We'll form their minds with studious care To all that's manly, good, and fair, And train them for the skies. While they our wisest hours engage, They'll grow in virtue every day, No borrow'd joys,—they're all our own, Monarchs, we envy not your state: Our portion is not large indeed; In this the art of living lies, To want no more than may suffice, We'll therefore relish with content For if our stock be very small, To be resign'd when ills betide, And pleased with favours given : We'll ask no long protracted treat, But when our feast is o'er, Nor grudge our son with envious eye COTTON. LABOUR. THERE is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works; in idleness alone is there perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; the real desire to get work done will itself lead one more and more to truth,-to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth. The latest gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it. "Know thyself; " long enough has this poor "self" of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to "know" it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual ; know what thou canst work at; and work at it like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan. It has been written, "An endless significance lies in work :" a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how even in the meanest sorts of labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself,-all these like hell-dogs, lie beleaguering the soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man; but he bends himself with free valour against his task, and all these are stilled; all these shrink, murmuring, far off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labour in him—is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed flame! Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A formless chaos, once set it revolving, grows round and ever rounder; ranges itself, by mere force of gravity, into strata, spherical courses; is no longer a chaos, but a round, compacted world. What would become of the Earth, did she cease to revolve? In the poor old Earth, as long as she revolves, all inequalities, irregularities, disperse themselves; all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on the potter's wheel,—one of the venerablest objects, old as the prophet Ezekiel, and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes! And fancy the most assiduous potter-but without his wheel -reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by mere kneading and baking! Even such a potter were Destiny, with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man, the kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous potter without a wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive colouring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a botch, not a dish; no : a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered, amorphous botch, a mere enamelled vessel of dishonour! Let the idle think of this. Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river, there it runs and flows! draining off the sour festering water, gradually, from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labour is life: from the inmost heart of the worker rises his God-given force; the sacred celestial Life-Essence breathed into him by Almighty God, from his inmost heart awakens him to all nobleness, to all knowledge,-"Self-knowledge," and much else, so soon as work fitly begins. Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly, thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic vortices, till we try, and fix it. Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by action alone." 66 T. CARLYLE. THE OLD SEXTON. SAD seem'd the strong grey-headed man, One daughter, little Jane, had he- And when she laugh'd aloud and free, |