bosom; and the trout roaming fearlessly about its limpid waters; while some rustic temple, or sylvan statue, grown green and dank with age, gives an air of classic sanctity to the seclusion.

4. These are but a few of the features of park scenery; but what most delights me, is the creative talent with which the English decorate the unostentatious abodes of middle life. The rudest habitation, the most unpromising and scanty portion of land, in the hands of an Englishman of taste, becomes a little paradise. With a nicely discriminating eye, he seizes at once upon its capabilities, and pictures in his mind the future landscape.

5. The sterile spot grows into loveliness under his hand; and yet the operations of art which produce the effect are scarcely to be perceived. The cherishing and training of some trees; the cautious pruning of others; the nice distribution of flowers and plants of tender and graceful foliage; the introduction of a green slope of velvet turf; the partial opening to a peep of blue distance, or silver gleam of water; all these are managed with a delicate tact, a pervading yet quiet assiduity, like the magic touchings with which a painter finishes np a favorite picture.

6. The residence of people of fortune and refinement in the country, has diffused a degree of taste and elegance in rural economy that descends to the lowest class. The very laborer, with his thatched cottage and narrow slip of ground, attends to their embellishment.

7. The trim hedge, the grass-plot before the door, the little flower-bed bordered with snug box, the woodbine trained up against the wall, and hanging its blossoms about the lattice; the pot of flowers in the window; the holly, providently planted about the house to cheat winter of its dreariness, and to throw in a semblance of green summer to cheer the fireside; all these bespeak the influence of taste, flowing down from high sources, and pervading the lowest levels of the public mind. If ever Love, as poets sing, delights to visit a cottage, it must be the cottage of an English peasant.

8. In rural occupation there is nothing mean or debasing

It leads a man forth among scenes of natural grandeur and beauty; it leaves him to the workings of his own mind, operated upon by the purest and most elevating of external influences. Such a man may be simple and rough, but he cannot be vulgar.

9. The man of refinement, therefore, finds nothing revolting in an intercourse with the lower orders in rural life, as he does when he casually mingles with the lower orders of cities. He lays aside his distance and reserve, and is glad to waive the distinctions of rank, and to enter into the honest, heartfelt enjoyments of common life. Indeed, the very amusements of the country bring men more and more together; and the sound of the hound and horn blend all feelings into harmony.

10. To this mingling of cultivated and rustic society, may also be attributed the rural feeling that runs through British literature; the frequent use of illustrations from rural life; those incomparable descriptions of Nature, that abound in the British poets; that have continued down from "the Flower and the Leaf" of Chaucer," and have brought into our closets all the freshness and fragrance of the dewy landscape.

11. The pastoral writers of other countries appear as if they had paid Nature an occasional visit, and become acquainted with her general charms; but the British poets have lived and reveled with her; they have wooed her in her most secret haunts; they have watched her minutest caprices.

12. A spray could not tremble in the breeze, a leaf could not rustle to the ground, a diamond drop could not patter in the stream, a fragrance could not exhale from the humble violet, nor a daisy unfold its crimson tints to the morning, but it has been noticed by these impassioned and delicate observers and wrought up into some beautiful morality.

13. The effect of this devotion of elegant minds to rural occupations has been wonderful on the face of the country. A great part of the island is rather level, and would be monot

a Flower and Leaf; the title of a poem by Chaucer, (Chaw'ser.) b Chaucer; an early English poet, sometimes styled the father of English poetry.

onous were it not for the charms of culture; but it is studded and gemmed, as it were, with castles and palaces, and embroidered with parks and gardens.

14. It does not abound in grand and sublime prospects, but rather in little home scenes of rural repose and sheltered quiet. Every antique farm-house and moss-grown cottage is a picture; and as the roads are continually winding, and the view is shut in by groves and hedges, the eye is delighted by a continual succession of small landscapes of captivating loveli

ness.

