Turn, turn, my wheel! 'Tis nature's plan The child should grow into the man,

The man grow wrinkled, old, and gray; In youth the heart exults and sings, The pulses leap, the feet have wings; In age the cricket chirps, and brings The harvest home of day.

Turn, turn, my wheel! The human race,
Of every tongue, of every place,
Caucasian, Coptic, or Malay,
All that inhabit this great earth,
Whatever be their rank or worth,
Are kindred and allied by birth,
And made of the same clay.

Turn, turn, my wheel! What is begun
At daybreak must at dark be done,
To-morrow will be another day;

To-morrow the hot furnace flame

Will search the heart and try the frame And stamp with honor or with shame These vessels made of clay.

Stop, stop, my wheel! Too soon, too soon

The noon will be the afternoon,

Too soon to-day be yesterday;

Behind us in our path we cast
The broken potsherds of the past,
And all are ground to dust at last,
And trodden into clay.

THE OLD MAN AT THE GATE.

BY DOUGLAS Jerrold.

In Surrey, some three miles from Chertsey, is a quiet, sequestered nook, called Shepperton Green. At the time whereof we write the olden charity dwelt in an old workhouse-a primitive abiding place for the broken plowman, the palsied shepherd, the old, old peasant, for whom nothing more remained in this world but to die. The governor of this abode of benevolence dwelt in the lower Fart of the building, and therein, as the village trade might fluctuate, made or mended shoes. Let the plain truth be said the governor was a cobbler. Within a

stone's cast of the workhouse was a little white gate swung between two hedge banks in the road to Chertsey. Here, pass when you would, stood an old man, whose self-imposed office it was to open the gate; for the which service the passenger would drop some small benevolence in the withered hand of the aged peasant. This man was a pauper · one of the almsmen of the village work

house.

There was a custom-whether established by the governor aforesaid, or by predecessors of a vanished century, we know not that made it the privilege of the oldest pauper to stand the porter at the gate; his perquisite, by right of years, the small coin of the rare pedestrian. As the senior died, the living senior succeeded to the office. Now the gate and now the grave.

And this is all the history? All. The story is told —it will not bear another syllable. The "Old Man" is at the gate; the custom which places him there has been made known and with it ends the narrative.

how multitudinous its

How few the incidents of life emotions! How flat, monotonous, may be the circumstance of daily existence, and thoughts which spring from it! scape, broken into hill and dale,

yet how various the Look at yonder landwith trees of every hue

and form, and water winding in silver threads through velvet fields. How beautiful! for how various.

Cast

your eye over that moor; it is flat and desolate — barren as barren rock. Not so. Seek the soil, and then, with nearer gaze, contemplate the wondrous forms and colors of the thousand mosses growing there; give ear to the hum of busy life sounding at every root of poorest grass. Listen! Does not the heart of the earth beat audibly beneath this seeming barrenness — audibly as where the corn grows and the grape ripens? Is it not so with the veriest rich and the veriest poor - with the most active and with apparently the most inert?

That "Old Man at the Gate" has eighty years upon his head eighty years, covering it with natural reverence. He was once in London only once. This pilgrimage excepted, he has never journeyed twenty miles from the cottage in which he was born; of which he became the master; whereto he brought his wife; where his children saw the light, and their children after; and whence, having with a stout soul fought against the strengthening ills of poverty and old age, he was thrust by want and sickness out, and with a stung heart he laid his bones upon a workhouse bed.

Life to the "Old Man" has been one long path across a moor—a flat, unbroken journey; the eye uncheered, the heart unsatisfied. Coldness and sterility have compassed him round. Yet has he been subdued to the

blankness of his destiny? Has his mind remained the unwrit page that schoolmen talk of? has his heart become a clod? Has he been made by poverty a moving image a plow-guiding, corn-threshing instrument? Have not unutterable thoughts sometimes stirred within his brain-thoughts that elevated, yet confused him with a sense of eternal beauty - coming upon him like the spiritual presences to the shepherds? Has he not been beset by the inward and mysterious yearning of the heart towards the unknown and the unseen? He has been a plowman. In the eye of the well-to-do, dignified with the accomplishments of reading and writing, he is of little more intelligence than the oxen treading the glebe. Yet, who shall say that the influence of nature that the glories of the rising sun-may not have called forth harmonies of soul from the rustic drudge, the moving statue of a man!

That worn-out, threadbare remnant of humanity at the gate; age makes it reverend, and the inevitableshall inevitable be said?- injustice of the world invests it with majesty; the majesty of suffering meekly borne, and meekly decaying. "The poor shall never cease out of the land." This text the self-complacency of competence loveth to quote: it hath a melody in it, a lulling sweetness to the selfishness of our nature. Hunger and cold and nakedness are the hard portion of man; there is no help for it; rags must flutter about us; man, yes even the strong man, his only wealth (the wealth of Adam) wasting in his bones, must hold his pauper hand to his brother of four meals per diem; it is a necessity of nature, and there is no help for it. And thus some men send their consciences to sleep by the chinking

of their own purses. Necessity of evil is an excellent philosophy, applied to everybody but ourselves.

These easy souls will see nothing in our "Old Man at the Gate" but a pauper let out of the workhouse for the chance of a few half-pence. Surely he is something more! He is old; very old. Every day, every hour, earth has less claim in him. He is so old, so feeble,

that even as you look he seems sinking. At sunset he is scarcely the man who opened the gate to you in the morning. Yet there is no disease in him none. He is dying of old age. He is working out that most awful problem of life — slowly, solemnly. He is now the badged pauper, and now in the unknown country with Solomon !

Can man look upon a more touching solemnity? There stands the old man, passive as a stone, nearer, every moment, to church-yard clay! It was only yesterday that he took his station at the gate. His predecessor held the post for two years he too daily, daily dying –

Till, like a clock worn out with eating time,
The weary wheels of life at length stood still.

How long will the present watcher survive? In that very uncertainty in the very hoariness of age which brings home to us that uncertainty there is something that makes the old man sacred; for, in the course of nature, is not the oldest man the nearest to the angels! Yet, away from these thoughts, there is reverence due to that old man. What has been his life?suffering. What a beautiful world is this!

a war with

How rich

and glorious! How abundant in blessings, great and little, to thousands! What a lovely place hath God