It is true I had always loved my mother, even in my most heedless days; but I felt how inconsiderate and ineffectual had been my love. My heart melted as I retraced the days of infancy, when I was led by a mother's hand, and rocked to sleep in a mother's arms, and was without care and sorrow. "O my mother!" exclaimed I, burying my face again in the grass of the grave. "O that I were once more by your side, sleeping never to wake again on the cares and troubles of this world!"

I am not naturally of a morbid temperament, and the violence of my emotion gradually exhausted itself. It was a hearty, honest, natural discharge of grief which had been slowly accumulating, and the discharge gave me wonderful relief. I rose from the grave as if I had been offering up a sacrifice, and I felt as if that sacrifice had been accepted.

I sat down again on the grass, and plucked, one by one, the weeds from her grave; the tears trickled more slowly down my cheeks, and ceased to be bitter. It was a comfort to think that she had died before sorrow and poverty came upon her child, and before all his great expectations were blasted.

I leaned my cheek upon my hand, and looked upon the landscape. Its quiet beauty soothed me. The whistle of a peasant from an adjoining field came cheerily to my ear. I seemed to respire hope and comfort with the free air that whispered through the leaves, and played lightly with my hair, and dried the tears upon my cheek.

A lark, rising from the field before me, and leaving, as it were, a stream of song behind him as he rose, lifted my fancy with him. He hovered in the air just above the place where the towers of Warwick Castle marked the horizon, and seemed as if fluttering with delight at his own melody. "Surely," thought I, "if there was such a thing as transmigration of souls, this might be taken for some poet let

loose from earth, but still revelling in song, and carolling about fair fields and lordly towers."

At this moment the long-forgotten feeling of poetry rose within me. A thought sprung at once into my mind. "I will become an author!" said I. "I have hitherto indulged in poetry as a pleasure, and it has brought me nothing but pain; let me try what it will do when I cultivate it with devotion as a pursuit."

The resolution thus suddenly roused within me heaved a load from my heart. I felt a confidence in it, from the very place where it was formed. It seemed as though my mother's spirit whispered it to me from the grave. "I will henceforth," said I, " endeavor to act as if she were witness of my actions; I will endeavor to acquit myself in such a manner, that, when I revisit her grave, there may at least be no compunctious bitterness in my tears."

APPALLING; depressing with fear. PREDICAMENT; bad condition. PATRIMONY; an estate inherited from one's ancestors. PENSIVELY; with thoughtfulness, with some degree of melancholy. PREDICTION; a foretelling, a previous declaration of a future event. VERIFY; to prove to be true, to confirm. EXPIATION; the act of atoning for a crime.

NIGHT.

LABORS; ors like ers in hers. GATHER; short a, not ě. REPOSE; long e, not . DREAMS; sound r. ANGELS; short e, not ǎ.

NIGHT is the time for rest.

How sweet, when labors close,
To gather round an aching breast

The curtain of repose,

Stretch the tired limbs, and lay the head
Upon our own accustomed bed!

When truth that is, and truth that seems,

Blend in fantastic strife ;

Ah! visions less beguiling far

Than waking dreams by daylight are!

Night is the time to weep;

To wet with unseen tears Those graves of memory, where sleep The joys of other years,

Hopes that were angels in their birth, But perished young, like things of earth.

Night is the time to muse:

Then from the eye the soul

Takes flight, and, with expanding views,
Beyond the starry pole

Descries, athwart the abyss of night,

The dawn of uncreated light.

Night is the time to pray:

Our Savior oft withdrew
To desert mountains far away;

So will his followers do

Steal from the throng to haunts untrod,

And hold communion there with God.

MONTGOMERY.

FANTASTIC; imaginary, not real. CLASSIC; relating to ancient Greek and Roman authors of the first rank and estimation, which are studied as the best models of fine writing. PLEIADES; seven stars situated in the neck of the constellation Taurus. STALWART; bold, strong, daring, vehement.

INDUSTRY ESSENTIALLY SOCIAL.

CONSISTS; Sound sts. PURSUITS; pur as in her; sound r; give ui the sound of long u. SUCH; short u; do not call it sich.

MAN is not only a working being, but he is a being formed to work in society; and if the matter be carefully analyzed, it will be found that civilization, that is, the bringing men out of a savage into a cultivated state, consists in multiplying the number of pursuits and occupations; so that the most perfect society is one where the largest number of persons are prosperously employed in the greatest variety of ways. In such a society men help each other, instead of standing in each other's way. The farther this division of labor is

carried, the more persons must unite, harmoniously, to effect

y 185.

pg 178, 180.

the common ends. The larger the number on which each depends, the larger the number to which each is useful.

The humblest laborer, who works with his hands, possesses within him a soul endowed with precisely the same faculties as those which in Franklin, in Newton, or Shakspeare, have been the light and the wonder of the world; and, , on the other hand, the most gifted and ethereal genius, whose mind has fathomed the depths of the heavens, and comprehended the whole circle of truth, is enclosed in a body subject to the same passions, infirmities, and wants, as the man whose life knows no alternation but labor and rest, appetite and indulgence.

Every act that a man performs requires the agency both of body and mind. His mind cannot see but through the optic eye-glass; nor hear, till the drum of his ear is affected by the vibrations of the air. If he would speak, he puts in action the complex machinery of the vocal organs; if he writes, he employs the muscular system of the hands; nor can he even perform the operations of pure thought except in a healthy state of the body. A fit of the toothache, proceeding from the irritation of a nerve about as big as a cambric thread, is enough to drive an understanding, capable of instructing the world, to the verge of insanity. On the other hand, there is no operation of manual labor so simple, so mechanical, which does not require the exercise of perception, reflection, memory, and judgment; the same intellectual powers by which the highest truths of science have been discovered and illustrated.

The degree to which any particular action, or series of actions, united into a pursuit, shall exercise the intellectual powers on the one hand, or the mechanical powers on the other, of course depends on the nature of that action. The slave, whose life, from childhood to the grave, is passed in the field; the New Zealander, who goes to war when he is hungry, devours his prisoners, and leads a life of cannibal