ously with kings and queens, emperors and empresses, and notabilities of all sorts ? Do we not nightly jumble events and personages and times and places, as these do daily? Are we not sometimes troubled by our own sleeping inconsistencies, and do we not vexedly try to account for them or excuse them, just as these do sometimes in respect of their waking delusions?

I

WONDER that the great master who knew everything, when he called sleep the death of each day's life, did not call dreams the insanityof each day's sanity.

A WONDERFUL fact to reflect upon,

that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other.

A SOLEMN consideration, when I

enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of death itself, is referable to this.

No more can I turn the leaves of this

dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

DEA

EATH is Nature's remedy for all things, and why not legislation's ? Accordingly, the forger was put to death; the utterer of a bad note was put to death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to death; the purloiner of forty

shillings and sixpence was put to death; the holder of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to death; the sounders of three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of crime, were put to death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention-it might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was exactly the reversebut, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each particular case, and left nothing else connected with it to be looked after. Thus, Tellson's, in its day, like greater places of business, its contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid low before it had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately disposed of, they would probably have excluded what little light the ground floor had, in a rather significant

manner.

ALAS! how few of Nature's faces are

left alone to gladden us with their beauty! The cares, and sorrows, and hungerings, of the world, change them as they change hearts; and it is only when those passions sleep, and have lost their hold for ever, that the troubled clouds pass off, and leave Heaven's surface clear.

IT is a common thing for the counten

ances of the dead, even in that fixed and rigid state, to subside into the longforgotten expression of sleeping infancy, and settle into the very look of early life; so calm, so peaceful, do they grow again, that those who knew them in their happy childhood, kneel by the coffin's side in awe, and see the Angel even upon earth.

IN love of home, the love of country has

its rise; and who are the truer patriots or the better in time of needthose who venerate the land, owning its wood, and stream, and earth, and all that they produce? or those who love their country, boasting not a foot of ground in all its wide domain !

OH

H these holidays! why will they leave us some regret? why cannot we push them back, only a week or two in our memories, so as to put them at once at that convenient distance whence they may be regarded either with a calm indifference or a pleasant effort of recollection !

SUCH

is the difference between yesterday and to-day. We are all going to the play, or coming home from it.

OUR

UR whole life is a story more or less intelligible—generally less; but we shall read it by a clearer light when it is ended.

THERE are some falsehoods on which

men mount, as on bright wings, towards Heaven. There are some truths, cold bitter taunting truths, wherein your worldly scholars are very apt and punctual, which bind men down to earth with leaden chains.

OH,

H, moralists, who treat of happiness and self-respect, innate in every sphere of life, and shedding light on every grain of dust in God's highway, so smooth below your carriage-wheels, so rough beneath the tread of naked feet, bethink yourselves in looking on the swift descent of men who have lived in their own esteem, that there are scores of thousands breathing now, and breathing thick with painful toil, who in that high respect have never lived at all, nor had a chance of life!

GO ye, who rest so placidly upon the

sacred bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, teachers of content and honest pride, into the