Still with no cares our days were laden,
They glided joyously along;

And I did love you very dearly,

How dearly, words want power to show;
I thought your heart was touched as nearly;
But that was fifty years ago.

Then other lovers came around you;
Your beauty grew from year to year,
And many a splendid circle found you ́
The centre of its glittering sphere.
I saw you then, first vows forsaking,
On rank and wealth your hand bestow;
Oh, then I thought my heart was breaking!
But that was forty years ago.

And I lived on to wed another;

No cause she gave me to repine;
And when I heard you were a mother,
I did not wish the children mine.
My own young flock, in fair progression,
Made up a pleasant Christmas row;
My joy in them was past expression;-
But that was thirty years ago.

You grew a matron, plump and comely,
You dwelt in fashion's brightest blaze;
My earthly lot was far more homely,
But I, too, had my festal days.

No merrier eyes have ever glistened
Around the hearthstone's wintry glow,
Than when my youngest child was christened;
But that was twenty years ago.

Time passed. My oldest girl was married,
And now I am a grandsire gray;

One pet of four years old I carried

Among the wild-flowered meads to play,— In those same fields of childish pleasure, Where now, as then, the cowslips blow,She fills her casket's ample measure, And that is not ten years ago.

But though first love's impassioned blindness
Has passed away in colder night,

I still have thought of you with kindness,
And shall do till our last good-night.

The ever-rolling, silent hours

Will bring a time we shall not know, When our young days of gathering flowers Will be--a hundred years ago.

SUBLIMITY OF THE BIBLE.-L. J. HALSEY.

The Bible is not only the revealer of the unknown God to man, but His grand interpreter as the God of nature. In revealing God, it has given us the key that unlocks the profoundest mysteries of creation, the clew by which to thread the labyrinth of the universe, the glass through which to look "from nature up to nature's God."

It is only when we stand and gaze upon nature, with the Bible in our hands, and its idea of God in our understandings, that nature is capable of rising to her highest majesty, and kindling in our souls the highest emotions of moral beauty and sublimity. Without the all-pervading spiritual God of the Bible in our thoughts, nature's sweetest music would lose its charm, the universe its highest significance and glory.

Go, and stand with your open Bible upon the Areopagus of Athens, where Paul stood so long ago! In thoughtful silence, look around upon the site of all that ancient greatness; look upward to those still glorious skies of Greece, and what conceptions of wisdom and power will all those memorable scenes of nature and art convey to your mind, now, more than they did to an ancient worshipper of Jupiter or Apollo? They will tell of Him who made the worlds, "by whom, and through whom, and for whom, are all things." To you, that landscape of exceeding beauty, so rich in the monuments of departed genius, with its distant classic mountains, its deep blue sea, and its bright bending skies, will be telling a tale of glory the Grecian never learned; for it will speak to you no more of its thirty thousand petty contending deities, but of the one living and everlasting God.

Go, stand with David and Isaiah under the star-spangled canopy of the night; and, as you look away to the "range of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres wheeling unshaken through the void immense," take up the mighty questionings of inspiration!

Go, stand upon the heights at Niagara, and listen in awestruck silence to that boldest, most earnest, and eloquent of all nature's orators! And what is Niagara, with its plunging waters and its mighty roar, but the oracle of God, the whis

per of His voice who is revealed in the Bible as sitting above the water-floods forever?

Go, once more, and stand with Coleridge, at sunrise, in the Alpine Valley of Chamouni; join with him in that magnificent invocation to the hoary mount, "sole sovereign of the vale," to rise,

"and tell the silent sky,

And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun,

Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God."

Who can stand amid scenes like these, with the Bible in his hand, and not feel that if there is moral sublimity to be found on earth, it is in the Book of God, it is in the thought of God? For what are all these outward, visible forms of grandeur but the expression and the utterance of that conception of Deity which the Bible has created in our minds, and which has now become the leading and largest thought of all civilized nations?

