50 MY COUNTRY RESIDENCES. The trunk of the lofty Elm is dark, And the swallow build Their nests in the boughs; And the young birds peep at the azure sky, Rocked in their leafy cradles high. Two hundred Summers and Winters hoar It stood i' th' heart Of the Indian wood, and slowly grew The white men came, and the Indians pass'd, And house by house The village arose; The fields were cleared-the road was made, But the Elm was spared for its mighty shade. The village children, year by year, The little lads and the lassies dear, Idle their leisure moments here; You can see their swing On the lowest branch, And the tangled twine and the fluttering kites, Lost in the limbs by scampering wights. In the sunny Spring and the frosty Fall, And truants climb in the emerald spray. At the screaming birds, And drop from the breaking limbs around, When the earth is bright with the noontide beam, To the market-down, Summer fades with its bloom and sheen, Like a herald proud, Alas! I am like the fading tree, I scatter my foliage fast and free, Illuminate leaves of Poesy! A bountiful alms Of golden thought, Which the feet of men and the careless blast Trample and sweep to the wasted Past! I have but little more to remember of Hingham, save the bridge by the mill-dam, where I used to stand, and watch the long sea-weeds drifting outward, and the old graveyard on the hill,-to my way of thinking, that is a love of a burying-ground. It is a clump of little hills and slopes, where the dead sleep with the sunshine on their mounds; grave after grave rises around, some with white, recently-raised head-stones; some bricked around with old stones, flat on top; their half-effaced letters, crests, and round-cheeked cherubim, covered with the mosses of a century. If I remember rightly, one is dated “Anno Domini 1668." There are a great many ancient vaults there, but every one of them was wept over in its time, and held the once warm heart of man, or woman. Fathers, mothers, and children, have shed tears like dew, in this graveyard, and passed away, wept in turn, by a later generation. Life seems to me but a great pilgrimage through the earth; from the gates of Time, at one end, to the gates of Eternity at the other. Thousands upon thousands are marching onward, and have been marching onward for ages, whither they know not, only onward. Ten thousand drop off from the great caravan, daily and hourly; thousands stop for a moment to bewail them, as they lie in the sand, but soon pass onward, and are lost. The mass of mankind have no conception that the dreadful shadow of death broods over them-but so it is; a shadow tracks every one of us; whether we run or walk, it is always at our heels; when we lift the wine cup to our lips, its smile grows pallid; when we love, it mocks us with a feeling of our mortality and comes over the soul like a thunder cloud; when we lie down to sleep, it hangs over our rest; but when we sleep on our turfy couches, like those in this little graveyard, pillowed on rich, moist, earth, the shadow tracks us no more. It was but the shadow of our souls; when our souls have passed into the land of Light, the Shadow will melt to its original nothingness! The "For my single self," I want no better place to sleep in, than Hingham graveyard. earliest morning dew would shake over my grave its long twinkle of silver light; the Sun would kiss the hill with his golden lips; the Moon look down from her limitless wandering in the eternal blue, as tenderly as ever she looked on two young lovers, and far more steadfast, for then her waxing and waning could never make me wax and wane, or my warm heart grow cold. I often think of the revelation the ghost of Lorenzo makes in "Isabella, or the Pot of Basil." Pray who is Isabella? Sir, get your Keats and see!— also inquire who Baccaccio was, for I am deter "I am a shadow now, alas! alas! Upon the skirts of human nature dwelling, .Alone; I chant alone the holy muss, While little sounds of life are round me knelling; And glossy bees at noon do fieldward pass, And many a chapel bell the hour is telling; Paining me through. These sounds grow strange to me, And thou art distant in humanity!'' The feeling that the bees and bells give one, at noon, is wonderfully soft and slumberous: lie on a slope and try it. I hope when I have to endure the operation of being buried (may I live a thousand years in this beautiful world !) I shall have one or two friends, who will do me the favor to find me a nice, quiet spot, like this sweet little graveyard. Lounging in this little graveyard, on a holiday last summer, I wrote the verses below, with which I will end this paper, and my reminiscences of Hingham. The joyous town before me lies, The bells before me ring aloud, A pæan for the live and bold; The bells behind are tolling slow, A requiem for the dead and cold! The crowds before me tramp away, A thousand troubled souls before; Behind, not even one that grieves; The blight of wo that wastes the wheat, Can never touch the garnered sheaves! THE DESIGN OF LIFE. THE design of Life !