go back to the playmates of her childhoodsome reduced to the lowest state of helplessness or suffering-some dead and some forgotten. She hears the reluctant answer when she asks a kindness of one of the merry group, and she thinks of the time when kindness was more freely granted her, though far less needed than now. She starts at the loud laugh, but cannot understand the jest, and no one explains it to her listening ear. She loses the thread of earnest conversation, and no one restores the clue. She sits within the social circle, but forms no link in the chain of social union. Her thoughts and feelings cannot harmonize with those of her juvenile companions, and she feels in all its bitterness, that least tolerable portion of human experience-what it is to be desolate in the midst of society-surrounded by kindred and friends, and yet alone.

In looking at the situation of woman merely as regards this life, we are struck with the system of unfair dealing by which her pliable, weak, and dependent nature is subjected to an infinite variety of suffering, and we are ready to exclaim, that of all earthly creatures she is the most pitiable. And so unquestionably she is, when unenlightened by those higher views

which lead her hopes away from the disappointments of the present world, to the anticipated fruition promised to the faithful in the world to come. But the whole life of woman when studied with reference to eternity, presents a view of the great plan of moral discipline mercifully designed to assist her right conduct through the trials and temptations which surround her path. In childhood she is necessarily instructed in what belongs to social and domestic duty, and here she learns the difficult but important task of submitting, and of making her own gratification give place to that of others. In youth she is plunged into a sphere of greater temptations, and of more intense enjoyments, where her experience, embracing the widest extremes of pain and pleasure, teaches her all the different means to be made use of in avoiding or palliating the one, and in promoting the other. As a wife and a mother she has an opportunity of acting upon the knowledge thus acquired, and if her practice does honour to her theory, it is here that she obtains an importance, and derives a satisfaction, which might be dangerous even to a disciplined mind, did not age steal on and diffuse his sombre colouring over the pleasant

pictures to which her affections had given too. warm a glow, and which her happiness had persuaded her to be satisfied with contemplating. But this cold, blank medium intervening between life and eternity—between beauty and ashes-between love and death, comes to warn her that all she has been desiring, is but as the scattering of the harvest to be reaped in heaven; that all she has been trusting in, is but typical of that which endures for ever; and that all she has been enjoying, is but a foretaste of eternal felicity.

Her

Let then the aged woman be no longer an object of contempt. She is helpless as a child; but as a child she may be learning the last awful lesson from her Heavenly Father. Her feeble step is trembling on the brink of the grave; but her hopes may be firmly planted on the better shore which lies beyond. eye is dim with suffering, and tears; but her spiritual vision may be contemplating the gradual unfolding of the gates of eternal rest. Beauty has faded from her form; but angels in the world of light may be weaving a wreath of glory for her brow. Her lip is silent; but it may be only waiting to pour forth celestial strains of gratitude and praise. Lowly, and

fallen, and sad, she sits amongst the living; but exalted, purified, and happy, she may arise from the dead. Then turn if thou wilt from the aged woman in her loneliness, but remember she is not forsaken of her God!

127

THE POETRY OF THE BIBLE.

IN tracing the connection of poetry with subjects most frequently and naturally presented to our contemplation, we observe how it may be associated with our pursuits, so as to give interest to what is familiar, to refine what is material, and to heighten what is sublime. We now open the Bible, and find that poetry as a principle of intellectual enjoyment derived from association, is also diffused through every page of the sacred volume, and so diffused, that the simplest child, as well as the profoundest sage, may feel its presence. This in fact, is the great merit of poetry, (a merit which in no other volume but the Bible, can be found in perfection,) that it addresses itself so immediately to the principles of feeling inherent in our nature, as to be intelligible to