The wise, far cre, do ENGINE). God never made his work, 19.2... The tree of kin, Was easy found, but t 0), had our grandsure waM · K.... He first had sought the war : Now, both are lost: yEL MAIL. And many dentle of Da Let these obey a That men may de 1 Let then, bathr He 'scapes the You hearinda But on the pa When, often m Your away Where would t To poise, viz Where colle THE PHILOSOPHY OF SORROW. [D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, of Cumberland parentage and connections, born April, 1829, on the river Derwent in Tasmania; graduated at Cambridge, 1852, elected in the same year to a classical mastership in the Edinburgh Academy, and nominated in 1864 to the professorship of Greek in the Galway College of the Queen's University, Ireland. He has successfully employed his pen in prose and verse, and his writings present us with profound thought in simple and attractive language. He is the author of Nursery Nonsense, or Rhymes without Reason; Fun and Earnest, or Rhymes with Reason; ancient Leaves, or Renderings of Greek and Latin Authors in English Verse; Day-dreams of a Schoolmaster—a delightful book, full of suggestive thought; Sales Attici, or the Wit and Wisdom of Athenian Drama; Wayside Thoughts, A Collection of Lectures; and Scale Nova, or a Ladder to Latin. He has also contributed to Macmillan's Magazine; and for the interesting series of miscellaneous sketches published by Edmonston and Douglas, Edinburgh, under the title of Odds and Ends, he wrote the Wayside Thoughts of an Asophophilosopher, from which we take the following essayette.] For Heaven's sake, let us sit upon the ground, And see which one amongst us shall weep first; Listen! how the rain is pattering against the window-panes! and how the rain drives down the smoke!-and this is spring weather; the season belauded by our old poets, in phrases borrowed from southern singers and suited only to southern climes. I wish we had one of the old conventional fellows here; with permission to treat him as we thought fit. It would be a pleasure to stick him in the water-butt, and watch him from behind the window-blinds. But what does it matter to be kept indoors? Could we walk abroad, should we in an afternoon's ramble cast eyes upon a single happy face? Let us take a long retrospect of our own lives, and try to recall a week of uninterrupted happiness. If he is to be pitied that has no such green oasis to look back upon, how much more pitiable the wretch that looks back upon the plea sant spot and knows it may never be revisited! Let the rain fall. 'Tis a good thing to be kept indoors. Let us be idle for a day, and hold aloof from the busy, restless world. Let us strip off our work-a-day clothes, and bare us to the skin, and wallow in luxurious laziness. Let the rain fall. We are thrown upon an unquiet age of competitive rivalry: we keep the bow eternally on the stretch: we are in a continuous state of training: we have ceased to perspire, from the lack of superfluous flesh and comfortable fat. We are eliminating all lymphatic temperaments from out the population: ere long there will not be a man among us to weigh fifteen stone. Plethora and apoplexy are waxing rare: not a bad thing of itself: but in their stead have come heart-disease and a spectral troop of shadowy nervous maladies. We begin life as our fathers ended it. We start our house-keeping with the luxuries that to them were the well-won rewards of half a century's unambitious toil, We are uncontentable hangangerels. We are uneasy dogs, for ever on the wrong side of the door. But wherefore all this discontent, and hurry, and pressing forward? Were it not a pleasure to pause awhile; to stand at ease; to lie upon our oars, and hear the rippling of the water; to spin, like a top, in a dizzy, quasi-motionless, sound sleep? were it not sweet to leave behind us the busy factory, the humming town, the many-languaged harbour; and to loll at ease upon one's solitary sofa; or, better still, on the green grass of beautiful Dalmeny; and to listen -with ear and soul to listen? And to what? Why, to the birds, or to anything. knows what music we should hear! Heaven But, after all, this weather is better than what an east wind brings; the wind as cold and cutting as ill-natured wit; the wind that blows with such a penetrative cheerlessness, that, while your sunny-side is baking, your shady side is down at zero. You are, beneath its in- The school-boy longs for the holidays; the fluence, a walking allegory of French toast: maiden for her bridal morn; the student for you have your nose equatorially at home, and his fellowship; the father for the manhood of your nadir in a Siberian