I once loved and mingled with, but whose names have long since passed away from earth, and whose forms are sleeping now in that quiet village churchyard, in the silence of the grave. They are numbered with the departed, but their memories still live within my heart; and though they are mournful memories, yet I would not lose them for a world. How often is it thus, that our bereaved affections gather around those whom we have loved while living, and cling to them still, though grief for their remembrance may be wearing life away.

It was a quiet Sabbath morning in June that a funeral procession might have been seen forming at the foot of one of the streets of Eldonfield, whence it proceeded slowly towards the church yard. It was unusual for the stillness of the Sabbath to be thus disturbed, but death had entered the village and stricken down two, who were this day to be consigned to the grave. As the procession moved through the street, an unusual interest was manifested on the part of all, for the mother who was following to lay her only child by the side of the husband she had lost, but a few months before. The kind hearted villagers had shown her every token of sympathy in her sorrow, and now so touched were they by her grief, that it seemed as if the stroke of affliction had fallen upon them all. Slowly they moved along and so quietly they entered the churchyard that their own footsteps and the measured tolling of the bell were the only sounds to break the stillness of the scene. In silence they gathered around the grave and and there stood with their heads bowed while the man of God lifted up his voice and prayed for strength to the mourning hearts in this the hour of their trial. A tear stole over his check as he remembered the mother, and asked Him who could be touched with the feelings of our infirmities, to strengthen her as she bowed under the stroke of His chastening rod.

The pall was then removed and the coffin opened. It was a beautiful child that lay there in the quiet slumber of death. His hands lay folded upon his breast and his face wore a smile so sweet and gentle that it almost made one feel that it belonged to heaven rather than to earth. Perhaps it was an angel smile, with which one of those bright messengers had wreathed the lips of the child as an earnest to the mourners of the joy to which they were bearing away his spirit. One by one the villagers came up and cast a glance within the coffin, and then also the mother came forward to give her last look to the peaceful sleeper there. She knelt down upon the green sward beside the open coffin. Every eye was dim with tears as she

bent forward and carefully parted the shroud and then laid her hand upon the bosom of her child, seeking even then for the throbbing which should tell her that life still remained. But that heart had ceased to beat forever, and the hand which the mother now took within her own was stiff and cold as marble. Still she did not weep. She could not. Her eyes were as dry as though the fountain of tears had been sapped by the fiery ordeal through which she had been called to pass. She re-arranged the shroud; laid the little hand once more in its last resting place; smoothed back a single flaxen curl which lay upon his forehead, and then with an agony depicted on her countenance which told that her heart was breaking, she rose and turned away.

The coffin was now closed. On it was inscribed

A. T.
5.

indicating the name and age of the deceased. It was then lowered into the grave; a bundle of straw was carefully laid above it, and then the first spade full of earth was thrown in, sending back that dull and heavy sound so painful to a mourning ear. The earth was heaped up over the grave; the sods laid neatly around it, and after the old minister had made a few remarks and returned thanks to those who had kindly buried the dead,-the villagers left the place, many of them with a heavy heart. The widowed mother lingered among the last, but as she turned away she was heard to whisper,

"The dearest idol I have known,

Whate'er that idol be,

Help me to tear it from thy throne,
And worship only thee."

Faith had triumphed and that too gloriously. That mother's heart though riven with anguish was yet stayed by the thought that it was a merciful hand which had mingled for her the bitter draught, and that that hand doeth all things well. The last tie which had bound her to earth was now broken and she looked and longed for a reunion with those she had loved, in a brighter world. Widowed and childless she went to the home which she too was soon to leave; for in three months the grave closed over all her earthly sorrows. She

died peaceful and calm, trusting her all to a risen Savior, and with her last breath gently murmuring, "we shall meet again."

"WE SHALL MEET AGAIN." There is a power in these words which the cold-hearted skeptic never felt. What a joy it gives to the mourning one to think of a world where there is no more bereavement or sorrow; where He, who has given affliction and pain to the believing children of earth, shall hush their every sigh, and wipe away their every tear; and where the ties which have once been severed among the disciples of the meek and lowly One, shall be re-uni ted to be broken no more forever.

