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And here the impressive stone, engraved with words
Which grief sententious gives to marble pale,
Shall teach the heart; while waters, leaves, and birds,
Make cheerful music in the passing gale.

5 Say, wherefore should we weep, and wherefore pour
On scented airs the unavailing sigh,-

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While sun-bright waves are quivering to the shore,
And landscapes blooming,-that the loved must die?

There is an emblem in this peaceful scene:

Soon rainbow colors on the woods will fall;
And autumn gusts bereave the hills of green,
As sinks the year to meet its cloudy pall.

Then, cold and pale, in distant vistas round,

Disrobed and tuneless, all the woods will stand; 15 While the chained streams are silent as the ground, As Death had numbed them with his icy hand.

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Yet when the warm soft winds shall rise in spring,
Like struggling day-beams o'er a blasted heath,
The bird returned shall poise her golden wing,
And liberal Nature break the spell of Death.
So, when the tomb's dull silence finds an end,
The blessed dead to endless youth shall rise;
And hear th' archangel's thrilling summons blend
Its tone with anthems from the upper skies.
25 There shall the good of earth be found at last,

Where dazzling streams and vernal fields expand,
Where Love her crown attains,-her trials past,-
And, filled with rapture, hails "the better land!"

LESSON CXIII.-THE GOOD WIFE.-GEORGE W. BURNAP.

"The good wife!" How much of this world's happiness and prosperity, is contained in the compass of these two short words! Her influence is immense. The power of a wife, for good, or for evil, is altogether irresistible. 5 Home must be the seat of happiness, or it must be forever unknown. A good wife is, to a man, wisdom, and courage, and strength, and hope, and endurance. A bad one is confusion, weakness, discomfiture, despair. No condition is hopeless, when the wife possesses firmness, decision, 10 energy, economy. There is no outward prosperity which

can counteract indolence, folly, and extravagance at home. No spirit can long resist bad domestic influences.

Man is strong; but his heart is not adamant. He de lights in enterprise and action; but, to sustain him, he 5 needs a tranquil mind, and a whole heart. He expends his whole moral force, in the conflicts of the world. His feelings are daily lacerated, to the utmost point of endurance, by perpetual collision, irritation, and disappointment. To recover his equanimity and composure, home must be 10 to him a place of repose, of peace, of cheerfulness, of comfort; and his soul renews its strength, and again goes forth, with fresh vigor, to encounter the labors and troubles of the world. But if at home he find no rest, and there is met by a bad temper, sullenness, or gloom; or is assailed 15 by discontent, complaint, and reproaches, the heart breaks, the spirits are crushed, hope vanishes, and the man sinks into total despair.

Let woman know, then, that she ministers at the very fountain of life and happiness. It is her hand that lades 20 out, with overflowing cup, its soul-refreshing waters, or casts in the branch of bitterness, which makes them poison and death. Her ardent spirit breathes the breath of life into all enterprise. Her patience and constancy are mainly instrumental, in carrying forward, to completion, the best 25 human designs. Her more delicate moral sensibility is the unseen power which is ever at work to purify and refine society. And the nearest glimpse of heaven that mortals ever get on earth, is that domestic circle, which her hands have trained to intelligence, virtue and love, 30 which her gentle influence pervades, and of which her radiant presence is the centre and the sun.

LESSON CXIV.-A GOOD DAUGHTER.-J. G. PALFREY.

A good daughter!-there are other ministries of love, more conspicuous than hers, but none, in which a gentler, lovelier spirit dwells, and none, to which the heart's warm requitals more joyfully respond.-There is no such thing, 5 as a comparative estimate of a parent's affection, for one or another child. There is little which he needs to covet, to whom the treasure of a good child has been given. But a son's occupations and pleasures carry him more abroad; and he lives more among temptations, which hardly per10 mit the affection that is following him perhaps over half

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the globe, to be wholly unmingled with anxiety, till the time when he comes to relinquish the shelter of his father's roof, for one of his own; while a good daughter is the steady light of her parent's house.

Her idea is indissolubly connected with that of his happy fireside. She is his morning sun-light, and his evening star. The grace, and vivacity, and tenderness of her sex, have their place in the mighty sway which she holds over his spirit. The lessons of recorded wisdom 10 which he reads with her eyes, come to his mind with a new charm, as they blend with the beloved melody of her voice. He scarcely knows weariness which her song does not make him forget, or gloom which is proof against the young brightness of her smile. She is the pride and orna15 ment of his hospitality, and the gentle nurse of his sickness, and the constant agent in those nameless, numberless acts of kindness, which one chiefly cares to have rendered, because they are unpretending but all-expressive proofs of love.

