A happy life grows warm in every limb;
And if a precious parchment you unroll,
Your senses in delight appear to swim,

And heaven itself descends upon your soul.

Goethe's Faust.

Books are faithful repositories, which may be awhile neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction.-Johnson.

Books are a part of man's prerogative:

In formal ink, they thought and voices hold;
Then we to them our solitude may give,
And make time travel as of old.
Our life, Fame pieceth longer at the end,
And books it farther backward do extend.

Sir T. Overbury.

Books give

New views to life, and teach us how to live;
They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise,
Fools they admonish, and confirm the wise.—Crabbe.

THE CONSOLATIONS OF LITERATURE.

I FIND my joy and solace in literature. There is no gladness that this cannot increase; no sorrow that it cannot lessen. Troubled as I am by the ill health of my wife, by the dangerous condition-sometimes, alas! by the death-of my friends, I fly to my studies as the one alleviation of my fears. They do me this service-they make me understand my troubles better, and bear them more patiently. Certainly there is a pleasure in these pursuits, but they themselves prosper best when the mind is light.—Pliny.

Experience enables me to depone to the comfort and blessing that literature can prove in seasons of sickness and sorrow ; how powerfully intellectual pursuits can help in keeping the head from crazing and the heart from breaking.-Thomas Hood.

PURSUITS OF LITERATURE.

SUCH a superiority do the pursuits of literature possess above every other occupation, that even he who attains but a mediocrity in them, merits the pre-eminence above those that excel most in the common and vulgar professions.-Hume.

GIVING ADVICE.

No part of conduct asks for skill more nice,
Though none more common, than to give advice;
Misers themselves in this will not be saving,
Unless their knowledge makes it worth the having :
And where's the wonder? When we will obtrude
A useless gift, it meets ingratitude.—Stillingfleet.

I

The most difficult province in friendship is the letting a man see his faults and errors; which should, if possible, be so contrived that he may perceive our advice is given him, not so much to please ourselves, as for his own advantage. The reproaches, therefore, of a friend should always be strictly just and not too frequent.-Budgell.

THE GENERAL SUBJUGATOR.

A PAIR of bright eyes, with a dozen glances, suffice to subdue a man, to enslave him, and to inflame him, to make him even forget. They dazzle him so that the past becomes straightway dim to him, and he so prizes them that he would give all his life to possess 'em. What is the fond love of the dearest friends compared to this treasure? Is memory as strong as expectancy? fruition as hunger? gratitude as desire? I have looked at royal diamonds in the jewel rooms in Europe, and thought how wars have been made about 'em; Mogul sovereigns deposed and strangled for them, or ransomed with them; and daring lives lost in digging out the little shiny toys, that I value no more than the button in my hat. And so there are other glittering baubles (of rare water, too) for which men have been set to kill and quarrel ever since mankind began, and which last for a score of years, when their sparkle is over. Where are those jewels now that beamed under Cleopatra's forehead, or shone in the sockets of Helen ?— Thackeray's Esmond.

MUTABILITY.

THE flower that smiles to-day

To-morrow dies;

All that we wish to stay

Tempts, and then flies.
What is this world's delight?
Lightning, that mocks the night,
Brief, even as bright!

Virtue, how frail it is!

Friendship, too rare!

Love, how it sells poor bliss

For proud despair!

But we, though soon they fall,
Survive their joy, and all
Which ours we call.

Whilst skies are blue and bright,

Whilst flowers are gay,

Whilst eyes that change ere night
Make glad the day;

Whilst yet the calm hours creep,
Dream thou, and from thy sleep

Then wake to weep.-Shelley.

PRECEPT AND EXAMPLE.

THOUGH "the words of the wise be as nayles fastened by the masters of the assemblies," yet sure their examples are the hammer to drive them in to take the deeper hold. A father that whipt his son for swearing, and swore himself while he whipt him, did more harm by his example than good by his correction.-Fuller.

NEW ACQUAINTANCES.

IF a man does not make new acquaintances as he advances in life, he will soon find himself alone. A man should keep his friendship in constant repair.―Johnson.

LAUGHTER.

