stately-so eternal; the joy of man, the comfort of all living creatures, the glory of the earth-they are but the monuments of those poor leaves that flit faintly past us to die. Let them not pass without our understanding their last counsel and example; that we also, careless of monument by the grave, may build it in the world -monument by which men may be taught to remember, not where we died, but where we lived.

The Sky.

Not long ago I was slowly descending the carriage road after you leave Albano. It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up its arches like the bridge

But as I climbed the long slope of the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano and the graceful darkness of its ilex grove rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber, the upper sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of rain-cloud, in deep palpitating azure, half ether and half dew. The noon-day sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Ricca, and its masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it color, it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas, arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of

orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the gray walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every blade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet lightning opens in a cloud at sunset the motionless masses of dark rock-dark, though flushed with scarlet lichen, casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound, and, over all, the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds. that have no darkness, and only exist to illumine, were seen in intervals between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding luster of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of the sea.

Are not all natural things, it may be asked, as lovely near as far away? By no means. Look at the clouds and watch the delicate sculpture of their alabaster sides, and the rounded luster of their magnificent rolling. They are meant to be beheld far away: they were shaped for their place high above your head: approach them and they fuse into vague mists, or whirl away in fierce fragments of thunderous vapor. Look at the crest of the Alp from the far away plains over which its light is cast, whence human souls have communed with it by their myriads. It was built for its place in the far off sky: approach it, and as the sound of the voice of man dies away about its foundations, and the tide of human life is met at last by the eternal "Here shall thy waves be stayed," the glory of its aspect fades into blanched fearfulness: its purple walls are rent into grisly rocks, its silver fret-work saddened into wasting snow: the storm-brands of ages are on its breast, the ashes of its own ruin lie solemnly on its white raiment.

If you desire to perceive the great harmonies of the form of a rocky mountain, you must not ascend upon its sides. All there is disorder and accident, or seems so. Retire from it, and as your eye commands

it more and more, you see the ruined mountain world with a wider glance; behold! dim sympathies begin to busy themselves in the disjointed mass: line binds itself into stealthy fellowship with line: group by group the helpless fragments gather themselves into ordered companies: new captains of hosts, and masses of battalions become visible one by one; and far away answers of foot to foot and of bone to bone, until the powerless is seen risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded heap can now be spared from the mystic whole.

The Old Churchyard.

The next day, the day of the resurrection, rose glorious from its sepulchre of sea-fog and drizzle. It had poured all night long, but at sunrise the clouds had broken and scattered, and the air was the purer for the cleansing rain, while the earth shone with that peculiar luster which follows the weeping which has endured its appointed night. The larks were at it again, singing as if their hearts would break for joy as they hovered in brooding exultation over the song of the future; for their nests beneath hoarded a wealth of larks for Summers to come. Especially about the old churchyard, half buried in the ancient trees of Lossie House, the birds that day were jubilant; their throats seemed too narrow to let out the joyful air that filled all their hollow bones and quills; they sang as if they must sing or choke with too much gladness. Beyond the short spire and its shining cock rose the balls and stars and arrowy vanes of the house, glittering in gold and sunshine. The inward hush of the resurrection, broken only by the prophetic birds, the poets of the groaning and travailing creation, held time and space as in a trance; and the center from which radiated both the hush and the caroling expectation seemed to Alexander Graham to be the churchyard in which he was now walking in the cool of the

morning. It was more carefully kept than most Scottish churchyards, and yet was not too trim; nature had a word in the affairwas allowed her part of mourning in long grass and moss and the crumbling away of stone. The wholesomeness of decay, which both in nature and humanity is but the miry road back to life, was not unrecognized here, there was nothing of the hideous attempt to hide death in the garments of life. The master walked about gently, now stopping to read some well-known inscription, and ponder for a moment over the words; and now wandering across the stoneless mounds, content to be forgotten by all but those who loved the departed. At length he seated himself on a slab by the side of the mound that rose but yesterday; it was sculptured with symbols of decay-needless, surely, where the originals lay about the mouth of every newly-opened grave, as surely ill befitting the precincts of a church whose indwelling gospel is of life victorious. over death! "What are these stones," he said to himself, "but monuments to oblivion!" They are not memorials of the dead, but memorials of the forgetfulness of the living. How vain it is to send a poor forsaken name, like the title-page of a lost book, down. the careless stream of time! Let me serve my generation, and may God remember me!

Home.

Society is marked by greater and smaller divisions, as into nations, communities, and families. A man is a member of the commonwealth, a smaller community, as a hamlet or city, and his family at the same time; and the more perfectly all his duties to his family are discharged, the more fully does he discharge his duties. to the community and the nation; for a good member of a family cannot be a bad member of the commonwealth, for he that is faithful in what is least will also be faithful in what is greater. Indeed,

the more perfectly a man fulfills all his domestic duties, the more perfectly, in that very act, has he discharged his duty to the whole; for the whole is made up of parts, and its health depends

entirely upon the health of the various parts. There are, of course,

general as well as specific duties; but the more conscientious a man is in the discharge of specific duties, the more ready will he be to perform those that are general; and we believe that the converse of this will be found equally true, and that those who have least regard for home-who have, indeed, no home, no domestic circle--are the worst citizens. This they may not be apparently; they may not break the laws, nor do anything to call down upon them censure from the community, and yet, in the secret and almost unconscious dissemination of demoralizing principles, may be doing a work far more destructive of the public good than if they had committed a robbery.

We always feel pain when we hear a young man speak lightly of home, and talk carelessly, or it may be with sportive ridicule, of the "old man," and the "old woman," as if they were of but little consequence. We mark it as a bad indication, and feel that the feet of that young man are treading upon dangerous ground. His home education may not have been of the best kind, nor may home influences have reached his higher and better feelings; but he is at least old enough now to understand the causes, and to seek rather to bring into his home all that it needs to render it more attractive, than to estrange himself from it, and expose its defects.

Instances of this kind are not of very frequent occurrence. Home has its charms for nearly all, and the very name comes with a blessing to the spirit. This, however, is more the case with those who have been separated from it, than it is with those who yet remain in the old homestead, with parents, brothers, and sisters as their friends and companions.

The earnest love of home, felt by nearly all who have been compelled to leave that pleasant place, is a feeling that should be tenderly cherished, and this love should be kept alive by associations that have in them as perfect a resemblance of