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its locks of gold, and its bounding heart of bliss. He has lifted Heaven away from us, as we have stood up in the full stature of men; for to this the poet testified, when he said,

'It gives me little joy,

To think I'm farther off from Heaven,

Than when I was a boy.'

He has robbed manhood of its form erect, its eagle look, and its soldier tread. He has stolen beauty, line after line, and light after light, from the lips, the cheek, the brow of loveliness.

He has chilled the warmest pulses, dimmed the brightest visions, paralyzed the strongest hand, that ever throbbed with sympathetic pain, or swept the dismal horizon of human sorrow, or struck for God and the right.

He has effaced the inscriptions that love and memory have traced.

He has shrivelled and obliterated our parchments. He has struck from the roll, names that were born

to a good hope of immortality.

He has crumbled the walls of our old homesteads.

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He has changed' the faces of our old friends.

He has made life too long for our hopes, but too brief for our deeds.

He has substituted the new for the old; the things of to-day for the things of yesterday and for ever.

AND how have the architect, the painter, and the poet been battling against grim, relentless Time? Go to Bunker's Hill, and ask them, 'What build ye now?' and they answer,' Here swelled the first strain of Liberty's Anthem-here Warren fell-here one day in June, three quarters of a century ago-why it is Bunker Hill Monument! So, indeed, it is; but look at that mighty shaft, as it sublimely swings to the rising and setting sun. I tell you, it is more. You see there a fortress, a stronghold against Time. 'How the years drift over the world,' they said—they that stood around that crimsoned height. Those years will sweep the red record of the deed away.' TIME will do it, and the memory of that grand act shall be struck from the drama of our race. Not sonot so. We will pile up the granite; we will stereotype the story; we will emboss it upon the page of the globe; we will build a citadel-aye, that's the word!—a CITADEL against Time. Is it to last an hundred years ? Then for an hundred years, we'll stand the siege of Time. Five hundred?

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rison of memories shall be there still! Storm

on, all

devastating Time, we'll stay thee here. Those stoneah! lay them well! The clink of those trowels is a sublime defiance to him, to whom name and fame have been, in other days, as wrecks and weeds to the gray Atlantic.

The

In, from under the clear blue sky of heaven, we come to an humble chamber, guiltless of ornament. Therein is a man, and he bends over a canvass. light of the setting sun plays in a halo round his head, and falls upon a picture. 'Tis of a dwelling, an humble dwelling, surrounded by old trees, and a hill rising in the distance, and a stream low murmuring in the fore-ground. His pencil deepens this shadow and that tint. The landscape is almost finished. 'What do you here?' we ask. A light is kindled in his eye; a glow is on his pale cheek; he dashes his pencil upon the palette, as he exultingly exclaims, ‘I have recalled it all! There is the very tree from whose pendent limbs I swung, years and years ago; and there is the window through whose little blue panes, day was wont to break upon my childish eyes, and there the stream where drifted my mimic sail, and there the hill where whirled my mimic mill. And there the roof-aye! with the very moss upon its northern eaves-beneath which I loved my first

love and thought my first thought. All there!-a transcript from memory. The old house, or so they tell me, is dismantled; the roof lets in the stars; weeds have sprung up in the hearth, and the graveyard is more furrowed than ever. Let it crumble; let its dust be strown to the winds, but its image shall not fade. Time! do thy work; I have thee now! Efface the picture of that house from memory-it shall not be "lost to sight." And ere thy fingers shall dim that canvass, I shall have gone beyond thy potent sweep.' And well does he say, 'I have triumphed over Time;' and well does he exult, that with the noiseless weapon of the pencil, he has vanquished the conqueror of kings.

The Past is with us still,

When SCIENCE grasped a filmy thread of light,
That dimly floated in the empty air,
And dared to draw the silver woof of night,
Until she saw a STAR was clinging there,
She trembled at the vision she had seen:
It only told her that a star had been!

That starry tress had faded in its flight,

(So long it wandered through the blue abyss,)
Before it met a mortal's startled sight.

While yet it journeyed 'twixt that world and this,
Perhaps some hand had borne the wondrous urn,
Beyond the range of human thought's return;

Perhaps extinguished-e'en the stars do die-
Ere Heaven unfolded to her earnest eye.

Things are around us that have ceased to be;
And starry hopes, extinguish'd long ago,
Still link us to the past. Who would be free,
Or give that tearful past for all we know,
Or dream, of bliss or blessing yet to come?
All, ALL is mortal, till it reach the tomb!
And all unblest until it find its wings!

That last year's Heaven of stars, oh! who would give
For aught beside! Filled with translated things,
Too bright to die, too beautiful to live.

The

Old-Fashioned Mother.

OLD-FASHIONED Mothers have nearly all passed away with the blue check and homespun woolen of a simpler but purer time. Here and there one remains, truly accomplished,' in heart and life, for the sphere of home.

Old-fashioned mothers-God bless them!— who followed us with heart and prayer, all over the world-lived in our lives and sorrowed in our griefs: who knew more about patching than poetry; spoke no dialect but that of love; never preached nor wandered; 'made melody with their hearts;' and sent

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