humble than of an exalted social station. It is the high aim and the struggle to attain it that arm the hero for the strife he is certain to meet in his life career. The noblest life, the highest aim, is one which forgets self and selfish interests for the sake of others, and craves the utmost capacity for doing good under all circumstances. A noble life is the expression of a noble character. Lowell says, "Great character is as rare a thing as genius, if not even a nobler form of it. For surely it is easier to embody fine thinking or delicate sentiment, or lofty aspiration, in a book than in a life."

BUSY LIVES.

Cardwill.

Busy lives, like running water, are generally pure. Nothing will do more to improve the looks than sunshine in the heart. Endeavor to keep your life in the sunshine—the shadows will catch it soon enough. A child's mind is often much like a piece of white paper upon which anything may be written. Don't blot it. Those who have the "best times" when they are young begin the soonest to nurse their rheumatism. Happy is he who has learned this one thing-to do the plain duty of the moment quickly and cheerfully, whatever it may be. If you want knowledge, you must toil for it; if you want food, you must toil for it; and if pleasure, you must toil for it. Toil is the law. Pleasure comes through toil, and not by self-indulgence and indolence. When one gets to love work his life should be happy and useful. Therefore learn to enjoy your work. "Triumph and toil are twins."

FOUR OUTLINES.

Said he "I am
and conquer the
In the next he
Every day from

A mouse saw his shadow on the wall. larger than an elephant. I will go forth world." At that moment he espied a cat. had slipped through a hole in the wall. . the time he was a boy, a man walked alone in a quiet place and thought, and he doubted not it was the same man who had walked there for so many years, but at length he came to know that the same man had not walked there twice. . . . Death came to a door and knocked. Seeing it was Death, they barred the door, but Death broke down the bars and entered, taking away whom he would. Death came to another door and knocked. Seeing it was Death, they opened wide the door and welcomed him. At this Death turned his back and went saying, "Who desires me, I desire not." . . . Two men plowed in a field. One plowed straight, keeping his eyes on

the ground. No weeds grew, and he gathered great stores of corn. When he died, his son inherited much land. He lived in comfort and plowed in his father's fields. The other's furrows were not straight. At times he stopped to listen to the lark, or to admire a flower that grew upon a weed. He knew the names of the plants and their times of flowering. He knew the names of the stars also. He died owning no goods or lands. His son inherited his father's poverty. The son inherited also his father's love of nature. And he became a great artist, whose name and fame spread over two continents.

WHEN WE PLANT A TREE.

When we plant a tree, we are doing what we can to make our planet a more wholesome and happier dwelling place for those who come after us, if not for ourselves. As you drop the seed, as you plant the sapling, your left hand hardly knows what your right hand is doing. But nature knows, and in time the power that sees and works in secret will reward you openly. You have been warned against hiding your talent in a napkin; but if your talent takes the form of a maple key or an acorn, and your napkin is a shred of the apron that covers "the lap of the earth," you may hide it there unblamed; and when you render in your account you will find that your deposit has been drawing compound interest all the time. I have written many verses, but the best poems I have produced are the trees I planted on the hillside which overlooks the broad meadows scalloped and rounded at their edges by loops of the sinuous Housatonic. Nature finds rhymes for them in the recurring measures of the seasons. Winter strips them of their ornaments and gives them, as it were, in prose translation, and summer reclothes them in all the splendid phrases of their leafy language.

NATURE AND CHILDREN.

Holmes.

While we would by no means neglect on such an occasion as Arbor Day to call attention to the great economic uses of forests, the perils attending their wanton destruction, the necessity of prompt and watchful care lest through the rapid march of civilization we bring upon ourselves the very evils we seek to avoid, and would keep up from 'year to year a spirited and concerted action against our dangers, by planting along roadsides, in parks and yards, and around every school building, trees, and shrubs, and vines, and flowers; yet we would, with special emphasis, call the children to a wholesome

converse with Nature herself; would withdraw them from the restraints of books and recitation tasks, and woo them to her shady haunts, her valleys and hills, to deepen in their souls a sense of her life and a delight in her beauty, and some clear and sympathetic feeling of perpetual companionship; would take them to the deep ravines, though themselves scarcely so tall as the brambly goatsbeard growing there; and they should scale the scarry heights and gaze delighted on the billowy green below; they should know the jutting rock, and moss-lipped spring, and foamy torrent; they should ramble over the rolling hills, or look upon the reddening flush of clover-fields, or watch the ripples running over the windtouched wheat; they should mark each willowy creek, following it until through laurel bloom and fragrant birch, but a brook, it leaps laughing from the shadows of the mountain; they should scan each winding valley until narrowing to a wavering path it vanishes in the distant misty hills; they should hear the sparrows' silvery song thrilling the briery hedge, and see the bobolinks, with quivering wings, send down showers of rapturous melody upon the dew-bent grass; they should learn to love Nature with such tender reverence as never to abuse her or profane her; and, inspired by such love, they should seek her help in making home, or school, or village, or city, a comforting delight, a culturing power, a presence of beauty through life.

