more he rose. Bright flames of fire shot up from earth to heaven and reeled before his eyes, while the water thundered in his ears and stunned him with its furious roar. A week afterwards the body was washed ashore some miles down the river, a swollen and disfigured mass. Unrecognized and unpitied, it was borne away to the grave, and there it has long since mouldered away. -Charles Dickens. LVI.-SHORT SELECTIONS. DECEIT. THINK'ST thou there are no serpents in the world Do bask their spotted skins in fortune's sun, LABOR. -Joanna Baillie. "LABOR is worship," the robin is singing; Idleness ever despaireth, bewaileth; Keeps the watch wound or the dark rust assaileth! -Mrs. Osgood. DEATH. LIKE other tyrants, death delights to smite; What, smitten, most proclaims the pride of pow'r, To bid the wretch survive the fortunate, The feeble wrap the athletic in his shroud, A GENTLEMAN. SEE, what a grace was seated on his brow; New-lighted on a heaven-kissing hill; -Shakespeare. LVII. THE EXISTENCE OF A GOD. Go out beneath the arched heavens, at night, and say, if you can, "There is no God." Pronounce that dreadful blasphemy, and each star above you will reproach the unbroken darkness of your intellect; every voice that floats upon the night winds will bewail your utter hopelessness and folly. Is there no God? Who, then, unrolled the blue scroll, and threw upon its high frontispiece the legible gleamings of immortality? Who fashioned this green earth, with its perpetual rolling waters, and its wide expanse of island and of main? Who settled the foundations of the mountains? Who paved the heavens with clouds, and attuned, amid the clamor of storms, the voice of thunders, and unchained the lightnings that flash in their gloom? Who gave to the eagle a safe eyrie where the tempests dwell and beat the strongest, and to the dove a tranquil abode amid the forests that echo to the minstrelsy of her Who made thee, O man, with thy perfected elegance of intelligence and form? Who made the light pleasant to thee, and the darkness a covering and a herald to the first flashes of the morning? moan There is a God. All nature declares it in a language too plain to be misapprehended. The great truth is too legibly written over the face of the whole creation to be easily mistaken. Thou canst behold it in the tender blade just starting from the earth in the early spring, or in the sturdy oak that has withstood the blasts of fourscore winters. The purling rivulet, meandering through downy meads and verdant glens, and Niagara's tremendous torrent, leaping over its awful chasm, and rolling in majesty its broad sheet of waters onward to the ocean, unite in proclaiming, "There is a God!" "Tis heard in the whispering breeze and in the howling storm; in the deep-toned thunder and in the earthquake's shock; 't is declared to us when the tempest lowers, when the hurricane sweeps over the land, when the winds moan around our dwellings and die in sullen murmurs on the plain, when the heavens, overcast with blackness, ever and anon are illuminated by the lightning's glare. The truth is not less solemnly impressed on our minds in the universal hush and calm repose of nature when all is still as the soft breathings of an infant's slumber. The vast ocean, when its broad expanse is whitened with foam, and when its heaving waves roll mountain on mountain high, or when the dark blue of heaven's vault is reflected with beauty on its smooth and tranquil bosom, confirms the declaration. The twinkling star, shedding its flickering rays so far above the reach of human ken, and the glorious sun in the heavens, all, all declare there is a universal First Cause. Man, too, the proud lord of creation, so fearfully and wonderfully made, each joint in its corresponding socket, each muscle, tendon, and artery performing its allotted functions with all the precision of the most perfect mechanism, and, surpassing all, possessed of a soul capable of enjoying the most exquisite pleasure or of enduring the most excruciating pain; which is endowed with immortal capacities, and is destined to live onward through the endless ages of eternity,-these all unite in one general proclamation of the eternal truth: there is a Being, infinite in wisdom, who reigns over all, undivided and supreme, the fountain of all life, source of all light, from whom all blessings flow, and in whom all happiness centers. LVIII. JAFFAR. JAFFÀR, the Barmecide, the good vizier, The poor man's hope, the friend without a peer, On all they owed to the divine Jaffar. "Bring me this man," the caliph cried. The man 66 From bonds far worse Jaffar delivered me; From wants, from shames, from loveless household fears; He said, "Let worth grow frenzied if it will; Go; and since gifts thus move thee, take this gem, And hold the giver as thou deemest fit!" 'Gifts!" cried the friend. He took, and holding it High tow'rds the heavens, as though to meet his star, -Leigh Hunt. LIX.-OPPOSITE EXAMPLES. I ASK the young man who is just forming his habits of life, or just beginning to indulge those habitual trains of thought out of which habits grow, to look around him and mark the examples whose fortunes he would covet, or whose fate he would abhor. Even as we walk the streets we meet with exhibitions of each extreme. Here, behold a patriarch, whose stock of vigor threescore years and ten seem hardly to have impaired. His erect form, his firm step, his elastic limbs, and undimmed senses, are so many certificates of good conduct; or, rather, so many jewels and orders of nobility with which nature has honored him for his fidelity to her laws. His fair complexion shows that his blood has never been corrupted; his pure breath, that he has never yielded his digestive apparatus to abuse; his exact language and keen apprehension, that his brain has never been drugged or stupefied by the poisons of distiller or tobacconist. |