miraculously slain in the days before the old hall was built. It was the Normans who began to build that fine old hall, which is like the town, telling of the thoughts and hands of widelysundered generations; but it is all so old that we look with loving pardon at its inconsistencies, and are well content that they who built the stone oriel, and they who built the Gothic façade and towers of finest small brickwork with the trefoil ornament, and the windows and battlements defined with stone, did not sacrilegiously pull down the ancient half-timbered body with its oak-roofed banqueting-hall. 66 But older even than this old hall is perhaps the bit of wall now built into the belfry of the parish church, and said to be a remnant of the original chapel dedicated to St. Ogg, the patron saint of this ancient town, of whose history I possess several manuscript versions. I incline to the briefest, since, if it should not be wholly true, it is at least likely to contain the least falsehood. "Ogg, the son of Beorl," says my private hagiographer, was a boatman who gained a scanty living by ferrying passengers across the river Floss. And it came to pass, one evening when the winds were high, that there sat moaning by the brink of the river a woman with a child in her arms; and she was clad in rags, and had a worn and withered look, and she craved to be rowed across the river. And the men thereabout questioned her, and said, 'Wherefore dost thou desire to cross the river? Tarry till the morning, and take shelter here for the night: so shalt thou be wise, and not foolish.' Still she went on to mourn and crave But Ogg, the son of Beorl, came up and said, 'I will ferry thee across it is enough that thy heart needs it. And he ferried her across. And it came to pass, when she stepped ashore, that her rags were turned into robes of flowing white, and her face became bright with exceeding beauty, and there was a glory around it, so that she shed a light on the water like the moon in its brightness. And she said,-'Ogg, the son of Beorl, thou art blessed in that thou didst not question and wrangle with the heart's need, but wast smitten with pity, and didst straightway relieve the same. And from henceforth whoso steps into thy boat shall be in no peril from the storm; and whenever it puts forth to the rescue, it shall save the lives both of men and beasts.' And when the floods came, many were saved by reason of tha: blessing on the boat. But when Ogg, the son of Beorl, died behold, in the parting of his soul, the boat loosed itself from its moorings, and was floated with the ebbing tide in great swiftness to the ocean, and was seen no more. Yet it was wit nessed in the floods of the after-time, that at the coming on of eventide, Ogg, the son of Beorl, was always seen with his boat upon the wide-spreading waters, and the Blessed Lady sat in the prow, shedding a light around as of the moon in its brightness, so that the rowers in the gathering darkness took heart and pulled anew." 61.—OPPOSITE EXAMPLES. HORACE MANN. 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 fortune he would covet, or whose fate he would abhor. Even as we walk the streets, we meet with exhibitions of ear h 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. Enjoying his appetites to the highest, he has preserved the power of enjoying them. As he drains the cup of life, there are no lees at the bottom. His organs will reach the goal of existence together. Painlessly as a candle burns down in its socket, so will he expire; and a little imagination would convert him into another Enoch, translated from earth to a better world without the sting of death. But look at an opposite extreme, where an opposite history is recorded. What wreck so shocking to behold as the wreck of a dissolute man;-the vigor of life exhausted, and yet the first steps in an honorable career not taken; in himself a lazarhouse of diseases; dead, but, by a heathenish custom of society, unburied! Rogues have had the initial letter of their title burnt into the palms of their hands; even for murder, Cain was only branded on the forehead; but over the whole per son of the debauchee or the inebriate, the signatures of infamy are written. How nature brands him with stigma and opprobrium! How she hangs labels all over him, to testify her disgust at his existence, and to admonish others to beware of his example! How she loosens all his joints, sends tremors along his muscles, and bends forward his frame, as if to bring him upon all-fours with kindred brutes, or to degrade him to the reptile's crawling! How she disfigures his countenance, as if intent upon obliterating all traces of her own image, so that she may swear she never made him! How she pours rheum over his eyes, sends foul spirits to inhabit his breath, and shrieks, as with a trumpet, from every pore of his body, "Behold a beast!" Such a man may be seen in the streets of our cities every day; if rich enough, he may be found in the saloons, and at the tables of the "upper ten;" but surely, to every man of purity and honor, to every man whose wisdom as well as whose heart is unblemished, the wretch who comes cropped and bleeding from the pillory, and redolent with its appropriate perfumes, would be a guest or a companion far less offensive and disgusting. Now let the young man, rejoicing in his manly proportions, and in his comeliness, look on this picture, and on this, and then say, after the likeness of which model he intends his own erect stature and sublime countenance shall be configured. 62.-TELL ON HIS NATIVE HILLS. J. S. KNOWLES. Oh, with what pride I used To walk these hills, and look up to my God, And bless him that the land was free! 'Twas free- Free as our torrents are that leap our rocks, How happy was it then! I loved Its very storms. Yes, I have sat In my boat at night, when, midway o'er the lake, On yonder jutting cliff, o'ertaken there As if to sweep me o'er the horrid brink, I have thought of other lands, whose storms Have wished me there-the thought that mine was free 63.-AMONG MY BOOKS. ALEXANDER SMITH. In my garden I spend my days; in my library I spend my nights. My interests are divided between my geraniums and my books. With the flowers I am in the present; with the books I am in the past. I go into my library, and all history unrolls before me. I breathe the morning air of the world while the scent of Eden's roses yet lingered in it, while it vibrated only to the world's first brood of nightingales, and to the laugh of Eve. I see the pyramids building; I hear the shoutings of the armies of Alexander; I feel the ground shake beneath the march of Camby'ses. I sit as in a theatre, the stage is time, the play is the world. What a spectacle it is! What kingly pomp, what processions file past, what cities burn to heaven, what crowds of captives are dragged at the chariotwheels of conquerors! I hear or cry "Bravo!" when the great actors come on, shaking the stage. I am a Roman emperor when I look at a Roman coin. I lift old Homer, and I shout Achilles in the trenches. The silence of the empeopled Syrian plains, the out-comings and in-goings of the patriarchs, Abraham and Ishmael, Isaac in the fields at eventide, Rebekah at the well, Jacob's guile, Esau's face reddened by desert sun-heat, Joseph's splendid funeral procession,—all these things I find within the beards of my Old Testament. What a silence in those old books, as of a half-peopled world; what bleating of flocks, what green pastoral rest, what indubitable human existence! Across brawling centuries of blood and war, I hear the bleating of Abraham's flocks, the tinkling of the bells of Rebekah's camels. O men and women, so far separated yet so near, so strange yet so well-known, by what miraculous power do I know you all! Books are the true Elysian fields where the spirits of the dead converse, and into these fields a mortal may venture unappalled. What king's court can boast such company? What school of philosophy such wisdom? There is Pan's pipe; there are the songs of Apollo. Seated in my library at night, and looking on the silent faces of my books, I am occasionally visited by a strange sense of the supernatural. They are not collections of printed pages; they are ghosts. I take one down, and it speaks with me in a tongue not now heard on earth, and of men and things of which it alone possesses the knowledge. I call myself a solitary, but sometimes I think I misapply the term. No man sees more company than I do. I travel with mightier cohorts around me than ever did Timour or Genghi ŝ Khan on their fiery marches. I am a sovereign in my library, but it is the dead, not the living, that attend my levees. 64. THE RAINBOW. I sometimes have thought in my loneliest hours, When my heart was as light as a blossom in June; Its soft-tinted pinions of purple and gold! With a wing on the earth and a wing on the sea. How calm was the ocean! how gentle its swell! Like a woman's soft bosom, it rose and it fell, prayer, While its light sparkling waves, stealing laughingly o'er, |