sudden and surprising change. One evening, about ten days after their departure, Jane and her mother were astounded by a visit from her. The lady came in her carriage, and was dressed as if for a royal levee. Poor Mrs. Lee was startled, but Jane's instinctive self-respect could not allow her to stand abashed in such a presence. Presently the lady began:

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My dear Miss Lee, I have called to speak with you and your mother on a matter of some delicacy, a matter in which we all feel a deep interest, I mean the attachment between you and our son, which Mr. Harding has seemed to oppose."

At first, my dear Miss Lee' gave her a look of astonishment,-then replied, with a tone and manner by which the patronizing air of her visitor was much embarrassed:

"Excuse me, madam, I do not understand you."

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on

"Oh, there is no mistake," said the lady; the whole, you have been very prudent, and I respect you for it. You may own it all now. We thought Henri was too young to marry-but early marriages are happiest. His passion for you makes him wild, and I do not wonder, now I see how beautiful you are. My dear Jane, the fond love of two young hearts shall not be crossed. I have just received a letter from Mr. Harding. Henri will not go to Europe. They will return to-morrow, and you shall be united immediately." "What do you mean, madam?" said Jane, with a flash of indignation; "what have I done to warrant this language?"

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My dear, you need not hesitate to be frank with me," continued the lady, in whose mind there had not begun even the dawn of a thought that Jane could refuse her son, "you must understand me, I am really in earnest. It is the dearest wish of my heart, to see you and Henri united. The whole village knows how strongly you and he are attached to each other."

"Excuse me, madam; the whole village knows, or should know, just the contrary. You compel me to say, that my strongest feeling toward your son is contempt. Perhaps I ought to pity him, for I believe he is not capable of behaving like a gentleman."

Mrs. Harding turned to stare at the speaker, and her silk rustled as if quivering with sudden anger. Then, recovering herself, she said, "Oh, I understand, some love-quarrel, but lovers' quarrels never last long."

"What is your object, Mrs. Harding? What do you mean, by persisting to speak in this way? Have you come here to insult me?"

"You talk strangely, Miss Jane: do you mean that you will not marry Henri, now we all desire it? You cannot mean this, Jane?"

"But I do mean it. I hope I am understood." Jane was a little severe, perhaps; but she was cruelly provoked. Mrs. Harding went home, swelling with indignation; and, because she could do nothing else, she vowed vengeance.

But what had occasioned this change in the lady's feelings? A very natural question, which must be answered. One morning, when Mr. Harding had been in New-York about a week, an elderly gentleman, of very striking appearance, came to his room with an acquaintance, and was introduced as Mr. Wilson, from the East Indies, and late of the firm of Wilson, Reeves & Co. Mr. Harding had long known the reputation of this firm, and received him with obsequious reverence, much as a Broadway dandy would receive a great lord, just landed from Europe. The stranger said:

"I have called, sir, to beg the favor of some intelligence from Elmvale, where, I am told, you reside. It is my native place. I had a father and sister living there, when I left it."

"I shall be very happy, sir, to give you any intelligence in my power," replied Mr. Harding.

"Some years ago, I saw a notice of my father's death, in an American newspaper. I had sent my father some money, that did not reach him, and thus failed to secure communication with my friends. They, probably, thought me dead. I wish to learn whether my sister resides there still. Our father's name was Benjamin Wilson; and, just before I left, my sister was married to a young man by the name of William Lee."

"Lee-Lee-Lee-" mused Mr. Harding; "I do not recollect any person of that name in Elmvale. There is no one there of that name but a washerwoman, who is very poor. But she cannot be your sister."

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Is sho married? Has she a family?" asked the stranger.

"She is a widow, and has one child, a daughter. Her husband has been dead a long time, I believe; and I now recollect having heard that her father's name was Benjamin Wilson, and her husband's William Lee. She has always lived there, I think. But it is not possible that she is your sister, for she is a washerwoman, and very poor."