exile. So it is: no his boys. To reach a distant bourn, we are blessings come unmixed: from the cup of ever ready to leap the interval; forgetting that enjoyment we never drink pleasure neat. The the interval may be a momentous fraction in sweet, delicious wind that blows from the warm our little life-total. It may be, indeed, that west, too often deluges us and our new hats all intervals of life are not equally valuable. with rain; and, if the sun shine brightly over- What infinitesimal price should we set upon a head, it is too often through the icy wind- year of hobbydyhoyhood? What imagination medium, that comes surcharged with rheuma- could appraise an hour spent rapturously in tism and bad temper from the uncomfortable speaking and listening to love-nonsense? east. It is also possible that the speed as well as the value of time is only relative; and that clocks, with all their humdrum regularity, are but respectable delusions. There are times with us all, when in a concave mirror we see a minute distorted into long hours; and, again, in the convex glass the long hours dwindle to a point. When summoned by peremptory duty from a warm bed upon a keen, frosty morning, how precious are the last five minutes of snoozledom! You live introspectively all through them: you chew the cud of your own cosiness. Then comes the wrench: in a moment you are in the cold tub, careless and forgetful of repose, So, when the hour is come for rising after our long life-sleep, we beg another hour in vain. A minute yet remains: only one. Each second is an epoch; divided into distinct and awful intervals. The senses are preternaturally quickened, as under the first influence of ether, and you hear the beating and the pulsing of some great inner-world machinery; the terrible ticking of some eternal timepiece. The hour strikes, and in a moment we are up to our necks in water; in the water of a cold, deep river: in a moment we have forgotten all the past, even the friends that now are weeping at the bed-side: in a few more moments they will have forgotten us, to be themselves in due turn forgotten. The pebble on the beach neither lives nor dies; and we can but imperfectly describe the conditions of its actuality by negational terms. The trees of the forest lead an unconscious life through leafy ages: they toil not, neither do they spin: in the pleasant spring-tide they don gradually their green robes: in the rich and sad autumn they pass slowly into beautiful decay; slowly and noiselessly, like dreams. The lower type of animals most probably have no anticipatory fears of death, but may pass almost painlessly into inanimate matter out of semi-vegetable life. I passed yesterday, in the neighbourhood of Leith, a public slaughter-house. A flock of sheep were going one by one up an inclined gangway into an upper room of unpremeditated death. They were pushing each other upwards, to the yelping music of two collie-dogs, in apparent eagerness to follow their leader. As each in turn would stand upon the gangway's upper ledge, too soon he would solve the secret of the horrible charnel-house. Too soon; and too late. For Ba-ba is the cry behind; which interpreted would mean: "Move on, and let us see what's to be seen." They would see it soon enough, poor bleating simpletons; and then there would be the last Ba-ba and the babbling o' green fields. The higher animals, and especially such as have been highly educated by companionship with man, have unquestionably some dim idea of the last change. Man alone is prescient of all its horrible concomitants; can predict with a fearful accuracy the gradations of the humbling analysis. In the face of these terrible considerations, may we not expect some comfort to be derived from reflections upon our spiritual nature? Comfort?-comfort there might have been, but for our suicidal propensity of turning blessings into curses. We may safely premise that, in respect of philanthropy, any one sect of Christians is in advance of any body whatsoever of other religionists. Yet there is not a single sect of Christians, but that peoples its particular hell with by far the greater portion of the outer-lying world, and no inconsiderable portion of its own adherents. So covetous are we of pain; so greedy of sorrow; so dissatisfied with the diseases and mischances of life, and the death that inevitably crowns all, that in our most serious and meditative moods we revel in prefigurements of eternal, unutterable, and all but universal misery. From our little noisy pulpits we wag wise pows, and condole in an exhilarating way with our credulous congregations on the steady approach of our common doom. We build