12 praise. Ye are gone!-but, like the Old Brown Meeting House, we still remember you. There are moments even now, when like a cloud ye overshadow me, and I fancy, while all else is hushed and still, that I can hear the soft mysterious melody of your golden lyres floating upon the breeze of evening, and murmuring in fitful strains around my vine-covered cot. Other events render the Old Brown Meeting House memorable to me :-In it, I gave myself to God; in it, my eldest son was baptized; in it, I first ate of the bread, and drank of the new wine at the supper of the Lord. I felt then, at the age of twenty-two, as if I had done with the world. Ten, are thirtyten, forty-ten, fifty-and yet, I am not done with it. No; too well do I love it, for oh, how many do I have to love! The Old Brown Meeting House, with all it contained, is gone! I saw the first shingle torn from the roof. I watched the taking down of the building-heard the cheers, when the last "long pull" told the old fabric was demolished! As I sat by my window, my tears flowed; for I felt the glory of the first temple dedicated to God in this village, would never again be beheld. Reader, are you weary? Having read what I have written, are you not inclined to believe with me, that there was much pure religion in the Old Brown Meeting House? when the sunlight gleamed through the cracks on the preacher's face, and the rain dropped upon his shoulder; when the cobwebs hung upon the rafters, and the swallow built her nest upon the beams; when the mothers in Israel wore their black bonnets, their red cloaks, and sang "Old Hundred?" The Old Brown Meeting House, with those who built it, has passed away for ever. But the remembrance of it can never fade from my mind. There are but few around me, who can sympathize in my cherished, and often sad reminiscences. I feel that I am following in the footsteps of my fathers, and when I am gone, who will ever think of the Old Brown Meeting House ?" Sag Harbor, Long Island. MILTON. MANNER IN WHICH HE LOST HIS SIGHT. In the works of Milton, there are many afflicting references to the loss of his sight; a calamity which must have been extremely painful to a man of his literary taste and habits. In regard to the immediate cause of this affliction, he says: "When I was publicly solicited to write a reply to the defence of the royal cause; when I had to contend with the pressure of sickness, and with the apprehension of soon losing my remaining eye: and when my medical attendants clearly announced, that if I did engage in the work, it would be irreparably lost, their premonitions caused no hesitation, and inspired no dismay. I would not have listened to the voice of Esculapius himself from the shrine of Epidauris, in preference to the heavenly monitor within my breast. My resolution was unshaken; though the alternative was, either the loss of my sight, or the desertion of my duty." In a letter addressed to Leonard Philaria, the Athenian, and written in the year 1654, he thus describes the manner in which he lost the power of his sight:"It is now, I think, about ten years since I perceived my vision to grow weak and dull. In the morning, if I began to read as was, my custom, my eyes instantly ached intensely, but were refreshed after a little corporeal exercise. The blaze of the candle which I looked at seemed, as it were, encircled with a rainbow. Not long after, the sight of the left eye (which I lost some years before the other) became quite obscured, and prevented me from discerning any object on that side. The sight of my other eye has now been gradually and sensibly vanishing away for about three years. Some months before it entirely perished, though I stood motionless, every thing which I looked at seemed in motion to and fro. A stiff, cloudy vapor seemed to have settled on my forehead and temples, which usually occasions a sort of somnolent pressure upon my eyes, and particularly from dinner till evening. So that I often recollect what is said of the poet Phineas, in the Argonautics: A stupor deep his cloudy temples bound, And when he walked he seemed as whirling round, I ought not to omit, that while I had any sight left, as soon as I lay down on my bed, and turned on either side, a flood of light used to gush from my closed eyelids. Then, as my sight |