cloud, then "1 shall be" is as grand as an old

When

The battle is done, the harp unstrung,

Its music trembling, dying,

pæan.

Then "I shall be " is as sublime as an old prophecy! But there is another tense in this Grammar of Life it were well to remember; the sparkling moment that dances out from the ripening hours, like golden grain, beneath the flails of Time, as we write, and even as we write, is gathered into the great garner of the Past.

There is an injunction it were well to remember:

OLD LETTERS! Don't you love, sometimes, to look over old letters? Some of them are dim with years, and some are dim with tears.

Here is one now,

the burden of which is, 'Don't

forget; the device on the seal is, 'don't forget,' and

the writer thereof went, winters ago, to "the narrow beds of peace." But surely, she needn't have written it, for we can't forget if we would.

Don't forget! They are common words; we hear them, perhaps use them, every day, and yet how needless, we may almost say, how meaningless, they are. What is it we forget? That which was fore'gotten, and set down in the tablets of memory, long ago; set down, we may not remember where, we may not remember when, but it is there still. Remove with the palm of Time, the inscriptions upon marble-eat out with its corroding tooth,' the lettering upon brass, but that thing fore'gotten remains unobliterated. Some breath may whirl back the leaves of memory to its page-in some hour, an epitome of its contents may be unrolled before us. Every thought consigned to memory is immortal-its existence runs parallel with the mind that conceived, and the heart that cradled it. 'Don't forget!' We cannot forget. Earth is full of strains Lethean of man's invention, but the past is with him still.

New days, new hopes, new loves arise; but 'pleasant yet mournful to the soul is the memory of joys that are past.' Our eyes are dazzled with the clear of the present, but dimmed with the cloud of the

past. Ride as we will, on the swiftest billow of tomorrow, we are never out of sight of yesterday. There it shines still, with a tearful, gentle light, like some pale Pleiad through the rack of the storm. "Don't forget!" Ah! the science that could teach men to forget, would be more welcome than all the trickery of Mnemonics.

When the heart beats sadder, and the tide of life runs slower, how the Yesterdays come drifting down to waiting Age-waiting for him who enters hall and hovel, unbidden and unstayed. "Don't forget!" Alas! who does not remember?

Even Ocean itself, busy as it is, in laving from its shores, all records of the past, is the great memory of the natural world. Clarence' dream was no fiction, and its treasures glitter, and whiten, and sway amid the groves of red coral. But even the Sea is not oblivious, for "the Sea shall give up its dead."

Blessed Almanacs.

WHILE I am writing these words, a pair of "bright particular" eyes, just on a level with the table, are following my pen in its eccentric movements over the page. Don't you and I wish our eyes were just on a level with the tables again! The owner of the eyes aforesaid, is a Lilliputian, not nearer to Heaven, as Hamlet had it, even "by the altitude of a copine," than PORT, and he lacks a sheet of paper of three feet. And speaking of eyes, where can you find a brighter pair of interrogation-points, than the eyes of a child? Seeing every thing, and turning every thing into a query, that they see?

Subject yourself for a half hour to one of these

youthful inquisitors, and you are more of a philosopher than I take you to be, if he doesn't pose you, in less than half the time.

But small as he is, his ambition, like a vine in a garden, has run all over the month of December, and leaved and flowered at a tropical rate, some where near the 25th. 'How many days is it to Christ

mas?'

'How many Saturdays is it?'

There is no

school on Saturdays, and the little rascal keeps his calendar by play-days! Well, let him, for few enough of them he'll find by and by, unless he lives on into the Millennium. 'And will Santa Claus come?—and how can he come down the chimney and the stove-pipe ?—and does he come Christmas or New Year's?' There's that vine of his, a week longer than it was, a minute ago.

'Oh! have him come Christmas! Have him come Christmas!' and eyes, and feet, and heart, for that matter, all dance together. Have him come Christmas! There spoke the child of a larger growth. There peeped out the man, through the disguise of boyhood, thus early drawing on the future, like a gay heir in expectancy, to make up the deficits of the present an extravagance, that has made many a man and woman bankrupt for the amount of a thousand hopes sterling, and the undivided half' of a life full of happiness,

Men have a weary train of days-days of care and toil, if not of tears; but children have, in their calendar, but four or five days in a whole yearChristmas, New Year's, and Birth-day, Fourth of July, and Thanksgiving-but they, like great lamps,