in air a world-wide, spiritual scaffold, and erect thereon innumerable gibbets, and comfort one another with detailed speculations on the phases of the never-ending strangulation. We stand upon our little platforms of life and time, and over the edge peer curiously and shudderingly into the dark, outer void; and through the magnifying lenses of fear and imagination descry therein, or seem to descry, ghastly and hideous forms of physical and spiritual decomposition. And it were not so very sad that we should do all this, if the doing so made us in the least sad. But the unspeakable sadness of it all is, that the process gives a general though undefined thrill of pleasurable satisfaction. In the days when men would stand together in the shade and argue a dog's tail off, it was a favourite occupation of the old philosophers to define, chronologically, geographically, and circumstantially, the conditions of perfect happiness. We have no time now-a-days for such idle speculations. We are pulling down our old barns and building greater ones: we are grovelling on the ground before a golden image, like that set up of old in the plain of Babylon: we are searching for a vulgar and ignoble philosopher's stone. But supposing we could give the time and pains required for the considera tion of the old question, should we find the pity, but with an almost envying wonderment problem an easy one? at the spectacle of a son weeping beside his dead mother, or of a father staring down into the new grave of his dead son. might enforce obedience and strike terror; but Omnipotence is not omnipotent in respect of love. Nay, even goodness is not lovable; but admirable only, unless it be crowned with sorrow and girdled round about with infirmity. Childhood cannot be esteemed happy, as being an age that, apart from the troubles of teething, is a continued lamentation and a cry. Good men have told us that the Infinite Educational traditions sit as a nightmare on made himself finite, and that the Omnipotent the elastic spirits of boyhood. Youth and early divested himself of power, to save a ruined manhood bring heat of blood and immature world. They have only given us half the judgment to cope with the perilous temptations reason. If a world could not be saved by less of the unknown world. Over professional life than such a sacrifice, by only such a sacrifice in manhood broods an universal Grundyism; could Divinity win love. The Hand that and commercial life is crenellated by a corrod-guides the stars and wields the thunderbolt ing covetousness. We might look to religion for consolation, were it not that the usually received doctrines represent divinity as sterner than the sternest of all human judges, and mankind as a set of hopeless and incorrigible scoundrels. We are sailing in a shut-up ark over a wide sea, fathomless and shoreless. Send out Hope like a dove, and it will come back with no green leaf in its bill. Let us open the narrow door-way, the one window, and end our misery by a plunge into the deep sea. Nay: we are so numerous and disorderly a crew, that we should only trample each other to death in the effort to get out. Let us sit still in the cabin and wait the end. What? are we to go drifting on and on, until we are starved or suffocated; until our melancholy bark, with its ghastly crew of sitting skeletons, is picked up and opened by mariners of the new order; mariners to whom are reserved the new heavens and the new earth, after the subsidence of our troubled waters? Heaven forbid! sit still, and wait in hope. One day or other we shall come bump upon Mount Ararat. Yea, surely; one day or other. We are, indeed, weak creatures, moving ever onwards beneath some irresistible pressure towards an inevitable gulf. From time to time we catch a fleeting glimpse of happiness; but misfortunes cling to us like burrs; and sorrow clothes us with a Nessus-shirt of pain. In the morning we are green and grow up: in the evening we are cut down, dried up, and withered. But is there no balm in Gilead? Hath philosophy no anodyne, and religion no herb of healing? Let us cease complaining; and consider awhile the dignity, and majesty, and sublimity of our human nature. Let us draw comfort, as in a bucket, from the well of tears. For our weakness is our strength, and our shame our glory. It is the unspeakable sadness of our common lot that gives that lot whate'er of sweetness and of beauty it can call its own. The angels in heaven, amid their monotone of grand, eternal praise, must look, not with | Divinity was not perfect until when the Lord wept: there was a culmination of Godhead when the Man-Christ was agonized in the garden; when