Mr. Wilson's face quivered, and his eyes filled with tears. "Yes, yes," he replied, "that is my sister. Poor Mary! She must be very poor, for I ruined my father by an unfortunate speculation. There was nothing left. She must be very poor; but I have no family, and all I have shall be hers. I will settle half of my property on her immediately, and the rest shall be her daughter's, as soon as I have done with it."

In the course of the day, Mr. Harding inquired in various quarters, and found that Mr. Wilson's

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property amounted to more than two and a half millions of dollars.

"By the stars!" he exclaimed to himself, "Henri has made a hit after all. That pretty girl is now worth having!"

Without delay, he wrote to his wife, telling her of the great fortune of the Lees, and advising her to call on them at once, and consent to receive Jane as Henri's wife, before they could have time to know of Mr. Wilson's arrival. This letter occasioned the visit, from which we saw the lady return with looks not quite so fair as Jane's

There was a knock at the door, which Jane hastened to open. Mr. Wilson entered, and stood a few moments, gazing at the widow. He spoke : "Mary, my dear sister, do you not know your brother?"

She advanced towards him, and he caught her in his arms, as she cried, "George! George! is it you? Then you are alive! You have come back again! heaven be praised!"

There was happiness in the widow's house that night; and there was joy on her account, through the whole village next morning.

Mr. Wilson purchased the farm that had belonged to his father. He also built a house in the village, where he resides with his sister. He will not suffer Charles and Jane to leave them. He idolizes Jane's children; and says, they are almost as beautiful as their mother.

Henri soon afterwards married a New-York

as

lady, whom Mr. Wilson always speaks of "that melancholy butterfly." His marriage increased his fame in Elmvale; for it occasioned a law-suit. Miss Sophia Green prosecuted him for breach of promise. It was in vain that he protested that he was innocent-that he scarcely knew the girl, and all that. His letter was produced in evidence; and Miss Sophia recovered heavy damages.

But the Hardings have left Elmvale, and returned to the city. They grew sick of the country. Mrs. Harding says, the country air did not suit her health; and that she feared a country village would spoil the manners of her children.

SING not of Fame! there was a time
Such strain had suited well mine ear,
And I had sprung, perchance through crime,
Ambition's laurell'd pomps to share;
The wild alarm, the impetuous thirst,
The wing to soar, the will to sway,
Had led me forth, through fields accurst,
On man, for man's delight, to prey.

Oh! rather sing of lonely hours,
Of wakeful nights and mournful sighs,
When on his couch of withered flowers
Hope vainly opes her vacant eyes;
In vain with vision straining far,
Seeks still dear shape and baffled dream;

And turning now, from star to star,
Finds mockery in each golden gleam.

AMID all the deformity of this world there is much beauty. It greets us at our entrance into it, even before we have power to appreciate it, as in a mother's smile, itself the expression of perhaps the deepest emotion of which our moral nature is capable; and a father's joy, which is awakened by the new fact of our individual existence. A happy constitution it is, that to the child, the mother always looks beautiful, unless she violates some precept of that decalogue of affections which the finger of God has inscribed on the " fleshly tables of the heart." Thus it is, that love and beauty (not in their romantic sense) are inseparably associated in certain forms of our existence. But it is not alone in the exercise of the higher and deeper affections of humanity, that we are to seek for the beautiful. The material world that surrounds us overflows with it. Take, for instance, the early dawn of a summer's day, that period of the morning which precedes the outbursting of the splendors of the sun; or select, if you please, the hour of "dewy eve,' ," when that same luminary has "bathed his burning axle in the deep waters of the Pacific. Could mortal pencil ever approach the execution of such panoramic scenes of beauty? All, all is original. All else is copy. Everywhere the difference between the finite and the infinite meets the mind of man. Now, the simple purpose of lighting the world might have been accomplished without so lavish a display of, I had almost said, kaleidoscopic beauty. But God delights in benevolence, as well as in beauty, physical, intellectual and spiritual. Hence, the union of beauty and goodness, in so many of his individual acts and fixed constitutions.

