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can scarcely allow herself to feel her own happiness while conscious of the accumulated miseries of the earth.

"Are you come to me again?" I cried, once, on seeing her kind face looking in at my door, and knowing she was then writing about America.

"I must come as you are sick,” she replied; as if it was an understood thing that where she knew sickness was, there she was expected to be.

Her bunch of lilac stayed long on the table before me in a glass of water, and often revived me; my little Blo-sippa died sooner; the cold had agreed with it better than heat. Ivy is a favourite plant in Swedish rooms. It is curious to see that rampant thing, which will grow anywhere in England, and gives such winter beauty to our lanes, and woods, and hedges, clothing their nakedness with its mantle of green-here made a little delicate hot-house nurseling; put into a small geranium pot, and trained up sticks, or by strings, into a state so delicate, graceful and refined-looking, that one scarcely thinks it of the same race as our great, hardy, ever-propagating, and over-all-encroaching ivy of old England. Some persons, who take pains with it, have it to look ornamental, by being trained up strings in

their windows; but in general-it is supported by cross rods, in pots, and does not grow tall.

The holly, also, is a hot-house shrub, very seldom seen; and placed under cover in the Botanical Garden of Upsala, where it is kept in large pots.

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CHAPTER XIV.

AND how do you think I employ myself while lying in state here, without any of the joys of the exterior world around me? Why, in trying to understand the beauties of THE Poet of Sweden, as he is considered-Bishop Tegner; in railing against the Frenchisms of the Swedish language; and in translating the Swedish Church Hand-book-as the Breviary, Service or Prayer-book for the use of the clergy is to our ear, perhaps, rather irreverently called. And as I do so, I give my translation to my adjunct, in order that he may improve me in his language, while improving himself in mine. This Hand-book is certainly

more pleasing to me than the Psalm-book, by which name the Prayer-book for the use of the people is understood.

The Hand-book not only contains the prayers and offices of the Swedish Church, but gives plain explicit directions and rules for their performance; so that one Priest is not seen turning to the altar at a moment when another scrupulously turns from it. He is told when to face the people, when to face the altar; when to read, and when to sing; when to kneel, and when to stand. The most curious direction appears to me that which orders the people to respond when the prayers are sung, but to be silent when they are read. As the latter is the most common practice, not so many Priests having voices so good as to prefer singing, the result is, that the prayers seem to me to be very little joined in. The people never kneel-literally never, either in private or public devotions, except at the time of Holy Communion. They sit almost all the time on their seats, droning out the Psalms, in a sort of Presbyterian fashion; some looking very devout, and a great many looking very sleepy. These psalms, or prayers in rhyme, have unhappily greatly superseded the old prayers of the Church. They are not even the

Psalms of David, which seem equally superseded; for the Swedes are not ashamed to call Bishop Wallin the "David of the North." They have been composed by some of the best poets of the land in modern times; and so the effusions of the poets of Sweden have supplanted the Divine strains of the Poet of the East altogether, and, so far I fear as the affections and the daily practice of the people are concerned, thrown the beautiful prayers of the Fathers of the Church quite into the background.

There are no less than five hundred of these psalms, some of them awfully long; and the place they hold in the devotions of the people, and in the use of the Swedish Church, is well indicated by the position given to them in the Book-that is, before the prayers, in the order of the church service. Indeed they are most useful auxiliaries on all occasions of Divine service, or public or private prayer. They form a prayer from the pulpits, they are used to help out sermons. I was once invited, at a country clergyman's house, to stay for family prayer when I was about to retire to my room. Gladly I consented: he sat down, clapped his hands as a signal for silence; every one took their seats, and the priest, folding

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