THE CLIMAX OF MUSIC.

Then was completed the passion of the mighty fugue The golden tubes of the organ, which as yet had but muttered at intervals-gleaning among clouds and surges of incense-threw up, as from fountains unfathomable, columns of heart-shattering music.

-De QUINCEY.

THE SPELL OF MOONLIGHT.

I have been dreaming a long while in the moonlight, which floods my room with a radiance, full of vague mystery. The state of mind induced in us by this fantastic light is itself so dim and ghost-like that analysis loses its way in it, and arrives at nothing articulate. It is something indefinite and intangible, like the noise of waves which is made up of a thousand fused and mingled sounds. It is the reverberation of the unsatisfied desires of the soul, of all the stifled sorrows of the heart, mingling in a vague, sonorous whole, and dying away in cloudy murmurs. All those imperceptible regrets, which never individually reach the consciousness, accumulate at last into a definite result; they become the voice of a feeling of emptiness and aspiration; their tone is melancholy itself. In youth the tone of these Aeolian vibrations of the heart is all hope-a proof that these thousands of indistinguishable accents make up indeed the fundamental note of our being, and reveal the tone of our whole situation. Tell me what you feel in your solitary room when the full moon is shining in upon you and your lamp is dying out, and I will tell you how old you are, and I shall know if you are happy.

-HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.

WINE AND OPIUM CONTRASTED.

Wine disorders the mental faculties; opium, on the contrary, if taken in the proper manner, introduces among them the most exquisite order, legislation and harmony. Wine unsettles and clouds the judgment; opium, on the contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive. The opium eater feels that the diviner part of his nature is paramount; that is, the moral affections are in a state of cloudless serenity; and over all is the great light of the majestic intellect. -De QUINCEY.

Virtue is not always its own reward, and the way that leads to reformation is remarkably ill-lighted for so respectable a thorough-WILKIE COLLINS.

fare.

THE CANT OF CRITICISM.

Grant me patience, Good Heavens! Of all the cants that are canted in this canting world, though the cant of hypocrisy may be the worst, yet the cant of criticism is the most tormenting. I would go fifty miles on foot to kiss the hand of that man who willingly gives up the reins of his imagination into the hands of his author; is pleased he knows not why-nor cares not wherefore. -STERNE.

WHEN WILD OATS ARE SOWN.

You wait, boy, till you're married, and the house begins to fill, and you'll tuck in your tail, and sing small, and take risks, and see accidents don't happen, and grow grey hairs like the rest of us. -CUTLIFFE HYNE.

STATELY ASPECT OF AUTUMN.

Then the woods arose in folds, like drapery of awakened mountains, stately with a depth of awe, and memory of the tempests. Autumn's mellow hand was on them, as they owned already, touched with gold, and red, and olive; and their joy toward the sun was less to a bridegroom than a father.

So, perhaps, shall break upon us that eternal morning when crag and chasm shall be no more, neither hill nor valley, nor great unvintaged ocean; when glory shall not scare happiness, neither happiness envy glory, but all things shall arise and shine in the light of a Father's countenance, because itself is risen.

-BLACKMORE.

DOES FOLLY LIVE ON EARTH ALONE?

There, boy, said I, Will your wisdom tell me the story of that star? Are its people as mad as we? Is there ambition on one side and folly on the other? Are its great men the prey of a populace, and their populace the tools and the fools of their great men? Have they orators to inflame their passions; lawyers to beggar them in the pursuit of justice; traders, to cheat them; heroes to give them laurels and vanity at the price of blood, hunger, and misery: and philosophers to be the worst plagues among them—in the midst of perpetual wonders and baffled by every pebble under their feet, insensible to their own ignorance; and with every attribute and voice of nature full of worship, wrapping themselves in the robe of the scorner, and refusing their homage to a God? -GEORGE CROLY.

THE POLAR REGIONS.

These lonely latitudes do not belong to the habitable world for the piercing cold shivers the stones, splits the trees, and causes the earth to burst asunder, which, throwing forth showers of icy spangles, seems incapable of enduring this solitude of frost and tempest, of famine and death. Solemn silence reigns.

-EUGENE SUE.

BELIEF IN MIRACLES LOGICAL.

