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And such is human life; so gliding on,
It glimmers like a meteor, and is gone!
Yet is the tale, brief though it be, as strange,
As full, methinks, of wild and wondrous change,
As any that the wandering tribes require,
Stretch'd in the desert round their evening fire;
As any sung of old, in hall or bower.

To minstrel-harps at midnight's witching hour!

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The hour arrives, the moment wish'd and fear'd;
The child is born, by many a pang endear'd.
And now the mother's ear has caught his cry;
Oh, grant the cherub to her asking eye!

He comes, she clasps him. To her bosom press'd,
He drinks the balm of life and drops to rest.

Her by her smile how soon the stranger knows!
How soon by his the glad discovery shows!
As to her lips she lifts the lovely boy,

What answering looks of sympathy and joy!
He walks, he speaks. In many a broken word
His wants, his wishes, and his griefs are heard.
And ever, ever to her lap he flies,

When rosy Sleep comes on with sweet surprise.
Lock'd in her arms, his arms across her flung,
(That name most dear forever on his tongue,)
As with soft accents round her neck he clings,
And, cheek to cheek, her lulling song she sings,
How blest to feel the beatings of his heart,
Breathe his sweet breath, and kiss for kiss impart;
Watch o'er his slumbers like the brooding dove,
And, if she can, exhaust a mother's love!

But soon a nobler task demands her care,
Apart she joins his little hands in prayer,
Telling of Him who sees in secret there:
And now the volume on her knee has caught
His wandering eye-now many a written thoug
Never to die, with many a lisping sweet,

His moving, murmuring lips endeavor to repeat.1

GINEVRA.

She was an only child-her name Ginevra,-
The joy, the pride of an indulgent father;
And in her fifteenth year became a bride,
Marrying an only son, Francesco Doria,

Her playmate from her birth, and her first love.

Just as she looks there in a bridal dress,
She was all gentleness, all gayety,
Her pranks the favorite theme of every tongue.

1"I have now lost my barrier between me and death. God grant I may live to be as well prepared for it as I confidently believe her to

Human Life.

have been. If the way to heaven be through piety, truth, justice, and charity, she is there." -SWIFT, on the death of his mother.

But now the day was come, the day, the hour;
Now frowning, smiling, for the hundredth time,
The nurse, that ancient lady, preached decorum;
And, in the lustre of her youth, she gave
Her hand, with her heart in it, to Francesco.

Great was the joy; but at the nuptial feast,
When all sate down, the bride herself was wanting;
Nor was she to be found! Her father cried,
"Tis but to make a trial of our love!"

And fill'd his glass to all; but his hand shook,
And soon from guest to guest the panic spread.
'Twas but that instant she had left Francesco,
Laughing, and looking back, and flying still,
Her ivory tooth imprinted on his finger.
But now, alas! she was not to be found;
Nor from that hour could any thing be guess'd,
But that she was not!

Weary of his life,
Francesco flew to Venice, and, embarking,
Flung it away in battle with the Turks.
Orsini lived; and long might you have seen
An old man wandering as in quest of something,-
Something he could not find, he knew not what.
When he was gone, the house remained awhile
Silent and tenantless, then went to strangers.

Full fifty years were past, and all forgotten,
When on an idle day, a day of search
'Mid the old lumber in the gallery,

That moldering chest was noticed; and 'twas said,
By one as young, as thoughtless as Ginevra,
Why not remove it from its lurking place?"
'Twas done as soon as said; but on the way
It burst, it fell; and lo! a skeleton,

With here and there a pearl, an emerald stone,
A golden clasp, clasping a shred of gold.
All else had perish'd-save a wedding-ring
And a small seal, her mother's legacy,
Engraven with a name, the name of both,
"Ginevra."

There then had she found a grave!
Within that chest had she conceal'd herself,
Fluttering with joy, the happiest of the happy;
When a spring-lock, that lay in ambush there,
Fasten'd her down forever!

A WISH.

Mine be a cot beside the hill;

A beehive's hum shall soothe my ear,

A willowy brook that turns a mill,
With many a fall, shall linger near.

The swallow oft beneath my thatch
Shall twitter from her clay-built nest;
Oft shall the pilgrim lift the latch,

And share my meal, a welcome guest.

Around my ivied porch shall spring
Each fragrant flower that drinks the dew;
And Lucy, at her wheel, shall sing
In russet gown and apron blue.

The village church, among the trees,
Where first our marriage vows were given,
With merry peals shall swell the breeze,
And point with taper spire to heaven.

HUGH MILLER, 1802–1856.

HUGH MILLER, "the stone-mason of Cromarty," was born October 10, 1802. His only éducation, in the scholastic sense of the term, was received at the grammar-school in his native town; and yet he is scarcely less remarkable as a master of picturesque English prose than as a practical geologist. On leaving school, at seventeen, he began to work as a stone-mason, and continued at this labor till his thirty-fourth year, devoting, however, all his leisure moments to researches in natural history, and to the enlargement of his literary knowledge, Shakspeare, Milton, and Bacon being his favorite authors. Most of his companions in labor were of exceptionable habits, and it seems wonderful that he escaped falling into the same; but let him tell his own story:

THE TURNING-POINT IN HIS LIFE.