-alas, that it should be so little thought of! The very words seem to awaken a new idea, to open up a new vista, to surprise us in a manner by their unfamiliarity, || contrasted with their manifest nearness to our interests, duty and destiny. They fall like a reproach upon our worldliness from an upper sphere, calling us back from the outward and the earthly, and reminding us that there is something better and worthier than these. It will be well if such shall be the practical result of our present meditation such is its aim. We would disown for a time the accidental and the passing-those transient peculiarities which constitute the mere drapery of our being-that we may the more clearly and the more calmly contemplate the great and the universal, and that, by thus looking at ourselves and our fellows in the light of those higher and wider relations which have their roots in the soul, and which pass into the infinite, we may take the likeliest course for reconciling ourselves to ourselves, to one another, and to the world without, while we shall, by the very fact of dwelling upon them, be strengthening and sustaining all that is most gloriously distinctive of humanity in man. What is our life? says an inspired writer: “It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." And yet this Vapor life has for its trophies all that is great and imposing in the world--temples, and cities, and palaces, and kingdoms-all that is useful in science, all that is profound in philosophy, all that is soothing in literature, all that is great and beautiful in art; and all these have been fostered under its wing, and are the footprints which it has left on the sands of time. Nay, but this vaporlife is laden with eternity; this meteor flash, every time that it is kindled, lights an immortal spirit to heaven or to hell it fixes destiny, it determines a course of endless progression upwards among the stars, or of endless sinking and divergence into a deeper gloom than brooded over the primal chaos. So that the trial of Solomon was no solitary case. Life holds the balance to every man the good that is passing and perishable in the one scale, the wisdom which is allembracing and imperishable in the other, and death steps in only as the ratifier of the choice, while eternity is the endless unfolding of the fruit. What shall we say then? Was the apostle in jest? Was he seeking to depreciate this great seed-time of our existence? Nay, verily; but rather he would rebuke the presumption and the folly which, by refusing to connect it with the eternity beyond, makes it the palace of the body indeed, but the prison of the soul, destined to open at a moment, they think, not into the farsounding depths of ruin and despair. We can perceive a threefold purpose and aim of human life. First, we can perceive that man has much to do with regard to himself. He is not the ideal being which some represent him. There is guilt on his conscience, dimness in his eye, and weakness, rather wickedness, at his heart. He discovers the ruins of a fair creation, but nothing more" the gold is become dim," the temple is dismantled, and strange visitants within it now haunt its shrine; the mark is upon him, and his conscience might speak out somewhat in the manner of Cain-"It shall come to pass, that wheresoever the doomsman of justice shall find me, he shall kill me." The first aim of his life, then, has to do with himself-how to be rid of this inward accuser, how to erase those guiltstains which "plague him so," how to find assurance of reconciliation to his God, that he may hold up his head in the universe, and listen to His voice speaking to him peace from his awful throne. This must be his first and his earliest aim, and in vain for this are his own sacrifices or gifts. "The world, by its wisdom, knew not God." Superstition may slay its thousands of victims, idolatry may invoke its thousands of gods, science may advance its thousand appliances, and self-righteousness may "wash itself never so clean," the groans of humanity are still as deep, its wounds as wide as ever they were. The curse is human, but the cure is divine; and the first aim of our life must be fulfilled at the cross. But this is no more than the beginning of the work. He has his foot upon the rock now, which alone can be trusted. He is now within the scope of the great central attraction, and in contact with all that is destructive of evil, and most influential for good. Cleaving to that, he must reach forward and upward, strengthening his heart THE DESIGN OF LIFE. in all holy affections, opening his mind to the fullness of truth, guarding his passions with a stern and uncompromising denial, and building himself up into the likeness of Him whose temple he is. He is safe in his highest aspirations here; he has entered into the only legitimate sphere for a boundless ambition; and, with Christ for his pattern, perfection for his aim, and heaven for his crown, he must gird himself for the battle in all the lowliness of dependence, but with the energy of despair, as knowing well that the work is great, that "The heavens are steep, and hell is deep, This must be the first great aim of our lifeindividual emancipation from the guilt and the tyranny of evil. Nothing can be a substitute for this it is the necessary condition of all other great and generous aims. We should be found but silly builders without it; for, says an apostle, "Let every man prove his own work, and so shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another." Looking at man, then, in this isolated aspect, we say, that one great design of his life is to wrestle, and rise, to be moving heavenwards ever -converting all things around him into the means of his advancement, even his very passions and infirmities into the pedestal of his fame and the ladder of his glory. But then, after all, he is not an isolated being: he is part of a system wide as the universe, he stands in important relation to all his fellows, he cannot disdain even the weakest and poorest among them, but in selfishness and sin; and here looks forth another great design of his life. He was formed to love, and there is no religion without it. There is more than a beautiful