No man who has once heartily and wholly laughed can be altogether irreclaimably bad. How much lies in laughter-the cipher key wherewith we decipher the whole man! Some men wear an everlasting barren simper; in the smile of others lies a cold glitter as of ice; the fewest are able to laugh what can be called laughing, but only sniff, and titter, and snigger, and titter, from the throat outwards, or at best produce some whiffling husky cachinnation, as if they were laughing through wool; of none such comes good. The man who cannot laugh is not only fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils, but his whole life is already a treason and a stratagem.-Carlyle.

OCCUPATIONS IN RETIREMENT.

LET our station be as retired as it may, there is no want of playthings, and associations, nor much need to seek them in this world of ours. Business, or what presents itself to us under that imposing character, will find us out, even in the stillest retreat, as a just demand upon our attention. It is wonderful how, by means of such real or seeming necessities, my time is stolen away. I have just time to observe that time is short, and by the time I have made the observation, time is gone.-Cowper's Letters.

DREAMS.

DREAMS are but interludes which Fancy makes :
When monarch Reason sleeps, this mimic wakes;
Compounds a medley of disjointed things,

A court of cobblers, and a mob of kings.
Light fumes are merry, grosser fumes are sad :
Both are the unreasonable soul run mad;
And many monstrous forms in sleep we see,
That neither were, nor are, nor e'er can be.
Sometimes forgotten things, long cast behind,
Rush forward in the brain, and come to mind.

The nurse's legends are for truth received,
And the man dreams but what the boy believed;
Sometimes we but rehearse a former play,
The night restores our actions done by day;
As hounds in sleep will open for their prey.
In short, the farce of dreams is of a piece
In chimeras all, and more absurd or less.

HUMAN FRAILTY.

Dryden: Chaucer.

THE best of men appear sometimes to be strange compounds of contradictory qualities; and were the accidental oversights and folly of the wisest man,-the failings and imperfections of a religious man,— the hasty acts and passionate words of a meek man,―were they to rise up in judgment against them, and an ill-natured judge to be suffered to mark in this manner what has been done amiss, what character so unexceptionable as to be able to stand before him?—Sterne.

POOR SCHOLARS.

IT is but too often the fate of scholars to be servile and poor. Many of them are driven to hard shifts, and turn from grasshoppers into humble bees, from humble bees into wasps, and from wasps into parasites, making the Muses their mules to satisfy their hunger-starved paunches, and get a meal's meat; their abilities and knowledge only serving them to curse their fooleries with better grace. They have store of gold, without knowing how to turn it to advantage; and, like the innocent Indians, are drained of their riches without receiving a suitable reward.-Burton.

MARRIED LIFE.

THE treasures of the deep are not so precious
As are the concealed comforts of a man
Locked up in woman's love. I scent the air
Of blessings when I come but near the house.
What a delicious breath marriage sends forth!
The violet bed's not sweeter. Honest wedlock
Is like a banqueting house built in a garden,
On which the spring's chaste flowers take delight
To cast their modest odours; when base lust,
With all her powders, paintings, and best pride,

Is but a fair house built by a ditch side.—Thos. Middleton.

Have you ever seen pure rose-water kept in a crystal glass? How fine it looks, how sweet it smells, while the beautiful urn imprisons it! Break the glass, and let the water take its own course doth it not embrace dust, and lose all its former sweetness and fairness? Truly

so are we, if we have not the stay rather than the restraint of mar

riage. Sir P. Sidney.

Though wedlock by most men be reckoned a curse,
Three wives did I marry, for better for worse:
The first for her person, the next for her purse,
The third for a warming-pan, doctor, and nurse.

THE BRIDE.

I KNOW no sight more charming and touching than that of a young and timid bride, in her robes of virgin white, led up trembling to the altar. When I thus behold a lovely girl, in the tenderness of her years, forsaking the house of her fathers and the home of her childhood, and, with implicit confidence and the sweet self-abandonment which belong to woman, giving up all the world for the man of her choice,— when I hear her, in the good old language of the ritual, yielding herself to him "for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love, honour, and obey, till death us do part,"-it brings to mind the beautiful and affecting devotion of Ruth: "Whither thou goest I will go, and where thou lodgest I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God."-Washington Irving.

LOVE.

LOVE was made to soothe and share
The ills that wait our mortal birth ;
Love was made to teach us where

One trace of Eden haunts our earth.