, well guarded by the beggar's greedy eye. But no sooner was his meal set before him to its fullest fraction, the corner of the dirty table covered by the various items of the feast, and Kite the dog perched upon its hind legs watching for the expectant bit, with eyes as sedulous as those of the twenty hungry faces which looked on, than pushing through the crowd of women, the vagrant knelt down beside a mere handful of straw, on which was huddled a sleeping child, so gaunt, so mere a skeleton, so frail, that it might, there sleeping, have passed for a Theban mummy, born and cradled three thousand years ago. 66 "Biddy, his mother," said one of the women, in reply to the vagrant's question, spouted Pat's fiddle, and hav'n bin heard of since; and left him here with nothing but a tea-pot o' water." As the child's pale shrunken face lay so deathlike thus before her, the full sin of the night's dram, and all its consequences, touched the vagrant's soul to tears; but penitence and tears were of short duration, for as she moved away again, evidently on some intent for the benefit of the little sleeper, one of a group of five or six flashily dressed young fellows, seated on benches round a small square table, on which were pipes, pewter pots, a ginbottle, and a dip candle in a greasy old tin candlestick, seized her by the waist, and forcing her to sit beside him, urged her not in vain, to drink; till with dishevelled hair, bright eyes, loud laughter, merry voice, she was amongst the very wildest of that promiscuous multitude. For though the hungry and the penniless shrunk as it were within themselves still more, the coarse laughter, the brutal jest were soon general; for the Scotch fiddler having sunk into a soddened sleep over the remnants of his supper, the boldest had seized the relics of the " com"Afortable," and were boisterous over both its flavour and the theft. "Would ye be answerable to Slink for the penny, Sawney?" asked the girl, as the old man approached. "I've bin all the way to the forest, Sawney, and not a mite o' bread." The old man glanced down at the wretched basket, and then whined out with a broad Scotch accent. mon can be no answerable, except for hissel, lassie. But, if ye'll rin for a pot o' fourpenny, twa herrings, a This sensual revelry of the crime, licentiousness, de ELIZA COOK'S JOURNAL. pravity, and ignorance, which society, through pest and around her. "Havn't you brought me something?" he asked eagerly. "I'm very hungry." She covered her face with her hands, though he was sightless. Nothing?" he asked again, piteously. "No, Pat. Some girls robbed me." 66 Nothing, " he again said; and his sightless eyes looked as if they saw within her very soul. 'Only some violets from the forest, Pat," she said softly, "and you want —" "Oh, let me feel them, smell them," he replied eagerly. "Oh, do!" She crept away subdued, her contrition making her an angel for the moment. She took the violets from where they had grown faint in the heat and smoke, and where they had been trodden under foot, shook out their fallen leaves, and filled an old spoutless jug from the large waterbutt in the damp cellar below, and, putting in the violets, brought them to the blind child's bed. He had been again searching in the straw, and some one had just told him that his mother had pawned the violin. He, however, bent down towards the flowers as the girl touched him, and inhaled, with greedy sense, their reviving odour, as if it flowed inward to his soul, and dissipated languor and pain. too. "Sweet, sweet," he said to the girl, "so cool and fresh If the kit had been here, and I could have played 'em a little tune, it would be thanking 'em for coming." Again he searched amidst the straw, as for something that till then had been ever by his side. extraordinary abstract gaze, looking keenly on, but, HOW TO LIVE WITH ONE'S FRIENDS. One of the most provoking forms of the criticism above Another rule is, not to let familiarity swallow up all Again; we must not expect more from the society of our friends and companions than it can give; and, especially, must not expect contrary things. Intimate friends and relations should be careful, when their own circle, that they do not make a bad use of they go out into the world together, or admit others to the knowledge which they have gained of each other by You seldom need wait for their intimacy. Nothing is more common than this, and did it not mostly proceed from mere carelessness, it would the written life of a man to hear about his weaknesses, be superlatively ungenerous. or what are supposed to be such, if you know his intimate friends, or meet him in company with them. Lastly, in conciliating those we live with, it is most surely done, not by consulting their interests, nor by "The most refined part of us lies in this giving way to their opinions, so much as by not offending their tastes. The vagrant knew the blind child's love for his poor fiddle; she stole unheeded across the floor, took Sawney's kit from behind the chair where it hung, not, however, without a growl from Kite, and brought it to him. He felt it, took it; ran his little wasted fingers along the strings, and then drawing the bow across, commenced, without other preparation, a melody so simple, so touch-region of taste, which is, perhaps, a result of our whole ing, so without art, yet so marvellously liquid, so running nature, and, at any rate, is the region of our most subtle out from sweetness into sweetness, as not only to show sympathies and antipathies." that, though blind to outward sense, the light within the soul was large and pure, but, that had the flowers had voices, they could not have told of summer winds, of shade, of sunlight, of waving fern and grass, by sweeter, and by more enraptured melody! It may be said, that if the great principles of ChrisTrue tianity were attended to, all such rules, suggestions, and observations as the above, would be needless. but to apply them to daily life, many little rules, precauSuch things hold a enough! Great principles are at the bottom of all things; tions, and insights are needed. middle place between real life and principles, as form does between matter and spirit-moulding the one, and expressing the other. And yet, and yet, far above the sweetness of the sound itself, was the power of its wonderful metaphysic influence over the leer, the jest, the dram, the brawl, the curse, the sin, and as if these, like a mist, had fallen TALENTS ALWAYS ASCENDANT.-Talents, whenever away, a purer nature was appealed to, and answered. For the very worst of the thieves, the drunkards, the brawlers, one by one, grouped themselves, with eager faces, round they have had a suitable theatre, have never failed to the little dirty scrap of straw; and drawn there by an emerge from obscurity, and assume their proper rank in influence, so beautifully shown by the old poets, in their the estimation of the world. The jealous pride of power Orphean Fables, declared by this very influence, that may attempt to repress, and crush them; the base and there are qualities in the nature of all men, which malignant rancour of impotent spleen, and envy-may only require, like music, to be discreetly touched, to strive to embarrass and retard their flight; but these subdue, whilst such influence lasts, the worst degrada-efforts, so far from achieving their ignoble purpose, so far tion, and to arrest, with iron hand, even the curses of a Babel! The vagrant, by an impulsion, looked round whilst the child still played, and beheld not only a man with an genuine, and vigorous talents, will serve only to increase from producing a discernible obliquity, in the ascent of their momentum, and mark their transit, with an additional stream of glory. |