My playmate thou shalt be; and when the wind is cold Our hearth shall be thy bed, our house shall be thy fold. 6"See, here thou need'st not fear the raven in the sky; Both night and day thou 'rt safe, our cottage is hard by. Why bleat so after me? Why pull so at thy chain? Sleep, and at break of day I'll come to thee again."

Wordsworth

XXI.

SUNNY DAYS IN WINTER.

1. SUMMER is a glorious season,

Warm, and bright, and pleasant;

But the past is not a reason

To despise the present.

So, while Health can climb the mountain,
And the log lights up the hall,
There are sunny days in Winter,
After all.

2. Spring, no doubt, hath faded from us,
Maiden-like in charms;

Summer, too, with all her promise,
Perished in our arms.

But the memory of the vanished,
Whom our hearts recall,

Maketh sunny days in Winter,

4. Then, although our darling treasures

Vanish from the heart;

Then, although our once-loved pleasures
One by one depart;

Though the tomb loom in the distance,
And the mourning-pall,-

There is sunshine, and no Winter,

After all!

D. F. M'Carthy.

XXII.

THE BEAR AND THE CHILDREN.

EI

1. I WILL tell you a circumstance which occurred a year ago in a country town in the south of Germany. The master of a dancing-bear was sitting in the tap-room of an inn, eating his supper; whilst the bear (poor harmless beast!) was tied up behind the wood-stack in the yard.

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2. In the room up stairs three little children were playing about. Tramp! tramp! was suddenly heard on the stairs. Who could it be? The door flew open, and, behold! there entered the bear, the huge, shaggy beast, - with his clanking" chain.

3. Tired of standing so long in the yard alone, Bru-inTM had at length found his way to the staircase. At first the little children were in a terrible fright at this unexpected visit, and each ran into a corner to hide himself.

4. But the bear found them all out, and put his muzzle," snuffling, up to them, but did not harm them in the least. He must be a big dog, thought the children; and they began to stroke him familiarly.

5. The bear stretched himself out at his full length upon the floor, and the youngest boy rolled over him, and nestled his curly head in the shaggy black fur of the beast. Then the eldest boy went and fetched his drum and thumped away on it with might and main; whereupon the bear stood erect upon his hind legs, and began to dance.

6. What glorious fun! Each boy shouldered his musket; the bear must of course have one too, and he held it tight and firm, like any soldier. There's a comrade for you, And away they marched,-one, two,-one,

my lads two!

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7. The door suddenly opened, and the children's mother entered. You should have seen her, speechless with terror, her cheeks white as a sheet, and her eyes fixed with horror! But the youngest boy nodded with a look of intense delight, and cried, "Mother, we are only playing at soldiers!" At that moment the master of the bear appeared. From the Danish of Andersen.

XXIII. GETTING INTO A PASSION.

1. Ir does not follow, because people may retire from the world, that they must become saints; for so long as the tendency to evil" remains in the heart, some circumstance from without will call it forth, and then sin is again committed. To make this clear, I must tell you an old story.

2. There was once a man of a very passionate temper; and, instead of looking for the cause of this in himself, he threw the blame of it on other people. It was they, he said, who made him get into such passions, and who spoiled all his pleasure in life, and therefore he would leave them, and become a hermit.

3. And so he went into a desert"1 place, where there were no inhabitants, and built himself a hut in the middle of a wood,38 where there was a little spring of water; and the small quantity of bread that he needed he ordered a boy to bring to him once a week, and place upon a rock a good way from the hut.

4. He had not been a hermit very long -not many days, I believe when he took his pitcher and went to the spring. The ground by the spring was very uneven, and so his pitcher fell over as he set it down. The hermit lifted it up, and placed it carefully under the spring, but the water, which poured out with great force, fell on one side of the pitcher, and again it tumbled. This put the hermit in a great passion, and, snatching up the pitcher, he said, “It

shallus stand, though!" and set it down on the ground with such violence, that it broke all to pieces.

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5. With this, he saw he had been giving way to one of his old bursts" of passion, and he said to himself, "If this is the way I go on in my solitude, the fault must be mine if I cannot command my temper among men. I had better return to my duties in the world, and endeavor to avoid evil, and do what is right." And so he went back into the world a wiser and a better man.

1. O! GREEN was the corn as I rode on my way,
And bright were the dews on the blossoms of May,
And dark was the sycamore's shade to behold,
And the oak's tender leaf was of emerald and gold.

2. The thrush from his holly, the lark from his cloud,
Their chorus of rapture sung jovial42 and loud;
From the soft vernale sky to the soft grassy ground,
There was beauty above me, beneath,54 and around.

3. The mild southern breeze brought a shower from the hill,
And yet, though it left me all dripping and chill,
I felt a new pleasure, as onward I sped,

To gaze where the rainbow gleamed broad overhead.

4. O such be life's journey, and such be our skill
To lose39 in its blessings the sense of its ill;
Through sunshine and shower may our progress be even,
And our tears add a charm to the prospects of heaven.
BISHOP HEBER.

1. I HAVE always preferred cheerfulness to mirth. The latter I consider as an act,113 the former as a habit of the mind. Mirth is short and transient, cheerfulness fixed and permanent.

2. Those are often raised into the greatest transports" of

mirth who are subject to the greatest depressions of melancholy; on the contrary, cheerfulness, though it does not give the mind such an ex'quisite gladness, prevents us from falling into any depths of sorrow.

3. Mirth is like a flash of lightning, that breaks through a gloom of clouds, and glitters for a moment; cheerfulness keeps up a kind of daylight in the mind, and fills it with a steady and perpetual se-ren'ity.

4. A man who uses his best endeavors to live according to the dictates of virtue and right reason, has two perpetual sources of cheerfulness, in the consideration of his own nature and of that Being on whom he has a dependence. If he looks into himself, he cannot but rejoice in that existence which is so lately bestowed upon him, and which, after millions of ages, will be still new and still in its beginning.

5. How many self-congratulations naturally arise in the mind when it reflects on this its entrance into eternity, when it takes a view of those improvable faculties which in a few years, and even at its first setting out, have made so considerable a progress, and which will be still receiving an increase of perfection, and consequently an increase of happiness !128

6. The consciousness of such a being spreads a perpetual diffusion of joy through the soul of a virtuous man, and makes him look upon himself every moment as more happy than he knows how to conceive.

7. The second source of cheerfulness to a good mind is its consideration of that Being on whom we have our dependence, and in whom, though we behold him as yet but in the first faint discoveries of his perfections, we see everything that we can imagine as great, glorious, and amiable. We find ourselves everywhere upheld by his goodness, and surrounded with an immensity of love and mercy.

8. In short, we depend upon a Being whose power qualifies him to make us happy by an infinity of means, whose