every perfume, throng and grow together, stretching up into the air to heights that weary the eye to follow. Wild vines, bignonias, coloquintidas, intertwine each other at the feet of these trees, escalade their trunks, and creep along to the extremity of their branches, stretching from the maple to the tulip-tree, from the tulip-tree to the holly-hock, and thus forming thousands of grottoes, arches, and porticoes. Often, in their wanderings from trees, these creepers cross the arm of a river, over which they throw a bridge of flowers. Out of the midst of these masses, the magnolia, raising its motionless cone, surmounted by large white buds, commands all the forest, where it has no other rival than the palm-tree which gently waves, close by, its fans of verdure.

A multitude of animals, placed in these retreats by the hand of the Creator, spread about life and enchantment. From the extremities of the avenues may be seen bears, intoxicated with the grape, staggering upon the branches of the elm-trees; cariboos bathe in the lake; black squirrels play among the thick foliage; mocking-birds, and Virginian pigeons not bigger than sparrows fly down upon the turf reddened with strawberries; green parrots with yellow heads, purple woodpeckers, cardinals red as fire, clamber up to the very tops of the cypress-trees; humming-birds sparkle upon the jessamine of the Floridas; and bird-catching serpents hiss while suspended to the domes of the woods, where they swing about like the creepers themselves.

If all is silence and repose in the savannahs on the other side of the river, all here, on the contrary, is sound and motion, peckings against the trunks of the oaks, frictions of animals walking along as they nibble or crush between their teeth the stones of fruits, the roaring of the waves, plaintive cries, dull bellowings and mild cooings, fill these deserts with tender, yet wild harmony. But when a breeze happens to animate these solitudes, to swing these floating bodies, to confound these masses of white, blue, green, and pink, to mix all the colours and to combine all the murmurs, there issue such sounds from the depths of the forests, and such things pass before the eyes, that I should in vain endeavour to describe them to those who have never visited these primitive fields of nature.

WINIFREDA.

Away, let naught to love displeasing,
My Winifreda, move your care,
Let naught delay the heavenly blessing,
Nor squeamish pride nor gloomy fear.

What though no grants of royal donors With pompous titles grace our blood? We'll shine in more substantial honors, And to be noble we'll be good.

Our name, while virtue thus we tender, Will sweetly sound where'er 'tis spoke; And all the great ones, they shall wonder How they respect such little folk.

What though from fortune's lavish bounty
No mighty treasures we possess,
We'll find within our pittance plenty,
And be content without excess.

Still shall each kind returning season
Sufficient for our wishes give;
For we will live a life of reason,
And that's the only life to live.

Through youth and age in love excelling,
We'll hand in hand together tread;
Sweet smiling peace shall crown our dwelling,
And babes, sweet smiling babes, our bed.

How should I love the pretty creatures, While round my knees they fondly clung; To see them look their mother's features, To hear them lisp their mother's tongue.

And when with envy time transported, Shall think to rob us of our joys, You'll in your girls again be courted, And I'll go wooing in my boys.

JAMES HAMMOND.

ON OLD AGE.

What, therefore, should I fear, if after death I am sure either not to be miserable or to be happy? Although who is so foolish, though he be young, as to be assured that he will live even till the evening? Nay, that period of life has many more probabilities of death than ours has: young men more readily fall into disease, suffer more severely, are cured with more difficulty, and therefore few arrive at old age. Did not this happen so, we should live better and more wisely, for intelligence, and reflection, and judgment reside in old men, and if there had been none of them, no states could exist at all. But I return to the imminence of death. What charge is that against old age, since you see it to be common to youth also? I experienced not only in the case of my own excellent son, but also in that of your brothers, Scipio, men plainly marked out for the high