Now, to appreciate duly this combination, as well as to enjoy fully the natural scenes which are evidential of it, a man must be in a healthy state. If disease is wearing out his system, he will have little relish for such objects. They are but mockery to a dying man, unless, indeed, the religious principle is triumphant within him. If he be a man of diseased principles and profligate practices; if there be not a healthy tone of the moral system, he is not the man to look on the displays of goodness and beauty. A drunkard, a gambler, or a sluggard of any kind, will not rise to behold the dawning glories of the East; and, if he did, would

not enjoy them. That deprivation is one of the penalties annexed to his transgressions.

So, for aught we perceive, all the purposes of a flower might have been answered without investing it with such varied and exquisite beauty, and especially without adding to it that delightfully mysterious fragrance, so exciting to the appropriate organs, and often awakening, particularly in the female bosom, emotions of the highest enthusiasm. Is it because of her superior purity? Or is there among the inward and invisible elements of that soul a gentleness, a beauty, a hidden fragrance, that corresponds, and, so to speak, congenializes with the outward works of God? I have sometimes stood and admired the passionate fondness of a child for flowers. The rapture of that little girl, in her young and guileless being, was perfectly contagious, and I found my own heart dancing with a sympathetic joy. I was sure that in her all was natural. An experienced beauty might mingle some airs of affectation with her soft eulogies on the most beautiful portion of the vegetable creation, as there are those in fashionable life, who would not on any account be thought destitute of a taste for the fine arts, and so purchase and admire pictures and statuary, without really possessing any judgment, if they have any pleasure in such matters. But a child revels with unsophisticated emotions in this enchanting region of Nature's great empire: worships with a pure and burning devotion, in this part of her holy temple. Yet it cannot be proved, that such sources of pleasure are essential to the existence and the progress of childhood. But they are essential to the more perfect development of the benevolence of God, delighting, as it does, to associate itself with the forms of natural beauty, in order to promote and exalt the happiness even of a child.

Nor should any one presume to interfere with that felicity. A crusty old bachelor, or a childless husband, (a far superior character,) might be disgusted with an enthusiasm for which he had no sympathy, but let him take care how he offends one of these little ones. There are guardian spirits ministering to them, invisible, but real; if doubted by men, yet accredited in the court of heaven, and acting

under the highest regal authority. "In heaven they do always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven," said He, whose humanity, shrining the divinity, was upheld and sanctified by that sublime and mysterious connection, while it graced the ungrateful world that scorned and crucified Him. He, in the days of his flesh, stooped with a profound and graceful tenderness to the little ones, and mingled his own crystal sympathies with the spirit of childhood. He rebuked the temper that would repel them from the charities of Christianity. He spoke words for them that will never be forgotten through all the lapse of time.

Nor was the illustrious teacher of men indifferent to the voices of nature around him. The quiet beauty of the lily charmed that imagination, which ever maintained a perfectly harmonious relation to the other powers of the mind, was never deceived by the ever-shifting illusions that are accustomed to play around it, and never exaggerated the pictures it drew of the character, the state, or destiny of man. All earthly glory was less captivating to that rightly-constituted imagination, than the lovely, spotless hue of the flower of the field. And, yet, this is surpassed by the beauty of virtue of the graces of the spirit.

"Is aught so fair,

In all the dewy landscape of the spring,
In the bright eye of Hesper, or the morn;
In Nature's fairest forms, is aught so fair,
As virtuous friendship?"