But we digress. In the morning a young and tender flower which had just opened itself to a stormy world, and then closed its leaves forever, had been consigned to the dust whence it sprang; the evening was to close with a similar duty to one that had long been blossomed for the grave, upon whose head the tempests of life had beaten for al-♣ most a century without effect. Every one felt the contrast as the declining sun shone in upon this funeral scene. The melancholy duties with which the morning had opened, and the solemn services of the Sabbath had served to soften every feeling of those who now stood at the grave of the old man who was to be gathered to his fathers. There was a deep and unbroken silence as we stood for a few moments gazing at his features as he lay in the coffin before us. But what a silence it was! There was not a single whisper of grief, not a sob of sorrow, nor a sigh from a single mourning heart to break it. The old man had seen wife and children and connexions torn from his side, and now not one of them was left to weep over his grave. He had outlived them all. The friends of his youth, the companions of riper years had all passed away. There was not one survivor who had walked the long journey with him, for even the old men who stood by his coffin recollected him in the vigor of life, when they were occupied with the sports of childhood. He had grown up like a tree in the forest, and had stood unbroken and strong, while the woodman's axe and the decays of time had leveled all that grew around him, and now he too had fallen, the last relic of an age that had passed away. What a tale he might have told us, could he have broken the hushed stillness of that, moment when we were looking for the last time upon his features. His life had been full of years and he might have told us what it was to outlive all we love or care for here on earth, and to travel on to the grave for years in loneliness, without a single heart to beat in sympathy with our own; without a

single voice to greet our ear in tones that we have long been used to love. It was sad to think of him living so long with his memories and his joys all belonging to a past generation, and one could hardly help prefering the fate of the child whom we had that morning laid to rest, and who had slept in death before his short life had become saddened with the troubles of a sorrowful world. How many griefs, how many blasted hopes and blighted joys had he escaped, which the old man had been forced to bear in his toilsome journey of life. Was it not better that he should die thus before the sea of life had become ruffled with a single wave, than that his frail bark should have to brave the storms and the tempests and finally sink down in darkness, unguided and alone?

As we laid the old man in the grave, the last rays of the setting sun fell over the scene and then left us to the shadows of twilight. The time had been well chosen; for the evening was a fitting period for him to be consigned to rest who had been toiling on in life for so long a day. A spot had been chosen for his sepulture in the midst of his family, who had preceded him, and we left him there till the grave shall give up its dead.

"And so life passes away," I whispered to myself as I left the churchyard," it fleeth as a shadow and continueth not." Truly said Fenelon. "Les hommes passent comme les fleurs, qui s'épanouissent le matin, et qui le soir sont flétries et foulées aux pieds."

* W. *

ORPHICS.

From right to left swingeth the Pendulum. It hath ticked the death-knell of the present moment and joined it to the past, and it now returneth to the Future.

From left to right it swingeth back again, bearing a point of time from the Future without end, through the momentary Present, to the Past without beginning; and by the short arc it describes, separates an Eternity past from an Eternity to come.

dX.

Fame and Immortality-they flee from the living and alas, for the dead! they have fled away from their Fame and their Immortality.

,',

DAWN OF ENGLISH LITERATURE.

LITERATURE is the mirror of the popular mind. Whatever be its form or appearance, whether its different aspects be considered as the cause or the effect of the various changes to which society has been exposed, it will always be found to picture forth distinctly, the predominant feelings and tastes which characterize the age in which it is produced. No one can become an accurate historian; no one can indeed fully understand the state of society at a certain period of its history, without having studied and thoroughly understood the nature of its cotemporaneous literature. Society may mould the literature, or the literature may give character to society, in either case as certainly as we learn the nature of the one, do we become acquainted with the qualities of the other, in either case we shall find that the history of the one in its great and essential points is but a record of the other in its fundamental characteristics, and that each of the two offers us a direct and positive counterpart to the other. This principle, if true, becomes of incalculable service, in enabling us to determine many points in the literary history of the world that would otherwise remain entirely covered with obscurity. Thus, from what we know of the character of society at a certain age, we are able to judge with almost infallible certainty, of what must have been the character of its literature, even though no specimens have come down to aid us in our estimate.

Only by this means are we able to arrive at a correct judgment of the state of literature in the early periods of English history. A veil of darkness hangs closely drawn around the intellectual and physical condition of those times, and it is only by collecting and combining the scattered light which we can gain from them both that we are able to see with any distinctness the prominent outlines in the picture of each. Neither is able to give us alone a fair representation of itself, but the one and the other, to be understood fully, must be viewed in that reciprocal relation by which the history of both shows they are ever connected. Thus when we turn back five hundred