NIGHT.

Stay, stay with us,-rest, thou art weary and worn;
And fain was the war-broken soldier to stay;
But sorrow returned with the dawning of morn,
And the voice in my dreaming ear melted away.

229

CAMPBELL.

XVI. NIGHT.

"IF the relation of sleep to-night, and, in some instances, its converse, be real, we cannot reflect without amazement upon the extent to which it carries us. Day and night are things close to us; the change applies immediately to our sensations; of all the phenomena of nature, it is the most obvious and the most familiar to our experience; but, in its cause, it belongs to the great motions which are passing in the heavens. Whilst the earth glides round her axle, she ministers to the alternate necessities of the animals dwelling upon her surface, at the same time that she obeys the influence of those attractions which regulate the order of many thousand worlds. The relation, therefore, of sleep to-night, is the relation of the inhabitants of the earth to the rotation of their globe; probably it is more; it is a relation to the system of which that globe is a part; and, still farther, to the congregation of systems of which theirs is only one. If this account be true, it connects the meanest individual with the universe itself; a chicken roosting upon its perch, with the spheres revolving in the firmament."-Paley.

NIGHT is the time for rest ;

How sweet when labours close,
To gather round an aching breast
The curtain of repose,

Stretch the tired limbs, and lay the head

Down on our own delightful bed!

Night is the time for dreams;

The gay romance of life,

When truth that is, and truth that seems

Mix in fantastic strife;

Ah! visions less beguiling far

Than waking dreams by daylight are!

Night is the time for toil

To plough the classic field,
Intent to find the buried spoil
Its wealthy furrows yield;
Till all is ours that sages taught,
That poets sung and heroes wrought.

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 at their birth,
But died when young like things of earth.

Night is the time to watch;
O'er ocean's dark expanse,
To hail the Pleiades, or catch
The full moon's earliest glance

That brings into the home-sick mind
All we have loved and left behind.

Night is the time for care ;
Brooding on hours misspent,
To see the spectre of Despair
Come to our lonely tent;

Like Brutus midst his slumbering host,
Summoned to die by Cæsar's ghost.

Night is the time to think ;-
When, from the eye, the soul
Takes flight, and on the utmost brink
Of yonder starry pole,

Discerns beyond the abyss of night

The dawn of uncreated light.

Night is the time to pray;

Our Saviour oft withdrew

To desert mountains far away;

So will his followers do,

Steal from the throng to haunts untrod,
And commune there alone with God.

Night is the time for death ;

When all around is peace,

Calmly to yield the weary breath,

From sin and suffering cease,

Think of heaven's bliss, and give the sign

To parting friends;-that death be mine.

JAMES MONTGOMERY,

"A CHILD is a man in a small letter, and yet the best copy of Adam before he tasted the sinful apple. He is Nature's fresh picture, newly drawn, which time and much handling dims and defaces; his soul is yet a white page unscribbled with the observations of the world, whereof at length it becomes a blurred note-book. He is purely good, because he knows not evil, and hath not made means by sin. to be acquainted with misery. He arrives not at the mischief of being wise, nor endures ills to come by foreseeing them. Nature and his parents alike dandle him and train him with sugar first to a draught of wormwood. He plays yet like a young apprentice the first day, and is not come to his task of melancholy. We laugh at his foolish sports, but his game is our earnest, and his drums, rattles, and hobby-horse but the emblems and mockings of man's businesses. The older he grows he is a stair lower from God. He is the Christian's pattern, and the old man's fate-the one imitates his pureness and the other his simplicity."-Bishop Earle's Microcosmography.

OUR birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The soul that rises with us, our life's star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar :
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing boy,

But he beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;

The Youth, who daily further from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's priest,
And by the vision splendid

Is on his way attended;

At length the Man sees it die away,
And fade into the light of common day,

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;

Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,

The homely muse doth all she can
To make her foster-child, her inmate man,
Forget the glories he hath known,

And the imperial palace whence it came.

WORDSWORTH.

XVIII. ON SENSIBILITY.

"AFTER all the complaints that have been made of the peculiar distresses which are incident to cultivated minds, who would exchange the sensibilities of his intellectual and moral being for the apathy of those whose only avenues of pleasure and pain are to be found in their animal nature; who move thoughtlessly,' as Goethe says, 'in the narrow circle of their existence, and to whom the falling leaves present no idea but that of approaching winter ?"-Dugald Stewart.

SENSIBILITY how charming,

Thou, my friend, canst truly tell :
But distress, with horrors arming,
Thou hast also known too well;

Fairest flower,' behold the lily,
Blooming in the summer ray;
Let the blast sweep o'er the valley,
See it prostrate on the clay.
Hear the wood-lark charm the forest,
Telling o'er his little joys:
Hapless bird! a prey the surest,

To each pirate of the skies.3

Dearly bought the hidden treasure,
Finer feelings can bestow :*

Chords that vibrate sweetest pleasure,
Thrill the deepest notes of woe.

1. Flower, in what case?

BURNS.

3. Mention some of the pirates of the sky. 2. What part of the verb is charm? 4. Ellipsis?

XIX. TO DAFFODILS.

"THOU turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night. Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down and withereth. For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled."-Psalm xc. 3–7.

"ALL true work is sacred; in all true work, were it but true handlabour, there is something of divineness. Labour, wide as the earth, has its summit in Heaven. Sweat of the brow; and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart; which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all Sciences, all spoken Epics, all acted Heroisms, Martyrdoms-up to the Agony of bloody sweat,' which all men have called divine! O brother, if this is not worship,' then I say the more pity for worship; for this is the noblest thing yet discovered under God's sky. Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow workmen there in God's eternity; surviving there, they alone surviving: sacred band of the immortals, celestial body-guard of the empire of mankind. Even in the weak human memory they survive so long, as saints, as heroes, as gods; they alone surviving; peopling, they alone, the immeasured solitudes of Time! To thee Heaven, though severe, is not unkind; Heaven is kind-as a noble mother; as that Spartan mother, saying, while she gave her son his shield, "With it, my son, or upon it!' Thou, too, shalt return home, in honour to thy far distant home, in honour doubt it not-if in the battle thou keep thy shield! Thou, in the eternities and deepest death-kingdoms art not an alien; thou everywhere art a denizen! Complain not; the very Spartans did not complain."-Carlyle.

THE night is come, but not too soon;
And sinking silently,

All silently, the little moon

Drops down behind the sky.

There is no light in earth or heaven,
But the cold light of stars;
And the first watch of night is given
To the red planet Mars.

Is it the tender star of love?

The star of love and dreams?
O no! from that blue tent above,
A hero's armour gleams.