The features of the external world, whatever permanence they may seem to have, are all to be erased, all to be extinguished, in the final "wreck of matter and crush of worlds. But moral qualities are in their nature sempiternal. Moral and spiritual beauty is imperishable! This is goodness --this is holiness, the crown and the gem of the Divinity itself. Was ever a more impressive prayer offered than that of the exquisite poet, as well as the splendid monarch of Israel: The BEAUTY of the Lord our God be upon us!" That would be beauty worthy of the muse of the immortal Milton, or the burning pencil of the seraphic Isaiah.

involves the power of music in all its variations and capabilities of impression; whether that music emanate from living mind or inanimate matter. Besides its original and essential quality of producing emotion by the power of association, it wonderfully augments the effect on the susceptibilities of the interior man. There is a soft and sweet tone of music in the flow of a rivulet, amid rural scenery, beneath the sunlight of a bright summer's day; but how are our emotions deepened and strengthened, when at the hour of midnight, we hear that same stream, after having enlarged its channel and accelerated its momentum, plunging over a precipice or an artificial embankment; acquiring at this point the character of a waterfall, one of the most interesting objects in nature! A feeling of sublimity is now added to the state of the mind, and the emotion becomes complete. The elements of darkness, obscurity and silence are introduced, and seem nearly to absorb the sense of beauty. The soul almost instinctively raises itself to God, who "maketh darkness his pavilion, and the thick darkness his swaddlingband." That sound seems the organ-dirge of Nature, over the temporary death of the inanimate world. Less sad and solemn, but still tenderly pensive, are the notes of the night-bird, familiar to New England ears, heard in the gray twilight of summer, as he now ascends, greeting the lofty regions of the air with his monotone-a not very melodious soprano; and then plunges into the depths of ether below, uttering, at the last point of his descent, a deep bass note; then rising again to renew his music "at the gate of heaven."

But oh! how blithe and merry is the song of birds in the bright and early morning! Poetry has consecrated all this natural music, which in its nature is fitted to lead the soul up to God. It is part of the worship of this magnificent temple, whose arch is the blue vault of heaven, whose pavement is the green earth, whose worshippers are MEN, "made in the image of God ;" and whose presiding, all-pervading divinity is God himselfthe Eternal, the Immortal, the Invisible, the OMNIPRESENT.

This train of thought might be pursued, but will-at least for the present-be suspended. If any mind shall, by it, be led to a deeper contemplation of the connected influence of Beauty and Benevolence, my object will be attained.

In my early days, my father lived in a rambling old house, in the most old-fashioned of countryplaces; I well remember with what delight I used to rush out to the gate, to be ready to receive the paper, as I heard the stage-driver's horn, sounding in the distance. This paper was published every week, in a neighboring city, and contained a vast deal of everything; but always in one corner was a story; grave or gay, sentimental or horrible, it was all the same to me, if it was a story. I devoured it eagerly, and thought what a delightful thing it must be, to see one's-self in print, to see your very words printed, know they were read with delight, and looked for with such longing anxiety: I dreamed, sleeping and waking, of this, until it became with me a night-mare; the desire to write a story was a haunting idea, but I thought authors such very great men and women, how could I, a little Miss in her teens, write anything that people would read! At last, I resolved to try, so hiring Betty, the cook, to give me the nicest quill from the goose that she next killed, I roamed away among the hills, and on the tops of the rugged rocks, or, stretched upon the fragrant moss, I dozed away long days, big with this one idea of becoming an author. At last the story was completed, the little manuscript was directed to

the very paper that my father took, and I bribed our market-boy to take it secretly to the office, with many injunctions to answer no questions. After impatiently waiting a whole week, the anxiously expected horn of the stage-driver was heard. I rushed out to the gate, and caught up the paper eagerly-there, upon the same corner that I had formerly looked at with so much interest, was my own story-it was no mistake, there were the very words; and the heart of a girl of fifteen was burning with an excess of emotion as these lines were read; "We publish to-day an interesting tale from a fair reader of ours, and shall be happy to hear from her again." I rushed out to my old haunts upon the hill and cried, for very happiness. Now I felt myself to be a woman. I had been flattered, caressed, but I cared for nothing now but fame; I resolved to write in secret, and burst all at once upon the world and my friends, as an authoress, with a well-established claim to the title. I became grave, lost the listlessness heretofore peculiar to me, and shut myself in my room to write. Weeks passed on, and at last, it began to be noticed that Cary's hair was often uncombed, her fingers always covered with ink, and her room strewn with bits of paper; but I heeded not reproof or command. I was an authoress, and as