est distinction, that death was common to every period of life. Yet a young man hopes that he will live a long time, which expectation an old man cannot entertain. His hope is but a foolish one: for what man can be more foolish than to regard uncertainties as certainties, delusions as truths? An old man indeed has nothing to hope for; yet he is in so much the happier state than a young one; since he has already attained what the other is only hoping for. The one is wishing to live long, the other has lived long. And yet, good gods! what is there in man's life that can be called long? For allow the latest period: let us anticipate the age of the kings of the Tartessii. For there dwelt, as I find it recorded, a man named Arganthonius at Gades, who reigned for eighty years, and lived a hundred and twenty. But to my mind, nothing whatever seems of long duration, in which there is any end. For when that arrives, then the time which has passed has flowed away; that only remains which you have secured by virtue and right conduct. Hours indeed depart from us, and days and years; nor does past time ever return, nor can it be discovered what is to follow. What ever time is assigned to each to live, with that he ought to be content: for neither need the drama be performed by the actor, in order to give satisfaction, provided he be approved in whatever act he may be; nor need the wise man live till the plaudite. For the short period of life is long enough for living well and honorably; and if you should advance further, you need no more grieve than farmers do when the loveliness of springtime hath past, that summer and autumn have come. For spring represents the time of youth, and gives promise of the future fruits the remaining seasons are intended for plucking and gathering in those fruits. Now the harvest of old age, as I have often said, is the recollection and abundance of blessings previously secured. In truth everything that happens agreeably to nature is to be reckoned among blessings. What, however, is so agreeable to nature as for an old man to die? which even is the lot of the young, though nature opposes and resists. And thus it is that young men seem to me to die, just as when the violence of flame is extinguished by a flood of water; whereas old men die, as the exhausted fire goes out, spontaneously, without the exertion of any force: and as fruits when they are green are plucked by force from the trees, but when ripe and mellow drop off, so violence takes away their lives from youths, maturity from old men; a state which to me indeed is so delightful, that the nearer I approach to death, I seem

as it were to be getting sight of land, and at length, after a long voyage, to be just coming into harbor.

Of all the periods of life there is a definite limit, but of old age there is no limit fixed; and life goes on very well in it, so long as you are able to follow up and attend to the duty of your situation, and, at the same time, to care nothing about death; whence it happens that old age is even of higher spirit and bolder than youth. Agreeable to this was the answer given to Pisistratus, the tyrant, by Solon; when on the former inquiring "in reliance on what hope he so boldly withstood him," the latter is said to have answered, 'old age." The happiest end of life is thiswhen the mind and the other senses being unimpaired, the same nature, which put it together, takes asunder her own work. As in the case of a ship or a house, he who built them takes them down most easily; so the same nature which has compacted man, most easily breaks him up. Besides, every fastening of glue, when fresh, is with difficulty torn asunder, but easily when tried by time. Hence it is that that short remnant of life should be neither greedily coveted, nor without reason given up: and Pythagoras forbids us to abandon the station or post of life without the orders of our commander, that is of God. There is, indeed, a saying of the wise Solon, in which he declares that he does not wish his own death to be unattended by the grief and lamentation of friends. He wishes, I suppose, that he should be dear to his friends. But I know not whether Ennius does not say with more propriety: "Let no one pay me honor with tears nor celebrate my funeral with mourning."

He conceives that a death ought not to be lamented which an immortality follows. Besides, a dying man may have some degree of consciousness, but that for a short time, especially, in the case of an old man, after death, indeed, consciousness either does not exist, or it is a thing to be desired. But this ought to be a subject of study from our youth to be indifferent about death; without which study no one can be of tranquil mind. For die we certainly must, and it is uncertain whether or not on this very day. He, therefore, who at all hours dreads impending death, how can he be at peace in his mind? Concerning which there seems to be no need of such long discussion, when I call to mind not only Lucius Brutus, who was slain in liberating his country; nor the two Decii, who spurred on their steeds to a voluntary death; nor Marcus Atilius, who set out to execution, that he might keep a promise pledged to the enemy; nor the two Scipios,

who even with their very bodies sought to obstruct the march of the Carthaginians; nor your grandfather Lucius Paulus, who by his death atoned for the temerity of his colleague in the disgraceful defeat at Cannoe; nor Marcus Marcellus, whose corpse not even the most merciless foe suffered to go without the honor of sepulture; but that our legions, as I have remarked in my Antiquities, have often gone with cheerful and undaunted mind to that place, from which they believed that they should never return. Shall, then, wellinstructed old men be afraid of that which young men, and they not only ignorant, but mere peasants, despise? On the whole, as it seems to me indeed, a satiety of all pursuits causes a satiety of life. There are pursuits peculiar to boyhood; do therefore young men regret the loss of them? There are also some of early youth; does that now settled age, which is called middle life, seek after these? There are also some of this period; neither are they looked for by old age. There are some final pursuits of old age; accordingly, as the pursuits of the earlier parts of life fall into disuse so also do those of old age; and when this has taken place, satiety of life brings on the seasonable period of death.

