than all this. By merely multiplying the proportion of one of the ingredients, the most diverse substances are produced from the same elements. Thus, in the combinations of oxygen with nitrogen, the several compounds possess the most different qualities—a definite increase of one of the ingredients making all the difference between a virulent poison and the breath of man's life. What an unerring providence and skill does this evince in the continual assortment of nature's elementary products? What power, save an almighty one, could, from the mere varying composition of the same few elements, produce such wondrous diversity of result?

Still what specially claims our notice is the numerical exactitude thus found to lie at the root of nature. In breaking up its rounded and beautiful forms, they are found to rest on the most strictly arithmetical basis. It is seen to be, literally, a scientific truth, that the "mountains are weighed in scales and the hills in a balance." As, in the mighty movements of the heavens, we have to deal with the most rigorous measurements; so, in the minute and hidden movements of matter, we have equally to deal with such measurements. The constitution of the humblest bodies on earth, no less than that of the celestial orbs and orbits, leaves us, in the last resort, face to face with numerical order.

Whence this order? Science has disclosed its character; what has science to say as to its explanation? It has expressed, under the name of chemical affinity, all that it has to say on the subject. As we have, in the wide region of space, gravitation drawing all bodies to common centres, and cohesion holding the masses of the different bodies together; so, says science, we have the force of chemical or elective attraction serving by its occult power to give determinate character to every kind of material creation. But science merely conceals its ignorance by such general expressions. The laws in question are simply the last reductions of its persevering research; and, so far from furnishing any adequate explanation of the phenomena, they imperatively claim themselves to be explained. It is only when we recognise in these general

laws the operative modes of a Supreme Intelligence, that we can reach an adequate explanation of the order we everywhere find in nature. TULLOCH

QUOTATIONS FROM WORDSWORTH.

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:

So was it when my life began ;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,

Or let me die!

The child is father of the man;

And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

THANKS to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, its fears,
To me the meanest flower that lives can give
Thoughts, that do often lie too deep for tears.

A PRIMROSE by a river's brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.

THE swan on still Saint Mary's Lake
Floats double, swan and shadow!

THE Swan uplifts his chest, and backwards flings
His neck, a varying arch, between his towering wings:
The eye that marks the gliding creature sees
How graceful pride can be, and how majestic ease.

A RUDE mass

Of native rock, left midway in the square
Of our small market-village, was the goal
Or centre of these sports; and when, returned
After long absence, thither I repaired,
Gone was the old gray stone, and, in its place,
A smart assembly-room usurped the ground
That had been ours. There let the fiddle scream,

And be ye happy! Yet, my friends! I know
That more than one of you will think with me
Of those soft starry nights, and that old Dame,
From whom the stone was named, who there had sate,
And watched her table with its huckster's wares
Assiduous, through the length of sixty years.

NATURE never did betray

The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us-so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts—that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstacies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure-when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,

Thy memory be as a dwelling-place

For all sweet sounds and harmonies-oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief

Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,

And these my exhortations!

Upon the Sight of a beautiful Picture.

PRAISED be the Art whose subtle power could stay
Yon cloud, and fix it in that glorious shape;
Nor would permit the thin smoke to escape,
Nor those bright sunbeams to forsake the day;
Which stopped that band of travellers on their way
Ere they were lost within the shady wood;
And showed the bark upon the glassy flood
For ever anchored in her sheltering bay!

Soul-soothing Art! whom Morning, Noontide, Even,
Do serve with all their changeful pageantry;
Thou, with ambition modest yet sublime,
Here, for the sight of mortal man, hast given
To one brief moment caught from fleeting time,
The appropriate calm of blest eternity!

SECTION IV.

THE GREAT MART.

We shall consider this world as a great mart of commerce, where fortune exposes to our view many commoditiesriches, ease, fame, and knowledge. Everything is marked at a settled price. Our time, our labour, our ingenuity, are so much ready money which we are to lay out to the best advantage; and such is the force of well-regulated industry, that a steady and vigorous exertion of our faculties, directed to one end, will generally secure success.

Would you, for instance, be rich? Do you think that single point worth the sacrificing everything else to? You may then be rich. Thousands have become so from the lowest beginnings, by patient diligence, and attention to the minutest articles of profit and expense. But you must give up the pleasures of leisure and of a free unsuspicious temper. Those high and lofty notions of morals which you brought with you from the schools must be considerably lowered. You must learn to do hard, if not unjust things. You must shut your heart against the Muses, and be content to feed your understanding with plain household truths. In short, you must not attempt to enlarge your ideas, or polish your taste, or refine your sentiments, but must keep on in one beaten track, without turning aside to the right hand or to the left. "But I cannot submit to drudgery like this; I feel a spirit

above it." "Tis well be above it then; only do not repine that you are not rich.

Is knowledge the pearl of price? That, too, may be purchased by steady application, and long solitary hours of study and reflection. Bestow these, and you shall be wise. "But,” says the man of letters, "what a hardship is it that many an illiterate fellow who cannot construe the motto of the arms on his coach shall raise a fortune and make a figure, while I have little more than the common conveniences of life." But was it in order to raise a fortune that you consumed the sprightly hours of youth in study and retirement? was it to be rich that you grew pale over the midnight lamp? "What reward have I then for all my labours?" What reward! Have you not a soul well purged from vulgar prejudices, and able to comprehend the works of man, of God; a cultivated mind, replenished with inexhaustible stores of entertainment and reflection; a perpetual spring of fresh ideas; and the conscious dignity of superior intelligence? What reward can you ask

besides?

"But is it not some reproach upon the economy of Providence that such a one, who is a mean dirty fellow, should have amassed wealth enough to buy half a nation ?” Not in the least; he made himself a mean dirty fellow for that very end. He has paid his health, his conscience, his liberty, for it; and will you envy him his bargain? will you hang your head and blush in his presence, because he outshines you in equipage and show? Lift up your brow with a noble confidence, and say to yourself, I have not these things, it is true, but it is because I have not desired them; it is because I possess something better.

The man whose tender sensibility of conscience makes him scrupulous and fearful of offending, is often heard to complain of the disadvantages he lies under in every path of worldly honour and profit. "Could I but get over some nice points, and conform to the practice and opinion of those about me, I might stand as fair a chance as others for dignities and preferments." And why can you not? What hinders you from discarding this troublesome scrupulosity of