Life.

as there flow If they do, it They contract

LIFE is rich and beautiful. God's goodness is inexhaustible; why then should our hearts cease to receive it? Why should they wither away so long such wells of enjoyment? must be their own fault. themselves; they close themselves; they will not expand in order to rejoice in the joy of others, to admire the beauty of the world. Ah! that is poverty of soul. I desire it not. I will keep my soul open; spring and friendship, and song live perpetually on the earth. Heavy and woful times may come, but they must go again, and even while they last, shall we no longer look at the sunshine which falls on our lives, as on that which is turned away from it? MISS BREMER.

Music.

MUSIC!-oh! how faint, how weak,

Language fades before thy spell!
Why should feeling ever speak

When thou canst breath her soul so well?
Friendship's balmy words may feign,

Love's are e'en more false than they;

Oh! 't is only music's strain

Can sweetly soothe and not betray.

MOORE.

Sadness.

SADNESS is itself sometimes more pleasing than joy; but this sadness must be of the expansive and generous kind, rather referring to mankind at large, than the individual, and this is a feeling not incompatible with cheerfulness and a contented spirit. H. K. WHITE.

First and Only Love.

SHE never loved but once,
And then her love did seem
Like the opening of the tomb,
Or the weaving of a dream:-
A premature betrothing
To immortal things, -
A momentary clothing
With an angel's wings.

She never loved but once,

And then she learnt to feel
The wounds that Love inflicts,

That Love alone can heal,

For as that light of life

Slowly faded by,

She calmed her spirit's strife

In her wish to die.

Yet loved, and Memory drew
Some joy from all the pain,-
Her heart was kind to all

But never loved again.
She bid it cease to beat,
Till in yon sky above,

Love with love should meet,
First and only love.

MILNES.

Beauty.

THE ancients called beauty the flowing of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed, for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves' neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean

Paul Rechter signify, when he said to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to me of the things which in all my endless life I have not found and shall not find." EMERSON.

Sordid Love.

I GAVE thee, love, a snow-white wreath,
Of lilies for thy raven hair,
Alas, that now another's gift,

Rubies and gold should glitter there.

I saw this morn that lily wreath
Neglected thrown upon the ground,

And then I saw upon that brow
That chaplet of those rubies bound.

'Tis no new passion, no new face,

Hath won thy fickle heart from me;

That, I had better borne, than know

That gold hath wrought this change in thee.

G

L. E. L.