Indeed I do not see why I should not venture to tell you what I myself think concerning death, because I fancy I see it so much the more clearly, in proportion as I am less distant from it. I am persuaded that your fathers, Publius Scipio and Caius Lælius, men of the greatest eminence and very dear friends of mine, are living; and that life too which alone deserves the name of life. For whilst we are shut up in this prison of the body we are fulfilling as it were the function and painful task of destiny, for the heaven-born soul has been degraded from its dwelling-place above, and as it were buried in the earth, a situation uncongenial to its divine and immortal nature. But I believe that the immortal gods have shed souls into human bodies, that beings might exist who might tend the earth, and by contemplating the order of the heavenly bodies, might imitate it in the manner and regularity of lives. Nor have reason and argument alone influenced me thus to believe, but likewise the high name and authority of the greatest philosophers. I used to hear that Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, who were all but our neighbors, who were formerly called the Italian philosophers, had no doubt that we possess souls derived from the universal divine mind. Moreover, the arguments were conclusive to me, which Socrates delivered on the ast day of his life concerning the immortality

of the soul, he who was pronounced by the oracle of Apollo the wisest of all men. But why say more? I have thus persuaded myself, such is my belief: that since such is the activity of our souls, so tenacious their memory of things past, and their sagacity regarding things future-so many arts, so many sciences, so many discoveries, that the nature which comprises these qualities cannot be mortal; and since the mind is ever in action and has no source of motion, because it moves itself, I believe that it never will find any end of motion, because it never will part from itself; and since the nature of the soul is uncompounded, and has not in itself any admixture heterogeneous and dissimilar to itself, I maintain that it cannot undergo dissolution; and if this be not possible, it cannot perish and it is a strong argument, that men know very many things before they are born, since when mere boys, while they are learning difficult subjects, they so quickly catch up numberless ideas, that they seem not to be learning them then for the first time, but to remember them, and to be calling them to recollection. Thus did our Plato argue.

CICERO.

THE BILL OF MORTALITY. Pallida Mors æquo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas, Begumque turres. Horace

Pale Death with equal foot strikes wide the door Of royal halls and hovels of the poor.

While thirteen moons saw smoothly run
The Neu's barge-laden wave,
All these, life's rambling journey done,
Have found their home, the grave.

Was man (frail always) made more fruit
Than in foregoing years?
Did famine or did plague prevail,
That so much death appears?

No; these were vigorous as their sires,
Nor plague nor famine came;
This annual tribute Death requires,
And never waives his claim.

Like crowded forest-trees we stand,
And some are mark'd to fall;
The axe will smite at God's command,
And soon shall smite us all.

Green as the bay tree, ever green,
With its new foliage on,
The gay, the thoughtless, have I seem,
I pass'd-and they were gone.

Surely all other leisure is hurry compared with a sunny walk through the fields from afternoon church-as such walks used to be in those old leisurely times, when the boat, gliding sleepily along the canal, was the newest locomotive wonder; when Sunday books had most of them old brown leather covers, and opened with remarkable precision always in one place. Leisure is gone-gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers who brought bargains to the door

on

sunny afternoons. Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now-eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing, and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage; he only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion-of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis, happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall, and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of week-day services, and thought none the

worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing-liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port winenot being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations. Life was not a task to him, but a sinecure; he fingered the guineas in his pocket, and ate his dinners, and slept the sleep of the irresponsible; for had he not kept up his charter by going to church on the Sunday afternoon?

Fine old Leisure! Do not be severe upon him, and judge him by our modern standard; he never went to Exeter Hall, or heard a popular preacher, or read Tracts for the Times, or Sartor Resartus. GEORGE ELIOT.

THE DREAM.

No victor that in battle spent,
When he at night asleep doth lie
Rich in a conquered monarch's tent,
E'er had so vain a dream as I.

Methought I saw the earliest shade
And sweetest that the spring can spread,
Of jasmin, briar, and woodbine made;
And there I saw Clorinda dead.

Though dead she lay, yet could I see
No cypress nor no mourning yew;
Nor yet the injured lover's tree;
No willow near her coffin grew.