2

In laying down the foundation-stone of one of the larger houses! built this year by Uncle David and his partner, the workmen had a royal "founding pint," and two whole glasses of the whiskey came to my share. A full-grown man would not have deemed a gill of usquebaugh an overdose, but it was considerably too much for me; and when the party broke up, and I got home to my books, I found, as I opened the pages of a favorite author, the letters dancing before my eyes, and that I could no longer master the sense. I have the volume at present before me,-a small edition of the Essays of Bacon, a good deal worn at the corners by the friction of the pocket,-for of Bacon I never tired. The condition into which I had brought myself was, I felt, one of degradation. I had sunk, by my own act, for the time, to a lower level of intelligence than that on which it was my privilege to be placed; and though the state could have been no very

1 A town in the north of Scotland.

other spirits, with raisins, cinnamon, and other

2 A strong compound liquor of brandy and spices.

***

favorable one for forming a resolution, I in that hour determined that I should never again sacrifice my capacity of intellectual enjoyment to a drinking usage; and, with God's help, I was enabled to hold by the determination. I see, in looking back on this my first year of labor, a dangerous point, at which, in the attempt to escape from the sense of depression and fatigue, the craving appetite of the confirmed tippler might have been

formed.

He opened his brilliant literary career, in 1829, by publishing a volume of Poems, by a Stone-Mason, which was well received, and soon after Letters on the Herring Fishery, descriptive of a fisher's life at sea, which gave evidence of his nice observing faculties and of his pure English style. After about sixteen years spent with his hammer and chisel, he became, after his marriage, accountant in a Cromarty bank. In this position about six years were spent, during which his chief literary performance was Scenes and Legends in the North of Scotland, or the Traditional History of Cromarty. The Church of Scotland was at that time deeply agitated by the "Non-Intrusion principle," and Mr. Miller's feelings being all on the side of the Non-Intrusionists, he wrote two powerful pamphlets on the subject, which attracted so much attention that he was selected in 1840 to edit the Edinburgh Witness. Accordingly he removed to that city, and entered at once upon his duties as editor, which station he filled with signal ability to the day of his death. But, amid all the toils and distractions of journalism, he continued to cultivate his darling studies. The Old Red Sandstone, 1841; First Impressions of England and its People, 1847; Foot-Prints of the Creator, 1850; a charming autobiography entitled My Schools and Schoolmasters, 1854; and The Testimony of the Rocks, 1857; give evidence of his unceasing toil. Indeed, his labors were altogether too much for him; his brain gave way, and in a moment of aberration he put an end to his own existence at Portobello, near Edinburgh, on the 24th of December, 1856. His last work named above he had completed for the press, but it was not published till the next year. Two other works-The Cruise of the Betsey, a geological voyage to the Hebrides, and The Sketch-Book of Popular Geology-were edited by his widow after his death.2

There may be more scientific and learned geologists on the roll of English scholars than Hugh Miller, but no one has done so much to make the study of geology interesting and popular, and hardly any one has equalled him in the grace, purity, and varied splendor of his style. He presents, too, a noble example of what self-education can do for a man; and whether regarded as the fearless and independent writer, or the scientific and Christian scholar, showing how the works of God are in harmony with His Word,3 his character will ever claim the respect and reverence of posterity.

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PENTECOSTAL GIFT.

I remember being much struck, several years ago, by a remark dropped in conversation by the late Rev. Mr. Stewart of Cromarty, one of the most original-minded men I ever knew. "In reading in my Greek New Testament this morning,” he said. “I was curiously impressed by a thought which, simple as it may seem, never occurred to me before. The portion which I perused was in the First Epistle of Peter; and as I passed from the thinking of the passage to the language in which it is expressed, 'This Greek of the untaught Galilean fisherman,' I said, 'so admired by scholars and critics for its unaffected dignity and force, was not acquired, as that of Paul may have been, in the ordinary way, but formed a portion of the Pentecostal gift! Here, then, immediately under my eye, on these pages, are there embodied, not, as in many other parts of the Scriptures, the mere details of a miracle, but the direct results of a miracle. How strange! Had the old tables of stone been placed before me, with what an awe-struck feeling would I have looked on the characters traced upon them by God's own fingers! How is it that I have failed to remember that, in the language of these Epistles, miraculously impressed by the Divine power upon the mind, I possessed as significant and suggestive a relic as that which the inscription miraculously impressed by the Divine power upon the stone could possibly have furnished?"

TRACES OF THE OCEAN.

Was it the sound of the distant surf that was in mine ears, or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neighboring wood? Oh, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent since time first began where has it not been uttered? There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless desert, where no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand and the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his sands that the winds heap up; and it is the skeleton remains of his vassals-shells, and fish, and the strong coral-that the rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall mountain-peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting lungs labor to inhale the thin bleak air, where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders over multitudinous hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along long hollow valleys where the great rivers begin. And yet once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The elegies of his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on

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