I said, just now, that wealth, ill-used, was as the net of the spider, entangling and destroying; but wealth, well-used, is as the net of the sacred Fisher who gathers souls of men out of the deep. A time will come I do not think it is far from us- when this golden net of the world's wealth will be spread abroad as the flaming meshes of morning cloud over the sky; bearing with them the joy of light and the dew of the morning, as well as the summons to honorable and peaceful toil.

JOHN RUSKIN.

HAMLET'S INSTRUCTION TO THE PLAYERS.

SPEAK the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, - trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spake my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. Oh! it offends me to the soul, to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters,-to very rags, -to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb show and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant: it out-herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word; the word to the action; with this special observance that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing; whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; — to show virtue her own feature; scorn her own image; and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.

Now this, overdone or come tardy off, though it make the unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of which one, must, in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theatre of others. Oh! there be players, that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, or man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well,they imitated humanity so abominably!

SHAKESPEARE.

JOHN BURNS OF GETTYSBURG.

HAVE you heard the story the gossips tell
Of John Burns of Gettysburg?-No? Ah, well!
Brief is the glory that hero earns,

Briefer the story of poor John Burns;
He was the fellow who won renown

The only man who didn't back down

When the rebels rode through his native town;

But held his own in the fight next day,

When all his townsfolk ran away.

That was in July, sixty-three, -
The very day that General Lee,

The flower of Southern chivalry,

Baffled and beaten, backward reeled

From a stubborn Meade and a barren field.

I might tell how, but the day before,
John Burns stood at his cottage-door,
Looking down the village street,

Where, in the shade of his peaceful vine,
He heard the low of his gathered kine,
And felt their breath with incense sweet;

Or, I might say, when the sunset burned
The old farm gable, he thought it turned
The milk that fell in a babbling flood
Into the milk-pail, red as blood;

Or, how he fancied the hum of bees
Were bullets buzzing among the trees.

But all such fanciful thoughts as these
Were strange to a practical man like Burns,
Who minded only his own concerns,

Troubled no more by fancies fine

Than one of his calm-eyed, long-tailed kineQuite old-fashioned, and matter-of-fact,

Slow to argue, but quick to act.

That was the reason, as some folks say,

He fought so well on that terrible day.

And it was terrible. On the right
Raged for hours the heavy fight,
Thundered the battery's double bass
Difficult music for men to face;

While on the left - where now the graves
Undulate like the living waves

That all the day unceasing swept

Up to the pits the rebels kept —

Round shot ploughed the upland glades,
Sown with bullets, reaped with blades;
Shattered fences here and there,
Tossed their splinters in the air;

The very trees were stripped and bare;
The barns that once held yellow grain
Were heaped with harvests of the slain;
The cattle bellowed on the plain,

The turkeys screamed with might and main,
And brooding barn-fowl left their rest
With strange shells bursting in each nest.

Just where the tide of battle turns,
Erect and lonely, stood old John Burns.
How do you think the man was dressed?
He wore an ancient, long buff vest,
Yellow as saffron - but his best;

And, buttoned over his manly breast
Was a bright blue coat with a rolling collar,
And large gilt buttons- size of a dollar—
With tails that country-folk called "swaller."
He wore a broad-brimmed, bell-crowned hat,
White as the locks on which it sat.
Never had such a sight been seen
For forty years on the village green,
Since John Burns was a country beau,
And went to the "quilting" long ago.

Close at his elbows, all that day,
Veterans of the Peninsula,
Sunburnt and bearded, charged away,
And striplings, downy of lip and chin, —
Clerks that the Home Guard mustered in,
Glanced, as they passed, at the hat he wore,
Then at the rifle his right hand bore ;

And hailed him from out their youthful lore,
With scraps of a slangy reportoire:

"How are you, White Hat?' "Put her through!”
"Your head's level!" and, "Bully for you!"
Called him "Daddy," and begged he'd disclose
The name of the tailor who made his clothes,
And what was the value he set on those;
While Burns, unmindful of jeer and scoff,
Stood there picking the rebels off-

With his long, brown rifle and bell-crown hat,
And the swallow-tails they were laughing at.

'Twas but a moment, for that respect

Which clothes all courage their voices checked;

And something the wildest could understand
Spake in the old man's strong right hand,
And his corded throat, and the lurking frown
Of his eyebrows under his old bell-crown;
Until, as they gazed, there crept an awe

Through the ranks in whispers, and some men saw,
In the antique vestments and long white hair,
The Past of the Nation in battle there.
And some of the soldiers since declare,
That the gleam of his old white hat afar,
Like the crested plume of the brave Navarre,
That day was their oriflamme of war.
Thus raged the battle. You know the rest ;
How the rebels, beaten, and backward pressed,
Broke at the final charge, and ran.

At which John Burns a practical man
Shouldered his rifle, unbent his brows,
And then went back to his bees and cows.

This is the story of old John Burns;
This is the moral the reader learns:

In fighting the battle, the question 's whether
You'll show a hat that's white, or a feather.
BRET HARte.

A PSALM OF LIFE.

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
"Life is but an empty dream!"
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! life is earnest?

And the grave is not its goal; "Dust thou art, to dust returnest," Was not spoken of the soul.