to be too valuable for unpretending home purposes. Such spots are still to be found, fertile villages and sunny hillsides graced by old homesteads worthy of the name,homesteads which are more than "tenements" of so much or so little frontage and depth, capacious, irregular, approached not by a gravelled carriage-way, but only by the scarcely-marked wheel-path through the green yard, well sheltered by our noble elms and by farm buildings of every size and description, stables for the beasts, barns for the hay, and garners for the corn. Though such an abode may be far from architecturally beautiful, one can have associations with it that would be wholly out of the question within the limits of a city, that has resigned its old gardens to the housebuilder, and banished the children from private playrooms, and all the old nooks and haunts which childhood loves, to the public gymnasium. There are descendants of Puritans who celebrate Thanksgiving eve in such old and oaken-framed dwellings, as their English ancestors, before they became Puritans, celebrated Christmas Eve in English farm-houses.

It should be added, that the luxurious habits which have inevitably followed an increase of prosperity must be reckoned amongst the hinderances to a true development of household life. The generation that has accumulated wealth seldom learns to expend it with judgment, and is ready to substitute for an attractive simplicity a profusion which vitiates the appetite bodily and mental, destroying even the keen relish of childhood, condemns the young to the satiety and fastidiousness of those who have exhausted in of enjoyment every fountain of pleasure, and can find nothing new under the sun any longer. A love of display may seriously interfere with the informal amusements and festivities of the home, and prevent the household from enjoying itself at all because it cannot enjoy itself in fashionable ways.

years

And, moreover, it is a question well deserving to be

asked, whether we are not doing more than is wise to draw away from their homes, to evening lectures and the like, those whose hours belong to their families, and who would be quite as much instructed and entertained by home readings of pleasant books, by music and drawing and household games, as by discourses upon literature and science, which are so often exceedingly superficial, if not positively unsound? Does any one who has a home need a place in which, as the phrase is, "to spend his evenings"? It would seem to be quite as wise, whilst we are providing unions, and libraries, and lectures for homeless apprentices exposed to all the temptations of a city life, to imitate the example of that practical philanthropist, the late Joseph Curtis of New York city, and try to make these young people homeless no longer, by opening for them abidingplaces where they can have something more than food and shelter. Lectures and public meetings, religious and secular, are very well in their way, but they are no substitutes for homes, and are very likely to minister to mental and spiritual dissipation. Indeed, every assembling of men and women which comes as a rival to the household, whether it be styled institute or club, or even vestry, should be closely scrutinized, and anything like usurpation of home rights should be stoutly resisted.

And now it is but justice to follow these warnings against encroachments, actual or meditated, by a hearty recognition of what the earnest activity of the times will be sure to accomplish for the Home just in proportion as the good and wise strive to turn the wonderful material and intellectual resources of the age to the best account. Who can tell the multitude of comforts and elegances which modern skill and industry have poured into the dwellings of the humblest classes, carpets, unknown not many generations since to princes, garments as tasteful as they are cheap, pictures of the different members of the household not equalled for accuracy and beauty by the portraits

which wealth buys of famous artists, letters from absent ones written upon cheap paper and brought by penny mails, the best books, whether for temporary use or for ownership, and to every man who can read, his newspaper. Lord Brougham, in his address delivered before the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, on the 11th of October, 1858, gives many interesting facts relating to the circulation of cheap publications amongst the masses of England. The Penny Magazine, the pioneer amongst journals for the people, had, at the point of its highest circulation, a million of readers, each paper passing through several hands; and some estimate may be formed of the care with which the work was prepared from the statement made by Lord Brougham, that as much as sixty guineas was paid in one instance for the engraving of a single plate. It seems that there are now circulating weekly in England, amongst 1,200,000 subscribers, nine newspapers for the common people; and, besides these, cheap but very valuable illustrated histories and popular works of science, not to speak of books distinctively religious and reformatory, find their way regularly and in great numbers to the homes of the great multitude of manual laborers. I allude to these things because they are not perhaps quite so familiar as some other matters kindred to them and equally significant, but nearer home. By and by, besides all that has been instanced, the laborer shall have at little or no cost abundance of sun and air, as he now has pure water, artificial heat and light, when they are needed, many of the benefits promised by association, without the curses that have fallen upon those who, following Owen, Fourier, and Louis Blanc, would caricature creation, and make a new world, instead of making the best of this. The most skilful laborers and the most gifted artists are even now toiling, unconsciously it may be, yet really, to make the Home attractive, — to multiply the sources of refining and instructive pleasures, to give us elegance and a beautiful simplicity in the place of mere

glitter and tawdriness, to connect useful knowledge with amusement, and, by numberless labor-saving inventions, to release from drudgery all who wish to be released, and who will not ingeniously devise some new task as soon as you have discharged them from an old one. The spirit

of the age will work no mischief to the children of wisdom.

And now for the conclusion of the whole matter. Suffer no man to despise the home, or to make it second to any human interest or institution. Insist that it shall have time and space, thought and affection,- that it shall be intruded upon neither by the market-place nor by the school, nor even by the church. Let there be time for its duties, its pleasures, its studies, its prayers. It will help on the world unspeakably, if each one who has a household will try to rule it in wisdom and love. Why not make a home for our own children, as well as be ever laboring to secure for them the means with which they can make homes? Household days and opportunities, like everything else in our world, are of brief continuance: they may be gone, unless they are speedily availed of; seize them and turn them to account, and their fruit will be, not for time only, but for eternity as well. When we shall have done our work, whatever it may be, we mean to return to our homes, as the Jews return to Palestine and the wandering Swiss and Tyrolese to Switzerland and the Tyrol, to rest and die. Would it not be better to go home to live, to improve the present, to look upon the faces of the children whilst they are still children, to make those wiser and better and happier who may receive so much of their wisdom, goodness, and happiness at our hands?

E.

BIRTH FROM ABOVE.

BIRTH means formation. The progress of every created thing is through the gates of birth. It is not a process, as we inaccurately suppose, that is limited to the animal king dom and to man, but runs through all the lower departments of nature, as well.

Every blind spherule of mineral matter is gestated into geometrical shape, through the laws of crystallization, as truly as the young of the animal through the laws of animal formation. When the vegetable soul in the planted seed parts asunder its envelope and pushes its green blade into air and life, it is born into this world by essentially the same process as our babes are born. In filling the cycle of its growth, the plant may be said to have several births. Its growth is not a continuous development. The fruit does not come from the seed by a simple and regular progression, but it is reached through certain well-defined and clearly marked stages or steps; first the stem, branches, and leaves, next the blossom, finally the fruit. Each stage is the development of a new set of powers, the birth of a new organism in the plant. At first it is a mere stem and leaf. If you watch a plant during the spring and early summer, to appearance it lives for the sole purpose of enlarging its stem and multiplying its leaves; and were we ourselves to live no longer, we should conclude, and allowably so, that its growth was completed in this process. Soon, however, the production of foliage is found to be only a preparatory step. As the season advances, another class of organs appear. The development of stem and leaf abates, and the plant covers itself with blossoms. And, lastly, the blossoms yield to fruit and seed again. From the first, the buds, blossoms, and fruit were all in the seed, as integral parts of its idea, but only as possibilities, as embryos. They cannot be said to have any existence until they are formed or