But all showed unconcerned to be,
As if just Nature there did strive
To be as pitiless as she

Was to her lover when alive.

And now, methought, I lost all care,
In losing her; and was as free
As birds let loose into the air,
Or rivers that are got to sea.

Methought Love's monarchy was gone;
And whilst elective members sway
Our choice, and change makes power our
And those court us whom we obey.

Yet soon, now from my Princess free,
I rather frantic grew than glad,
For subjects, getting liberty,
Get but a license to be mad.

Birds that are long in cages awed,
If they get out, awhile will roam;
But straight want skill to live abroad,
Then pine and hover near their home.

And to the ocean rivers run
From being pent in banks of flowers;
Not knowing that the exhaling sun
Will send them back in weeping showers.

Soon thus for pride of liberty
I low desires of bondage found;
And vanity of being free

Bred the discretion to be bound.

But as dull subjects see too late
Their safety in monarchal reign,
Finding their freedom in a State
Is but proud strutting in a chain;

Then growing wiser, when undone,
In winter nights sad stories sing
In praise of monarchs long since gone,
To whom their bells they yearly ring;

So now I mourned that she was dead,
Whose single power did govern me;,
And quickly was by reason led
To find the harm of liberty.

Even so the lovers of this land

(Love's empire in Clorinda gone)

Though they were quit from Love's command, And beauty's world was all their own.

But lovers, who are Nature's best
Old subjects, never long revolt;
They soon in passion's war contest,
Yet in their march soon make a halt.

And those, when by my mandates brought
Near dead Clorinda, ceased to boast
Of freedom found, and wept for thought
Of their delightful bondage lost.

And now the day to night was turned, Or sadly night's close mourning wore; All maids for one another mourned, That lovers now could love no more.

All lovers quickly did perceive They had on earth no more to do Than civilly to take their leave, As worthies that to dying go.

And now all quires her dirges sing,
In shades of cypress and of yew;
'The bells of every temple ring,
Where maids their withered garlands strew.

To such extremes did sorrow rise,

That it transcended speech and form,

And was so lost to ears and eyes

As seamen sinking in a storm.

My soul, in sleep's soft fetters bound,
Did now for vital freedom strive;
And straight, by horror waked, I found
The fair Clorinda still alive.

Yet she's to me but such a light,
As are the stars to those who know
We can at most but guess their height,
And hope they mind us here below.

SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT.

LIFE IN AS-YOU-LIKE. As-you-like is a monarchy; a limited monarchy. At the time I dwelt there, the crown was worn by King Abdomen, almost the greatest man that ever walked. His natural ac

complishments were many, he was held to make a more melodious sneeze than any man in the universe. He invented buttons, the people of As-you-like before his time tying their clothes about them with strings. He also invented quart goblets. He was the son of King Stubborn, known as the King of the Shortwools.

After the king came the nobility; that is the men who had shown themselves better than other men, and those virtues were worked into their titles.

Thus there was the Duke of Lovingkindness; the Marquis of Sensibility; the Earl of Tenderheart; the Baron of Hospitality, and so forth. Touching, too, was the heraldry of As-you-like. The royal arms were, charity healing a bruised lamb, with the legend, Dieu et paix. And then for the coachpanels of the aristocracy, I have stood by the hour, at holiday times, watching them; and tears have crept into my eyes, and my heart has softened under their delicious influence.. There were no lions, griffins, panthers, lynxes no swords or daggers-no short verbial incitements to man-quelling. Oh, no! One nobleman would have for his bearings a large wheaten loaf, with the legend-Ask and have. Another would have a hand bearing

a purse, with the question- Who lacks? Another would have a truckle-bed painted on his panels, with the words-To the tired and footsore. Another would display some comely garment, with-New clothes for rags.

Oh!

I could go through a thousand of such bearings, all with the prettiest quaintness showing the soft fleshly heart of the nobleman, and inviting, with all the brief simplicity of true tenderness, the hungry, the poor, the weary, and the sick, to come, feed, and be comforted. And these men were the nobility of As-youlike; nor was there even a dog to show his democratic teeth at them.

The church was held in deepest reverence. Happy was the man who, in his noon- day walk, should meet a bishop; for it was held by him as an omen of every manner of good fortune. This beautiful superstition arose, doubtless, from the love and veneration paid