his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground. There went a shudder of awful joy throughout the universe, when the dying lips said,—“It is finished-." So grand a thing is human sorrow: so grand, and terrible, and sublime, and holy. THE COMFORTER. Oh! thou who dry'st the mourner's tear, The friends who in our sunshine live, Must weep those tears alone; But thou wilt heal that broken heart, Which, like the plants that throw When joy no longer soothes or cheers, Oh who would bear life's stormy doom, Come brightly wafting through the gloom Then sorrow, touch'd by thee, grows bright As darkness shows us worlds of light THOMAS MOORE. PEGGY NOWLAN. A [John Banim, born 1800, died 1st August, 1842. native of Ireland, he successfully illustrated the character and history of his countrymen in a number of powerful novels. In conjunction with his elder brother, Michael, he produced the Tales of the O'Hara Family, which became very popular. His principal novels are: Croppy, a Tale of 1798; The Bit o' Writin': Boyne Water: John Doe; and The Mayor of Wind-Gap. He also wrote the tragedy of Damon and Pythias. His writings deal with turbulent passions and incidents, but they are always interesting and elicit the sympathy of the reader. The following is from the O'Hara Tales, second series.] we believe she is such. 'Oh, jist by chance, afther a manner, miss; onct, when I went down to your counthry to see a gossip o' my own, the neighbours pointed you out to me as the comeliest colleen to be seen far an' wide; an' so, Miss Peggy, fear nothing;" for Peggy, as she looked about her, and at the woman, did show some terror; an' I'm glad in the heart to see any one from your part, where there's some kind people, friends o' mine; an' for their sakes, an' the sake o' the ould black hills you cum from, show me the man that daares look crooked at you." 66 This speech was accompanied by such softness of manner, that Peggy's nervousness lessened. She gained confidence from the presence of one of her own sex looking so kindly on her, and though years had been busy with her fine features, looking so handsome too. Her next question was, naturally, a request to be informed how she came into her present situation. "You were brought here jist to save your life," answered the woman; "a son o' mine coming along the road from Dublin, saw the coach tumble down; he waited to give it a helping hand up again; and when it druv away"And has it gone off, and left me behind?" interrupted Peggy, in great distress. "Of a thruth, ay has it, my dear." "What then am I to do?" "Why, you must only stay where you are, wid me, until the day, and you're welcome to the cover o' th' ould roof, an' what Late in the second morning of her journey, the coach upset within about a stage of Dublin, and Peggy Nowlan was violently thrown off, and deprived of sense by the shock. When she recovered, she found herself in a smoky looking room, dimly lighted by a single dipped candle of the smallest size. The walls were partly covered with decayed paper, that hung off, here and there, in tatters. There were a few broken chairs standing in different places, and in the middle of the apartment a table, that had once been of decent mould, but that now bore the appearance of long and hard service, supporting on its drooping leaves a number of drinking glasses, some broken and others capsized, while their slops of liquor remained fresh around them. Peggy was seated with her back to the wall; she felt her head support-ever comfort I can give you; and when the ed by some one who occasionally bathed her temples with a liquid which, by the odour it sent forth, could be no other than whisky; and if she had been an amateur, Peggy might have recognized it as pottheen. My God, where am I?" looking confusedly around, was her first exclamation. "You're in safe hands, Peggy Nowlan," she was answered in the tones of a woman's voice: "an' I'm glad to hear you spake at last." Turning her head, she observed the person who had been attending her. The woman was tall and finely-featured, about fifty, and dressed pretty much in character with the room and its furniture; that is, having none of the homely attire of the country upon her, but wearing gay flaunting costume, or rather the remains of such; and there was about her air and manner a bold confidence, accompanied by an authoritative look from her large black eyes, that told a character in which the mild timidity of woman existed not. Yet she smiled on Peggy, and her smile was beautiful and fascinating. "How do you know me, good woman?" again questioned our heroine, for day comes we'll look out for you, Miss Peggy, |