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

forth no books but living volumes, that honored their authors and blessed the world.

If woman have a broader mission now, in Heaven's name, let her fulfil it! If she have aught to sing, like the daughters of Judah, let her sit down by the waters of Babel, and the world shall weep; like Miriam, let her triumph-strain float gloriously over crushed but giant wrong, and the world shall hear; but let the triumph and lament issue, as did the oracles of old, from behind the veil that cannot be rent: the inner temple' of sacred Home.

Within it, should be enshrined the divinity of the place. Here and here only, would we find woman; here imprison her-imprison her? Aye, as the lighthouse ray, that flows out, pure as an angel's pulses, into the night and darkness of the world-a star beneath the cloud; but brightest there. warmest there-always there, where Heaven did kindle it, within the precinct, the very altar-place of home!

It is related of Madame Lucciola, a renowned vocalist, that she ruined a splendid tenor voice by her efforts to imitate male singing. Many a sweet voice and gentle influence in the social harmony, has been lost to the world in the same manner. There is nothing more potent than woman's voice, if heard, not

12*

in the field, or the forum, but at home. The songbird of Eastern story, borne from its native isle, grew dumb and languished. Seldom did it sing, and only when it saw a dweller from its distant land, or to its drowsy perch there came a tone, heard long ago in its own woods. So with the song that woman sings; best heard within Home's sacred temple. Elsewhere, a trumpet-tone-perhaps a clarion-cry, but the lutelike voice has fled the mezzo-soprano' is lost in the discords of earth.

The old homestead! I wish I could paint it for you, as it is—no, no, I dare not say, as it is—as it was; that we could go together, to-night, from room to room; sit by the old hearth, round which that circle of light and love once swept, and there linger, till all those simpler, purer times returned, and we should grow young again.

And how can we leave that spot, without remembering one form, that occupied, in days gone by, 'the old arm-chair:' that old-fashioned MOTHER ?—one in all the world, the law of whose life was love; one who was the divinity of our infancy, and the sacred presence in the shrine of our first earthly idolatry ; one whose heart is far below the frosts that gather so thickly on her brow; one to whom we never grow