Life! we've been long together

Through pleasant and through cloudy weather, 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear,

Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear;

Then steal away, give little warning,

Choose thine own time;

Say not Good Night,-but in some brighter clime Bid me Good Morning.

-A. L. Barbauld.

ETCHING.

Know ye what etching is? It is to ramble
On copper; in a summer twilight's hour
To let sweet fancy fiddle tunefully.

It is the whispering from Nature's heart,
Heard when we wander on the moor, or gaze
On the sea, on fleecy clouds of heaven, or at
The rushy lake where playful ducks are splashing;
It is the down of doves, the eagle's claw;
'Tis Homer in a nutshell, ten commandments
Writ on a penny's surface; 't is a wish,
A sigh, comprised in finely chiseled odes,
A little image in its bird's flight caught.
It is to paint on the soft gold-hued copper
With sting of wasp and velvet of the wings
Of butterfly, by sparkling sunbeams glowed,
Even so the etcher's needle; on its point
Doth catch what in the artist-poet's mind
Reality and fancy did create.

-Translated by Holda, from the Low Dutch of C. Vosmaer.

After we come to mature years, there is nothing of which we are so vividly conscious as of the swiftness of time. Its brevity and littleness are the theme of poets, moralists and preachers. Yet there is nothing of which there is so much—nor day nor night, ocean nor sky, winter nor summer equal it. It is a perpetual flow from the inexhaustible fountains of eternity: And we have no adequate conception of our earthly life until we think of it and live in it as a part of forever. Now is eternity, and will be, tomorrow and next day, through the endless years of God.

-Horatio Stebbins.

It has been well said that "in much of the world's best work the unconscious element is the most precious." A man's life-work may be a failure, from human standpoints, even from his own standpoint, and yet an invisible something has been added by him to the priceless stock of human worth and fidelity. This general truth is a consolation to lift us over many a stage of broken and disappointed hope. Life would mortify, and passing years terrify, were it not for the faith that Providence has far more to effect out of every sincere life than we can count or meas

ure.

-T. L. Eliot.

OF THE

UNIVERSITY

E PROFUNDIS."

Beneath Thy hammer, Lord! I lie
With contrite spirit prone:
Oh, mould me till to self I die
And live to Thee alone.

With frequent disappointments sore
And many a bitter pain,
Thou laborest at my being's core
Till I be formed again.

Smite, Lord! Thy hammer's needful wound

My baffled hopes confess,

Thine anvil is the sense profound

Of mine own nothingness.

Smite till from all its idols free,

And filled with love divine,

My heart shall know no good but Thee

And have no will but Thine.

-F. H. Hedge.

Hospitality is an expression of divine worship.

Let the world be better, brighter,

For your having trod its way;

Let your light be seen afar

-Talmud.

Ere sinks down life's little day. -Sister Dora.

Beware of desperate steps. The darkest day,
Lived till to-morrow, will have passed away.

-Cowper.

Be not simply good; be good for something.

--Thoreau.

Every man's work pursued steadily tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms in his life.

-George Eliot.

Be brief; for it is with words as with sunbeams, the more they are condensed the deeper they burn. -Southey.

To me the eternal existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity. If I work on incessantly until my death, nature is bound to give me another form of existence when the present one can no longer sustain my spirit.

-Goethe.