A ROMANCE IN VERSE.

When first I met Louisa Ann
I was a very happy man.
I saw and loved her-verbum sat,
My sorrow is not due to that.

No obstacles were in the way.
She'd no relations to say "Nay;"
No one to murmur at my plan
To marry dear Louisa Ann.

She did not hesitate-not she!

She owned that we might married be.
Against my love arose no ban

From my adored Louisa Ann.

She did not all too early die,

Nor-if it comes to that-did I;

Unchecked the course of true love ran:

I married my Louisa Ann.

There the romance however ends.
Dear reader, you and I are friends!
You don't like my Louisa Ann?
No more do I-I never can.

A CHARMING WOMAN.-JOHN G. SAXE.

A charming woman, I've heard it said
By other women as light as she;
But all in vain I puzzle my head

To find wherein the charm may be.
Her face, indeed, is pretty enough,

And her form is quite as good as the best,
Where nature has given the bony stuff,
And a clever milliner all the rest.

Intelligent? Yes-in a certain way:
With the feminine gift of ready speech;
And knows very well what not to say

Whenever the theme transcends her reach.

But turn the topic on things to wear,
From an opera cloak to a robe de nuit-

Hats, basques, or bonnets-'twill make you stare
To see how fluent the lady can be.

Her laugh is hardly a thing to please;
For an honest laugh must always start
From a gleesome mood, like a sudden breeze,
And her's is purely a matter of art-

A muscular motion made to show

What nature designed to lie beneath The finer mouth; but what can she do, If that is ruined to show the teeth?

To her seat in church-a good half mile-
When the day is fine she is sure to go,
Arrayed, of course, in the latest style
La mode de Paris has got to show;

And she puts her hands on the velvet pew
(Can hands so white have a taint of sin?)
And thinks how her prayer-book's tint of blue
Must harmonize with her milky skin!

Ah! what shall we say of one who walks
In fields of flowers to choose the weeds?
Reads authors of whom she never talks,
And talks of authors she never reads?
She's a charming woman, I've heard it said
By other women as light as she;

But all in vain I puzzle my head
To find wherein the charm may be.

888

-Harper's Magazine.

MARY, THE MAID OF THE INN.-ROBERT SOUTHEY,

Who is yonder poor maniac, whose wildly-fixed eyes
Seem a heart overcharged to express?

She weeps not, yet often and deeply she sighs:
She never complains, but her silence implies
The composure of settled distress.

No aid, no compassion the maniac will seek ;
Cold and hunger awake not her care;

Through her rags do the winds of the winter blow bleak
On her poor withered bosom half bare, and her cheek
Has the deathly pale hue of despair.

Yet cheerful and happy, nor distant the day,
Poor Mary the maniac has been;

The traveler remembers, who journeyed this way,
No damsel so lovely, no damsel so gay,

As Mary, the maid of the inn.

Her cheerful address filled the guests with delight,
As she welcomed them in with a smile;
Her heart was a stranger to childish affright,
And Mary would walk by the abbey at night,
When the wind whistled down the dark aisle.

She loved; and young Richard had settled the day,
And she hoped to be happy for life:

But Richard was idle and worthless, and they
Who knew him would pity poor Mary, and say
That she was too good for his wife.

'Twas in autumn, and stormy and dark was the night, And fast were the windows and door;

Two guests sat enjoying the fire that burnt bright,
And smoking in silence with tranquil delight
They listened to hear the wind roar.

""Tis pleasant," cried one," seated by the fireside
To hear the wind whistle without."

"A fine night for the abbey!" his comrade replied;
"Methinks a man's courage would now be well tried
Who should wander the ruins about.

"I myself, like a school-boy, would tremble to hear
The hoarse ivy shake over my head;
And could fancy I saw, half persuaded by fear,
Some ugly old abbot's grim spirit appear,
For this wind might awaken the dead!"