NEVER-ENDING PROGRESS.

Higbec.

It is a man's chief blessedness that there lie in his nature infinite possibilities of growth. The growth of animals comes quickly to an end, and when they cease to grow, they cease to be joyful; but man, whose bodily development even is slow, is capable of rising to wider knowledge and purer love through unending ages. Hence, even when he is old-if he has lived for what is great and exalted-his mind is clear, his heart is tender, and his soul is glad. Only those races are noble, only those individuals are worthy, who yield without reserve to the power of this impulse to ceaseless progress. Behold how the race from which we have sprung-the Aryan -breaks forth into ever new developments of strength and beauty in Greece, in Italy, in France, in England, in Germany, in America; creating literature, philosophy, science, art; receiving Christian truth, and through its aid rising to diviner heights of wisdom, power, love and knowledge. And so there are individuals-and they are born to teach and rule

-for whom to live is to grow; who, forgetting what they have been and what they are, think ever only of becoming more and more. Their education is never finished; their development is never complete; their work is never done. From victories won they look to other battlefields; from every height of knowledge they peer into the widening nescience; from all achievements and possessions they turn away toward the unapproachable Infinite, to whom they are drawn. Walking in the shadow of the too great light of God, they are illumined and they are darkened. This made Newton think his knowledge ignorance; this makes St. Paul think his heroic virtue naught. Oh, blessed men, who make us feel that we are of the race of God; who measure and weigh the heavens ; who love with boundless love; who toil and are patient; who teach us that workers can wait. They are in love with life; they yearn for fuller life. Life is good, and the highest life is God; and wherever man grows in knowledge, wisdom, strength; in faith, hope, and love; he walks in the way of heaven.

THE DREAM POWER.

Spaulding.

Unlock the door; let no foot-fall from the present disturb this shadowy scene. It is the old room-the familiar room. I see her there. There is no sense of strangeness or unreality about her; she smiles, as she was wont to smile, she moves softly-her fingers turn the music leaves-the candles are lighted-her face is half in shade-I can hear her low melodious laugh. I seem to be once more holding my Stradivarius violin lovingly. What! there is no sign of dust, or age, or neglect about this long-closed room. As we go back to past chapters of a beloved story, so have I gone back to read again a fragment of life, and as I look, and look, and look, the intervening years roll away, the shadows become real," till only the dead seem living, and only the living seem dead." it be Mendelssohn's D minor trio. The playing of that night remains with me. We seemed alive-sensitively alive to every vibration; her fingers caressed the cool ivory keys lovingly, the Stradivarius spoke rapturously to the lightest touch of the bow, the full toned violoncello gave out the deep but tender notes, like the voices of the sea in enchanted caves. How clean and "seizing," as the French say, was her rendering of the opening movement! How wonderfully woven in were the parts! We all three made but one, yet retaining our perfect individualities. A mystic presence invisible seemed to be with us; we felt as if playing in the presence of the great, gentle

Let

Mendelssohn; and though we played, so absorbed were we that we seemed at the same moment to be following our own music like listeners, in ourselves and out of ourselves. Between the movements we spoke not. I marked the flush upon her cheek--the bright light in her eyes. He was grave, intensely pre-occupied the dream power was upon us all. The peace

and full contentment of the slow movement with its rich and measured flow of melody melting at last into that heavenly trance at the close, which leaves us at the open gates of Paradise; then the sudden break at the scherzo, as though a joyous troop of lower earth spirits had burst in to tear us away from the divine contemplation, and toss us back into a world of wild uproar and merriment; then a slight pause before the tempestuous, but intensely earnest, conclusion. Here is the battle of life, with its suspense, its failure, its endeavor-striving for the victory, its wild and passionate overthrow, indomitable recovery and untamed valor; that is the bracing and sublime atmosphere of the last movement, more true to life than ecstasy, more wholesome than peace, more dignified than pleasure; and there the D minor trio leaves us.

REMEMBRANCE.

The

The sight of a faded flower pressed in a book brings back, with a little shock of feeling, the hand that gathered it, or the distant hills upon which it once bloomed years ago. touch of satin or fine hair is also capable of reviving the recollection of scenes, and places, and persons. But for freshness, and suddenness, and power over memory, all the senses must yield to the sense of hearing. When memory is concerned, music is no longer itself; it ceases to have any proper plane of feeling; it surrenders itself wholly, with all its rights, to memory, to be the patient, stern and terrible exponent of that recording angel. What is it? Only a few trivial bars of an old piano forte piece, " Murmures du Rhone or "Pluie des Perles." The drawing-room window is open, the children are playing on the lawn, the warm morning air is charged with the scent of the lilac blossoms. Then the ring at the bell, the confusion in the hall. The girl at the piano stops, and one is lifted in dying or dead. Years, years ago! but passing through the streets, a bar or two of the "Murmures du Rhone" brings the whole scene up before the girl, now no longer a girl, but a middle-aged woman looking back to one fatal summer morning. The enthusiastic old men, who invariably turned up when Madame Grisi was advertised to sing