A Psalm of Life.

What the heart of the young man said to the Psalmist.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave, Still like muffled drums are beating Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act, act in the living Present!

Heart within and God o'erhead!

WE must possess imagination to conjecture all that the heart can make us suffer: and the best sort of people in the world are often dull and stupid in this respect: they march right across our feelings as if they were treading on flowers, and wondering that they fade away.

MAD. DE STAEL.

Он meekly take what Heaven bestows:
And like its own fair flowers,

Look

up

in sunshine with a smile, And gently bend in showers.

Lature in America.

THE valley of the Connecticut is the most fertile valley in New England and it is scarcely possible that any should be more beautiful. The river-full, broad and tranquil as the summer sky, winds through meadows green with pasture, or golden with corn. Clumps of forest trees afford retreat for the cattle in the summer heats-and the magnificent New England Elm, the most graceful of trees, is dropped singly here and there. Hills of various height and declivity, bound the now widening, now contracting valley. To these hills the forest has retired: the everlasting forest-from which, in America, we cannot fly. I do not remember, that, except in some parts of the prairies, I was ever out of sight of the forest in the United States: and I am sure I never wished to be so. It was like the "verdurous wall of paradise," confining the mighty southern and western rivers to their channels. We were, as it appeared, imprisoned in it for many days together, as we traversed the south-eastern States. We threaded it in Michigan-we skirted it in New York and Pennsylvania: and throughout New England it bounded every landscape. It looked down upon us from the hill tops: it advanced into notice from every gap and notch in the chain. To the native, it must appear as indispensable in the picture gallery of nature, as the sky. To the English traveller it is a special boon, an added charm, a newly created grace; like the infant planet that wanders across the telescope of the astronomer. The English traveller finds himself never weary by day of prying into the forest from beneath its canopy; or from a distance drinking in its exquisite hues and his dreams, for months and years, will be of the mossy roots, the black pine, and silvery birch stems, the translucent green shades of the beech, and the slender creeper, climbing like a ladder into the topmost boughs

NATURE IN AMERICA.

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of the tall cedars, an hundred feet high. No description is rich enough to answer to what I saw on the Ohio-its slopes and clumps and groves. At the foot of these hills runs the river, broad and full-busy with the commerce of the wide West.

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It is an absorbing thing to watch the progress of world-making-both the formation of the natural and conventional world. I witnessed both in America. I saw something of the process of creating the natural globe in the depths of one of the largest caves in the world. In its depths-in this noiseless workshop, was Nature employed with her blind and dumb agents, fashioning mysteries which the earthquake of a thousand years hence may bring to light, to give man a new sense of the shortness of this life. I saw something of the process of world-making behind the fall of Niagara, in the thunder cavern, when the rocks that have stood forever, tremble to their fall, amidst the war of the unexhausted floods. I stood where soon human foot shall stand no more. Foothold after foothold is destined to be thrown down, till, after more ages than the world has yet known, the last rocky barrier shall be overpowered. Niagara itself, is but one of the shifting scenes of life, like all of the outward that we hold most permanent. Niagara itself, like the systems of the sky, is one of the hands of Nature's clock, moving though too slowly to be perceived by the unheeding-still moving to mark the lapse of time. While I stood in the wet whirlwind, with the crystal roof above me, the thundering floor beneath me, and the foaming whirlpool and rushing flood before me,-I saw those quiet studious hours of the future world, when this cataract shall have become a tradition.

HARRIET MARTINEAU.