Nature has its mysteries; truth or judgment might be commissioned from sources strange to human perceptions. To give way to the workings of a sickly imagination, may characterize the vulgar, the idle and the weak; but to admit the power of Heaven to suspend its own laws for its own purposes, is among the soundest conclusions of the pious and the wise. -GEORGE CROLY.

THE DEFENSE OF FAITH AND RELIGION.

It is against whole literatures; it is against whole philosophies; it is against the vague doubts of eminent thinkers; it is against the innumerable sneers, the repeated assumptions, the ever-varying criticisms of a powerful and intellectual press. -REV. F. W. FARRAR.

TERROR.

Like that which sometimes takes possession of the mind in dreams when one feels one's self sleeping alone, utterly divided from all call or hearing of friends, doors open that should be shut, or unlocked that should be triply secured, the very walls gone, barriers swallowed up by unknown abysses, nothing around one but frail curtains, and a world of illimitable night, whisperings at a distance, correspondence going on between darkness and darkness, like one deep calling to another, and the dreamer's own heart the center from which the network of this unimaginable chaos radiates, by means of which the blank privations of silence and darkness become powers the most positive and awful.

-DE QUINCEY

LOVES'S WAY.

Not more natural is it for the hart to pant for the water brook, for the plant to seek the light,for water to seek its level, for the bird to seek its mate, for the bee to sip the nectar of the flower, for the day to succeed the night, for the tide to ebb and flow, for the stars to twinkle, for the sun to shine, for the bud to blossom, for the leaves to fall-than it is for me to love thee!

-ROBERT LOUIS STEPHENSON.

THE SONG OF TRILBY.

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A string of perfect gems * strung together on a loose golden thread. Waves of sweet and tender laughter, the very heart and essence of innocent, high-spirited girlhood, alive to all that is simple and elementary in nature-the freshness of the morning, the ripple of the stream, the click of the mill, the lisp of the wind in the trees, the song of the lark in the cloudless skies-the sun and the dew, the scent of early flowers and summer woods and meadows the sight of birds and bees and butterflies and frolicsome young animals at play all the sights and scents and sounds that are the birthright of happy children, happy savages in favored climes-things within the remembrance and reach of most of us! All this, the memory and feel of it, are in Trilby's voice as she warbles that long, smooth, lilting, dancing laugh, that wondrous song without words.

-GEORGE De MAURIER.

THE PHILOSOPHER'S HUMANITY.

At no time of my life have I been a person to hold myself polluted by the touch or approach of any creature that wore a human shape. For a philosopher should not see with the eyes of the poor limitary creature calling himself a man of the world, and filled with narrow and self-regarding prejudices of birth, means, and education, but should look upon himself as a catholic creature, and as standing in equal relation to high and low, to educated and uneducated, to the guilty and the innocent. -DE QUINCEY.

MODESTY.

It is ex

Modesty is always the sign and safeguard of a mystery. plained by its contrary-profanation. Shyness or modesty is, in truth, the half-conscious sense of a secret of nature or of the soul too intimately individual to be given or surrendered. It is exchanged. Το surrender what is most profound and mysterious in one's being and personality at any price less than that of absolute reciprocity is profanation. -HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL.

EACH IN HIS OWN PLACE.

"To see things as they really are," is the purpose of the philosophy of pessimism in the hands of its worthiest exponents. But to know what is, and that alone, even were such knowledge possible, is not to know the truth. The higher wisdom seeks for the forces at work to produce that which now is. The present time is the meeting time of forces; the present fact their temporary product. To the philosophy of evolution, "every meanest day is the conflux of two eternities." Each meanest fact is the product of the world-forces that lie behind it. Each meanest man the resultant of the vast powers alive in human nature, struggling since life began. * In the more hopeful view of evolution the child exists for its possibilities. The huge forces within us have thrown it to the surface of time. ** ** * With this thought is sure to come, in some degree, the certainty that the heart of the universe is sound, that though there be many of us in the world each must have his place, and each at last "be somehow needful to infinity." We can thus see that each least creature has its need for being. -DAVID STARR JORDAN.

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WAYFARERS IN LIFE'S PILGRIMAGE.

And thus ever, by day and night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely to meet, and to act and re-act on one another, move we restless travelers through the pilgrimage of life.

-CHARLES DICKENS, in "Little Dorrit."