O Blaavin, rocky Blaavin,

It was with the strangest start

That I felt, at the little querulous cry,
The new pulse awake in my heart;

A pulse that will live and beat, Blaavin,

Till, standing around my bed,

While the chirrup of birds is heard out in the dawn,

The watchers whisper, He's dead!

O another heart is mine, Blaavin,

Sin' this time seven year,

For Life is brighter by a charm,
Death darker by a fear.
O Blaavin, rocky Blaavin,

How I long to be with you again,
To see lash'd gulf and gully
Smoke white in the windy rain-

To see in the scarlet sunrise

The mist-wreaths perish with heat,

The wet rock slide with a trickling gleam
Right down to the cataracts' feet;

While toward the crimson islands,

Where the sea-birds flutter and skirl,

A cormorant flaps o'er a sleek ocean floor
Of tremulous mother-of-pearl.

HERE may be a kind of poetical or Arcadian divinity drawn from the brightness of sunshine, and the rich enamel of flowers, and the deep dark blue of a sleeping lake. And, taking the glowing landscape as their page of theology, men may sketch to themselves God unlimited in His benevolence. But when the sunshine is succeeded by the darkness, and the flowers are withered, and the waters wrought into madness, can they find in the wrath and devastation that assurance of God's love, which they derived, unhesitatingly, from the calm and the beauty? The matter of fact we hold to be, that natural theology, at the best, is a system of uncertainties, a balancing of opposites. I should draw different conclusions from the genial breathings of one day, and the desolating simoom of the next. And though, when I had thrown me down on an Alpine summit, and looked forth on the clusterings of the grand and the lovely, canopied with an azure that was full of glory, a hope that my Creator loved me might have been gathered from scenery teeming with impresses of kindness, and apparently sending out from waving forests, and gushing fountains, and smiling villages, the anthem of an acknowledgment that God is infinitely beneficent; yet if, on a sudden, there passed around me the rushings of the hurricane, and there came up from the vallies the shrieks of an affrighted peasantry, and the torrents went down in their strength, sweeping away the labour of man's hands, and the corn and the wood which had crowned the fields as a diadem; oh, the confidence which had been given me, by an exhibition which appeared eloquent, of the benevolence of Godhead, would yield to horror and trepidation, whilst the Eternal One seemed walking before me, the tempest His voice, and the lightning His glance, and a fierce devastation in His every footprint!

BE

PROCRASTINATION.
(Young)

E wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer:
Next day the fatal precedent will plead;
Thus on, till wisdom is push'd out of life.
Procrastination is the thief of time;
Year after year it steals, till all are fled,
And to the mercies of a moment leaves
The vast concerns of an eternal scene.
If not so frequent, would not this be strange?
That 'tis so frequent, this is stranger still.

Of man's miraculous mistakes, this bears
The palm, "That all men are about to live,"
For ever on the brink of being born:
All pay themselves the compliment to think
They one day shall not drivel, and their pride
On this reversion takes up ready praise;
At least their own; their future selves applaud;
How excellent that life they ne'er will lead !
Time lodged in their own hands is Folly's vails;
That lodged in Fate's to wisdom they consign;

L

The thing they can't but purpose, they postpone. 'Tis not in folly not to scorn a fool,

And scarce in human wisdom to do more.

All promise is poor dilatory man,

And that through every stage; when young, indeed,
In full content we sometimes nobly rest,

Unanxious for ourselves, and only wish.

As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise.

At thirty man suspects himself a fool;
Knows it at forty, and reforms his plan;
At fifty chides his infamous delay,
Pushes his prudent purpose to resolve;
In all the magnanimity of thought
Resolves and re-resolves; then dies the same.

And why? because he thinks himself immortal.
All men think all men mortal but themselves;
Themselves, when some alarming shock of fate
Strikes through their wounded hearts the sudden dread:
But their hearts wounded, like the wounded air,
Soon close; where past the shaft no trace is found,
As from the wing no scar the sky retains,
The parted wave no furrow from the keel,

So dies in human hearts the thought of death:
E'en with the tender tear which nature sheds
O'er those we love, we drop it in their grave.

HE omnipresent Spirit perceives all but an infinite number of actions taking place together throughout the different regions of His empire. And by the end of the hour which has just begun, a greater number of operations will have been performed, which at this moment have not been performed, than the collective sum of all that has been done in this world since its creation. The hour just now begun may be exactly the period for finishing some great plan, or concluding some great dispensation, which thousands of years or ages have been advancing to its accomplishment. This may be the very hour in which a new world shall originate, or an ancient one sink in ruins. At this hour, such changes and phenomena may be displayed in some parts of the universe, as were never presented to the astonishment of the most ancient created minds. At this very hour the inhabitants of some remote orb may be roused by signs analogous to those which we anticipate to precede the final judgment, and in order to prepare them for such an event. This hour may somewhere begin or conclude mightier contests than Milton was able to imagine, and contests producing a more stupendous result; contests, in comparison of which those which shake Europe are more diminutive than those of the meanest insects. At this very hour thousands of amazing enterprises may be undertaken, and by the end of it a progress made, which to