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And then what a cheerful sharer is she, and what an able lightener of a mother's cares! what an ever present delight and triumph to a mother's affection! Oh! how little do those daughters know of the power which God has committed to them, and the happiness God would have 25 them enjoy, who do not, every time that a parent's eye rests on them, bring rapture to a parent's heart. A true love will, almost certainly, always greet their approaching steps. That they will hardly alienate. But their ambition should be, not to have it a love merely which feelings 30 implanted by nature excite, but one made intense, and overflowing, by approbation of worthy conduct; and she is strangely blind to her own happiness, as well as undutiful to them to whom she owes the most, in whom the perpetual appeals of parental disinterestedness, do not call 35 forth the prompt and full echo of filial devotion.

LESSON CXV.-RELIGION THE GUARDIAN OF THE SOUL.
ORVILLE DEWEY.

One of the circumstances of our moral condition, is danger. Religion, then, should be a guardian, and a vigilant guardian; and let us be assured that the Gospel is such. Such emphatically do we need. If we cannot bear 5 a religion that admonishes us, watches over us, warns us,

restrains us; let us be assured that we cannot bear a religion that will save us. Religion should be the keeper of the soul; and without such a keeper, in the slow and undermining process of temptation, or amidst the sudden 5 and strong assaults of passion, it will be overcome and lost.

Again, the human condition is one of weakness. There are weak points, where religion should be stationed to support and strengthen us. Points, did I say? Are we not encompassed with weakness? Where, in the whole circle 10 of our spiritual interests and affections, are we not exposed, and vulnerable? Where have we not need to set up the barriers of habit, and to build the strongest defences, with which resolutions, and vows, and prayers, can surround us? Where, and wherein, I ask again, is any man safe? 15 What virtue of any man, is secure from frailty? What strong purpose of his, is not liable to failure? What affection of his heart can say, "I have strength, I am established, and nothing can move me?"

How weak is man in trouble, in perplexity, in doubt;20 how weak in affliction, or when sickness bows the spirit, or when approaching death is unloosing all the bands of his pride and self-reliance! And whose spirit does not sometimes faint under its intrinsic weakness, under its native frailty, and the burthen and pressure of its necessi25 ties? Religion, then, should bring supply, and support, and strength to the soul; and the Gospel does bring supply, and support, and strength. And it thus meets a universal want. Every mind needs the stability which principle gives; needs the comfort which piety gives; needs it con30 tinually, in all the varying experience of life.

LESSON CXVI.-FEATURES OF AMERICAN SCENERY.-TUDOR.

Our numerous waterfalls, the enchanting beauty of Lake George and its pellucid flood, of Lake Champlain, and the lesser lakes, afford many objects of the most picturesque character; while the inland seas, from Supe5 rior to Ontario, and that astounding cataract, whose roar would hardly be increased by the united murmurs of all the cascades of Europe, are calculated to inspire vast and sublime conceptions. The effects, too, of our climate, composed of a Siberian winter, and an Italian sum:ner, 10 furnish new and peculiar objects, for description. The

circumstances of remote regions are here blended, and strikingly opposite appearances witnessed, in the same spot, at different seasons of the year. In our winters, we have the sun at the same altitude as in Italy, shining 5 on an unlimited surface of snow, which can only be found in the higher latitudes of Europe, where the sun, in the winter, rises little above the horizon. The dazzling brilliancy of a winter's day, and a moonlight night, in an atmosphere astonishingly clear and frosty, when the 10 utmost splendor of the sky is reflected from a surface of spotless white, attended with the most excessive cold, is peculiar to the northern part of the United States. What, too, can surpass the celestial purity and transparency of the atmosphere, in a fine autumnal day, when our 15 vision, and our thought, seem carried to the third heaven; the gorgeous magnificence of the close, when the sun sinks from our view, surrounded with various masses of clouds, fringed with gold and purple, and reflecting, in evanescent tints, all the hues of the rainbow.

LESSON CXVII.-STUDY OF HUMAN NATURE ESSENTIAL TO A
TEACHER.-G. B. EMERSON.

If you were about to engage, in a capacity higher than that of a day laborer, in any other pursuit than that of teaching, would you not set yourself at once to understand what was the object which you should endeavor to 5 have in view, and what the machinery by which you could attain it? If you were going to manufacture woollen goods, you would wish to understand the nature of the raw material, the processes and machinery by which it is to be acted on, and to judge of the quality of the 10 article you wished to produce. Will you do less, when the mechanism with which you are to operate is the work of an Infinite Architect? and the web to be woven is the rich and varied fabric of human character ?

If you were about to engage in agriculture, you would 15 take care to inform yourself as to the nature of the soil, its adaptation to the various kinds of grain and vegetables, and the season of the year, at which, in this climate, it is most proper to prepare the ground, to plough, to sow the seed, and to reap and gather into the barn. Will you 20 take less care, when the soil is the human soul, the seed

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