2420 128 549 NATIONAL READER. seat; but my youthful recollections of the worse than eastern slavery I there endured, made me regard what I saw with a feeling of peculiar distaste. If one thing more than another prevent my desiring the days of my youth to return, it is the horror I feel for the despotism of the pedagogue. For years after I left school, I looked at the classics with disgust. I remembered the heart-burnings, the tears, and the pains, the monkish method. of teaching-now almost wholly confined to our public schools -had caused me. It was long before I could take up a Horace, much less enjoy its perusal. It was not thus with the places I visited during the short space of cessation from task and toil that the week allowed. The meadow, where, in true jovialness of heart, I had leaped, and raced, and played-this recalled the contentedness of mind, and the overflowing tide of delight I once experienced, when, climbing the stile which led into it, I left behind me the book and the task. How the sunshine of the youthful breast burst forth upon me, and the gushing spirit of unreined and innocent exhilaration braced every fibre, and rushed through every vein ! The sun has never shone so brilliantly since. How fragrant were the flowers! How deep the azure of the sky! How vivid were the hues of nature! How intense the shortlived sensations of pain and pleasure! How generous were all impulses! How confiding, open, and upright, all actions! "Inhumanity to the distressed, and insolence to the fallen," those besetting sins of manhood, how utterly strangers to the heart! How little of sordid interests, and how much of intrepid honesty, was then displayed! * * * * * The sensations peculiar to youth, being the result of impulse rather than reflection, have the advantage over those of manhood, however the pride of reason may give the latter the superiority. In manhood there is always a burden of thought bearing on the wheels of enjoyment. In manhood, too, we have the misfortune of seeing the wrecks of early associations scattered every where around us. Youth can see nothing of this. It can take no review of antecedent pleasures or pains that become such a source of melancholy emotion in mature years. It has never sauntered. through the rooms of a building, and recalled early days spent under its roof. I remember my feelings on an occasion of this sort, when I was like a traveller on the plain of Babylon, wondering where all, that had once been to me so great and mighty, then was; in what gulf the sounds of merriment, that once reverberated from the walls, the master, the domestic, the aged, and the young, had disappeared. Our early recollections are pleasing to us, because they look not on the morrow. Alas! what did that morrow leave when it had become merged in the past! I have lately traversed the village in which I was born, without discovering a face that I knew. Houses have been demolished, fronts altered, tenements built, trees rooted up, and alterations effected, that made me feel a stranger amid the home of my fathers. The old-fashioned and roomy house, where my infant had been watched by parental affection, had been long uninhabited: it was in decay: the storm beat through its fractured windows, and it was partly roofless. The garden, and its old elms, the scene associated with the cherished feelings of many a happy hour, lay a weedy waste: years Amid thy desert walks the lapwing flies, And the long grass o'ertops the mouldering wall! But the picture it presented in my youth exhibits it as true and vivid as ever. It is hung up in memory in all its freshness, and time cannot dilapidate its image. It is now become an essence, that defies the mutability of material things. It is fixed in ethereal colours on the tablets of the mind, and lives within the domain of spirit, within the circumference of which the universal spoiler possesses no sovereignty. LESSON LXVIII. On visiting a Scene of Childhood.-BLACKWOOD'S Magazine. "I came to the place of my birth, and said, 'The friends of my youth, where are they?' and Echo answered, 'Where are they?"" LONG years had elapsed since I gazed on the scene, I thought of the friends, who had roamed with me there, When the sky was so blue, and the flowers were so fair,All scattered!-all sundered by mountain and wave, And some in the silent embrace of the grave! 666 I thought of the green banks, that circled around, As the face of the sky on a blue summer night: And I thought of the trees, under which we had strayed, All eager, I hastened the scene to behold, Rendered sacred and dear by the feelings of old; 'Twas a dream!-not a token or trace could 1 view And methought the lone river, that murmured along, I paused-and the moral came home to my heart :— Then, O, let us look-let our prospects allure- O'er the blightings of Change, and the ruins of Time. LESSON LXIX. The Little Graves.-ANONYMOUS. "Twas autumn, and the leaves were dry, As through the grave-yard's lone retreat, I walked, with slow and cautious feet, Three little graves, ranged side by side, My close attention drew; O'er two, the tall grass, bending, sighed, As, lingering there, I mused awhile Her form was bowed, but not with years, A prattling boy, some four years old, "Mămma', now you must love me more, For little sister's dead; And brother too, you said. 'Mamma, what made sweet sister die? You told me, if I would not cry, * a sounded as in father. "No, sister is not cold, my child; For God, who saw her die, As he looked down from heaven and smiled, Recalled her to the sky. "And then her spirit quickly fled To God, by whom 'twas given; Her body in the ground is dead, "Mamma, won't she be hungry there, |