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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 tires their echoes with unvaried cries;
Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,

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,
Which my fancy still robed in its freshness of green,---
The spot where, a school-boy, all thoughtless, I strayed
By the side of the stream, in the gloom of the shade.

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,
With wild-flowers, and sweet-brier, and eglantine crowned:
I thought of the river, all quiet and bright

As the face of the sky on a blue summer night:

And I thought of the trees, under which we had strayed,
Of the broad leafy boughs, with their coolness of shade;
And I hoped, though disfigured, some token to find
Of the names, and the carvings, impressed on the rind.

All eager, I hastened the scene to behold,

Rendered sacred and dear by the feelings of old;
And I deemed that, unaltered, my eye should explore
This refuge, this haunt, this Elysium of yore.

'Twas a dream!-not a token or trace could 1 view
Of the names that I loved, of the trees that I knew:
Like the shadows of night at the dawning of day,
"Like a tale that is told"—they had vanished away.

And methought the lone river, that murmured along,
Was more dull in its motion, more sad in its song,
Since the birds, that had nestled and warbled above,
Had all fled from its banks, at the fall of the grove.

I paused-and the moral came home to my heart :—
Behold, how of earth all the glories depart!
Our visions are baseless, our hopes but a gleam,-
Our staff but a reed,—and our life but a dream.

Then, O, let us look-let our prospects allure-
To scenes that can fade not, to realms that endure,
To glories, to blessings, that triumph sublime

O'er the blightings of Change, and the ruins of Time.

LESSON LXIX.

The Little Graves.-ANONYMOUS.

"Twas autumn, and the leaves were dry,
And rustled on the ground,
And chilly winds went whistling by,
With low and pensive sound.

As through the grave-yard's lone retreat,
By meditation led,

I walked, with slow and cautious feet,
Above the sleeping dead,-

Three little graves, ranged side by side, My close attention drew;

O'er two, the tall grass, bending, sighed,
And one seemed fresh and new.

As, lingering there, I mused awhile
On death's long, dreamless sleep,
And opening life's deceitful smile,
A mourner came to weep.

Her form was bowed, but not with years,
Her words were faint and few,
And on those little graves her tears
Distilled like evening dew.

A prattling boy, some four years old,
Her trembling hand embraced,
And from my heart the tale he told
Will never be effaced.

"Mămma', now you must love me more,

For little sister's dead;
And t'other sister died before,

And brother too, you said.

'Mamma, what made sweet sister die?
She loved me when we played:

You told me, if I would not cry,
You'd show me where she's laid."

* a sounded as in father.

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"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,
But sister lives in heaven."

"Mamma, won't she be hungry there,
And want some bread to eat?
And who will give her clothes to wear,
And keep them clean and neat?

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