sentiment in these words of the poet; "He prayeth best who loveth best, All things both great and small, If our blessed Redeemer has done no more for the world than to bequeath it his lessons of love, he would have been its greatest benefactor still. There is no such enemy to its progress as selfish. ness, and there is no demon so hard to exorcise: it forges the manacles for the slave, it mingles the cup for the drunkard, it casts up its gains amid the ruins it has made, and, while a brother is bleeding and nigh unto death, it stalks nimbly past on the other side. Thanks to our Redeemer for his every condemnation of this-that, both by his lips and by his life, he put the brand of Heaven's displeasure on the selfish, and extin 53 guished the voice of that impious creed—“ Am I my brother's keeper ?" But we must not forget that love is a practical thing. Its proper language is not words, but deeds; it has pæans for the prosperous, indeed, and pity for the fallen; but it has also food for the hungry, raiment for the naked, and refuge for the homeless and the outcast. "It knows to have compassion on the ignorant, and on them that are out of the way." Its celestial footprints may be traced, not, perhaps, to the house of feasting and wassail, but to the dusky dwelling of the mourner, to the edge of the sepulchre where the tear-drop glistens in its eye, to the cell of the culprit, where the words of wisdom fall from its lips, and to the uttermost limits of this sin-trodden earth, where it makes the glad tidings of salvation to ring. Like a pharos-light, it girds the whole horizon of wo, and the heart beats lighter in its presence, and the eye looks less sorrowful at its approach. Nor does it want scope for its wing in a world like this, for the desolate and the fallen are everywhere, the ignorant and the fearful, the hungry and the homeless; nor encouragement in its work, for "it is more blessed to give than to receive." It is the high usury of heaven: "he that soweth bountifully, shall reap also bountifully;" and, although it may sometimes meet with ingratitude and repulse, it is, nevertheless, the great strengthener of the soul, and the brightener of its way. Let us see, then, that we include this in the design of our own life, that we learn to love, not in word only, but in deed and in truth, that we look forth with affection on the great brotherhood of man, and aim at their uplifting, together with our own, to heaven and to truth. This will be living, indeed-living anticipatory of heavenliving assimilative to God; "for God is love; and he that dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in Him." There is one other point on which it is necessary to touch, and it is all-important: it is the zone of the others, it holds them together. Without it, man would be as a world without a star. He is formed to wrestle and to love, but he is also formed to worship. The moon passes round the earth, but both earth and moon pass around the sun; so brother here must minister to brother, but all must minister to God. Nor can they be sustained in their relations to each other, than as they adhere to their orbits in relation to Him. Worship, then, not in its cold and formal, but in its deep and spiritual meaning, is the great and paramount law of the universe. It is the symphony of the stars-the united voice of faith and love and gratitude and wonder, in the presence 54 THE MOTHER'S LAMENT. of the Eternal; it is the all embracing and allsustaining mystery of our being-its goal and its glory; it is wings to the moral creature in his contemplation of the Infinite; it is the upward attraction which loosens the cords of sense, and makes the earth as a spring-board to the young spirit, in its bound towards the Ideal and the Shadowless; it is written far down in the depths of our nature, and we have been aiming at it ever-alas, how blindly!-till at length the true light shone, and the true notes were sounded, over the heights of Bethlehem. Even as it is, we are but feeble and faltering scholars; our eye is still dim, and our heart still weak; we are "proselytes of the gate”—worshippers, if at all, of the outermost circle. But we are here to learn, and our instructors are many-the heavens and the earth, in all their sublime and beautiful formsthe sun, and the stars, and the flowers, and the THE MOTHER'S LAMENT. FROM A MANUSCRIPT POEM. BY THE LATE REV WALTER COLTON, OF THE U. 8. NAVY. My child, my sweet one! speak to me It is thy mother calls to thee; She who felt too deeply blessed, When thy lips to hers were pressed, When thy little arms were flung Round this neck, where thou hast clung, Thy infant step was light as air, As 'mid the garden flowers I watched thee, glancing here and there, As, through the vines, thy light form rushed I saw thee, in my raptured dreams, Thy path resplendent with the beams Of honor, love and truth. I thought, should he, whose noble worth Thy brow the promise bears, Be summoned from our humble hearth, How sweet 'twould be, I thought, to rest Ah, little thought I then, my child! Where lip and brow so much reveal I still shall feel that gushing joy, Which thrills a mother's breast Whene'er she clasps her bright-eyed boy From out his cradled rest. Come, meet thy mother's warm embrace, Return her fervid kiss, And press thy sweet cheek to her face, 'My first born bud of bliss!" Alas, my child! thy cheek is cold, And yet thy forehead gleams as fair In life and gladness there. Fall o'er those eyes of blue ! To tell us, in this trace of bliss, There breathes a brighter world than this. I feel reproved that thus I strove- To keep thee here, when only given |