15. The great charm, however, of English scenery, is the moral feeling that seems to pervade it. It is associated in the mind with ideas of order, of quiet, of sober, well-established principles, of hoary usage and reverend custom. Every thing seems to be the growth of ages of regular and peaceful exist

ence.

16. The old church, of remote architecture, with its low, massive portal; its gothic tower; its windows, rich with tracery and painted glass, in scrupulous preservation; its stately monuments of warriors and worthies of the olden time, ancestors of the present lords of the soil; its tombstones, recording successive generations of sturdy yeomanry, whose progeny still plow the same fields, and kneel at the same altar.

17. The neighboring village, with its venerable cottages, its public green, sheltered by trees, under which the forefathers of the present race have sported; the antique family mansion, standing apart in some little rural domain, but looking down with a protecting air on the surrounding scene; all these common features of English landscape evince a calm and settled security, a hereditary transmission of home-bred virtues and local attachments, that speak deeply and touchingly for the moral character of the nation.

a Civilization, in England, probably commenced at the invasion of Julius Cæsar, about nineteen hundred years ago.

LESSON XLVI.

HOME.

1. THERE is something in the word home, that wakes the kindliest feelings of the heart. It is not merely friends and kindred that render that place so dear, but the very hills and rocks and rivulets throw a charm around the place of one's nativity. It is no wonder that the loftiest harps have been tuned to sing of home, "sweet home." The rose that bloomed in the garden where one has wandered in early years a thoughtless child, careless in innocence, is lovely in its bloom and lovelier in its decay.

2. No songs are sweet like those we heard among the boughs that shade a parent's dwelling, when the morning or the evening hour found us gay as the birds that warbled over us. No waters are bright like the clear silver streams that wind among the flower-decked knolls, where, in childhood, we have often strayed to pluck the violet, or the lily, or to twine a garland for some loved schoolmate.

3. We may wander away and mingle in the "world's fierce strife," and form new associations and friendships, and fancy we have almost forgotten the land of our birth; but at some evening hour, as we listen perchance to the autumn winds, the remembrance of other days comes over the soul, and fancy bears us back to childhood's scenes, and we roam again the old familiar haunts, and press the hands of companions long since cold in the grave, and listen to the voices we shall hear on earth no more. It is then a feeling of melancholy steals over us, which, like Ossian's music, is pleasant, though mournful to the soul.

4. The African, torn from his willow-braided hut, and borne away to the land of strangers and of toil, weeps as he thinks of home, and sighs and pines for the cocoa land beyond the

a Ossian (Os'she-an, or Os'yan;) supposed to be a Scotch poet who flourished abou‹ A. D. 300. b Cocoa (ko'ko ;) a fruit, which abounds in Africa.

waters of the sea. Years may have passed over him, and strifes and toil may have crushed his spirits; all his kindred may have found graves upon the corals of the ocean; yet were he free, how soon would he seek the shores and skies of his boyhood dreams?

a

5. The New England mariner, amid the icebergs of the Northern seas, or breathing the spicy gales of the ever-green isles, or coasting along the shores of the Pacific, though the hand of time may have blanched his raven locks, and care have plowed deep furrows on his brow, and his heart have been chilled by the storms of the ocean, till the fountains of his love have almost ceased to gush with the heavenly current; yet, upon some summer's evening, as he looks out upon the sun sinking behind the western wave, he will think of home, and his heart will yearn for the loved of other days, and his tears flow like the summer rain.

6. How does the heart of the wanderer, after long years of absence, beat, and his eyes fill, as he catches a glimpse of the hills of his nativity; and when he has pressed the lip of a brother or sister, how soon does he hasten to see if the garden, and the orchard, and the stream, look as in days gone by! We may find climes as beautiful, and skies as bright, and friends as devoted; but that will not usurp the place of home.

LESSON XLVII.

THE WIFE.

IRVING.

1. I HAVE often had occasion to remark the fortitude, with which woman sustains the most overwhelming reverses of fortune. Those disasters, which break down the spirit of man, and prostrate him in the dust, seem to call forth all the ener

• Ever-green isles; the India islands.