spot in the distant horizon, where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest; where a Father's hand wipes the tear from every eye; and where “joy unspeakable and full of glory" eternally reigns.

III. FROST. AMUSEMENTS CONNECTED WITH IT. #2152

A GROUP of School-boys on the surface of a frozen pond or lake, is a most animated and interesting spectacle. There is so much evidence of real enjoyment in the motions, the accents, and the countenances of the various individuals who compose it, whether they glide, along the ice on skates, or by means of the more humble instrumentality of wooden shoes, fenced with iron or of a staff, armed with a pike, that a spectator, accustomed to reflection, cannot fail to recognize, in the happiness which prevails around him, an evidence of a benevolent Creator.

It might perhaps appear ludicrous, were I to assert that ice is formed smooth and hard, for the purpose of affording means of healthy and exhilarating sport to the young; and I might be reminded, that this is just the form which the crystallizing process takes in other instances, and the natural result of its laws. Be it so : but still it is impossible to deny, that the youthful mind is so framed as to take pleasure in the exercises which the smooth and level surface of the ice affords; and surely we do not go beyond the bounds of legitimate inference, when we assert, that this is one of the benevolent contrivances by which the rigours of winter are softened, whether the adaptation lie in the polished surface of the frozen plain, or in the buoyancy of the youthful mind, or in both. This observation may be greatly extended; for there is scarcely any object with which we are surrounded, that is not, to the well-constituted mind, a source of enjoyment. In the young this is more con

spicuous, because the pleasurable feeling lies nearer the surface, and is more easily excited, and expressed more emphatically, by outward signs. But it would be a great mistake to measure the relative enjoyments of childhood and manhood by their external expression, or to suppose that nature, even in its most familiar aspects, does not present as many objects of interest, and of agreeable sensation, to those who are in the meridian of life, or even verging towards the shades of evening, as to those who flutter in the morning sunshine.

If the ice afford to the school-boy the joy of gliding swiftly on its smooth expanse, it is not niggardly of its amusements to the more sedate minds of the mature in age. To every northern country, some amusement on the ice is familiar; and, among these, that of curling may be mentioned as the game peculiarly prized in many districts of Scotland; and also, if I mistake not, in the Netherlands; from which latter country it seems to have been originally derived. The amiable Grahame, in his British Georgics, gives a graphic description of this amusement, an extract from which will not be unacceptable :

Now rival parishes and shrievedoms, keep,
On upland lochs, the long-expected tryst,
To play their yearly bonspeil. Aged men,
Smit with the eagerness of youth, are there,

While love of conquest lights their beamless eyes,

New nerves their arms, and makes them young once more."

"Keen, keener still, as life itself were staked,
Kindles the friendly strife: one points the line
To him who, poising, aims and aims again;
Another runs, and sweeps where nothing lies.
Success, alternately, from side to side,
Changes; and quick the hours unnoted fly,
Till light begins to fail, and deep below,
The player, as he stoops to lift his coit,
Sees, half incredulous, the rising moon.

And now the final, the decisive spell

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Begins; near and more near the sounding stones,
Some winding in, some bearing straight along,
Crowd justling all around the mark; while one
Just slightly touching, victory depends
Upon the final aim; low swings the stone,
Then, with full force, careering furious on,
Rattling it strikes aside both friend and foe,
Maintains its course, and takes the victor's place."

These are but single instances of the means of enjoy ment, which brighten the gloom of winter. The benevolent Parent of nature enables the human mind to find a source of pleasure, as I have said, almost in every thing. Who has not felt his heart expand with an undefinable delight, when he has beheld the fantastic forms into which, during severe weather, the frozen spray or drippings of a cascade throw themselves, and when he has given loose reins to his fancy, in tracing crystal grottos, and temples, and spires, in the endless, but al ways elegant varieties of the architecture which the wizard Frost had reared? The very icicles dependent from the eaves of the houses, as they glance in the morn→ ing sun, are not beheld without a pleasing emotion ; and a higher gratification to the taste is afforded in contemplating the white expanse of the snow as it spreads its bright and colourless carpet over the fields, and lies thick on the bending hedges and trees, while, at the horizon, the cold marble outline of the distant hills, swelling in the softened light, is finely contrasted with the dark blue of the serene and cloudless sky. Mr Abbott, a pleasing and amiable American writer, has touched, very beautifully, on the "thousand ingenious contrivances," as he calls them, which "God has planned and executed to make men happy," and he alludes, among other things, to the enjoyments of winter, in a few sentences, which will form an appropriate conclusion to this paper.

"You can give no reason," says he, "why the heart of a child is filled with such joyous glee, when the first

snow-flakes descend. There is no very special beauty in the sight; and there are no very well-defined hopes ́of slides or rides, to awaken such joy. At fifty, the gladness is not expressed so unequivocally; but yet, when the gravest philosopher rides through a wood, whose boughs are loaded with the snow, and whose tops bend over with the burden, and looks upon the footsteps of the rabbit, who has leaped along over the ground, he feels the same pleasure, though he indicates it, by riding on in silent musing, instead of uttering exclamations of delight. Can you explain this pleasure? Is there any describable pleasure in a great expanse of white? Is the form of the trees, or the beauty of their foliage, improved by their snowy mantle? No! The explanation is, that God, who formed the laws of nature, formed also the human heart; and has so adapted the one to the other, as to promote, in every variety of mode, the enjoyment of the beings he has made. There is no end to the kinds of enjoyment which God has thus opened to us every where. They are too numerous to be named; and no intellectual philosopher has ever undertaken the hopeless task of arranging them."*

THE winter landscape has been accused of monotony ; and certainly all Nature has at this season a less animated and varied aspect than at any other. Unless when sprinkled over with hoar-frost, or covered with a cold mantle of snow, the surface of the earth is of a bleak and faded hue. The woods have long lost the variegated foliage, that had previously ceased to be their ornament; and the branches of the trees, with their "naked shoots, barren as lances," present one uniform appearance of death and decay. The howling of the long-continued storm, and the few faint bird-notes heard at intervals in the thickets or hedges, are monotonously mournful. The devastation of the earth, and the sounds that seem to bewail it, are general and unvaried. A few hardy plants and flowers, indeed, begin to swell their buds and expand their petals; but the thick cerements which envelope the one class, and the pale and sombre hue of the other, equally proclaim to the querulous mind the ungenial climate.

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Such, at a cursory glance, appear to be the aspect and tone of our winter scenery. But the keenly observant eye discovers, even at this desolate season, and in the midst of seeming monotony, that endless variety which characterizes every province of creation. On close inspection, indeed, all we behold is varied. Whatever be the season, and wherever lie the scene of our observation, though many things are apparently similar, yet none are exactly or really so. At certain times and places, the mutual resemblances between all the common objects of sense, all that solicits the eye or the ear in the landscape, may be so numerous and striking, as to produce a feeling of monotony; groups of mournful sights and