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quary. He always appears to us intellectually, as he did to Hannah More bodily, in a primrose suit and silk stockings. His memory is crowded with rubbish, but he hangs some little genre piece in the corner. No writer of his time presents such curious happiness of phrase. "Pictures are but the scenery of devotion;" Versailles is a lumber of littleness." I admire Walpole, but who can love him? Of the earth, every word and thought smell of it. His irreligion is not extremely obtrusive. He was a well-dressed scoffer of refined manners; a kind of English Voltaire, abridged and lettered, with gilt leaves, and elegantly tooled.

JUNE THE NINTH.

TOOD on the root-bridge in the fading lights of evening, and listened with pensive sadness to the chimes from Aberleigh,

while the swans,

66 -in their white-chested pride,

Rushing and racing come to meet me at the water-side."

Just one year ago, in the "leafy month of June," I heard the same sounds of mirth and melancholy, and said then, as now—

"How soft the music of those village bells,

Falling at intervals upon the ear

In cadence sweet."

There is solemn and touching truth in the remark of Pope, that every year carries away something beloved and precious; not destroying, nor effacing, but removing it into a soft and visionary twilight. Poussin's picture of a tomb in Arcadia is the last year in a parable.

It is in the nature of bells to bring out this tone of mournfulness. Every chime has its connecting toll. Each week locks the gate of its predecessor, and keeps the key. Thus it becomes a monument which the old sexton Time watches over. Beautiful it is, indeed, when studded with the rich jewels of wise hours and holy minutes! Most magnificent of sepulchres! The dust of our own creationsour hopes, thoughts, virtues, and sins-is to us the costliest deposit in the burial-ground of the world. How appalling would be the resurrection of a year, a month, or a week, with the secret history of every man open in its hand-a diary of the heart, to be read by its own flame! If childhood could be the granary of youth, youth of manhood, manhood of old age-the year gone being continually brought back to cherish, strengthen, and support the year coming-then might the Grecian story of filial piety receive a new and nobler fulfilment, in the wasted virtue of manhood invigorated by the life

giving current of our youth; in the feebleness and exhaustion of the parent, renewed by the glowing bosom of the child!

The steeple of Aberleigh teaches me a great lesson-to strengthen a good disposition into a habit. The relationship between the two is close and beautiful. Habits are the daughters of action, but they nurse their mother, and give birth to daughters after her image, more lovely and fruitful. The saying is Jeremy Taylor's. The use of our time is the criterion of our state, and our wages will be paid by the clock. Sterne, whose life was only a journey of sentiment, has nevertheless made a wise remark in one of his gossiping letters: "If you adopt the rule of writing every evening your remarks on the past day, it will be a kind of tête-àtête between you and yourself, wherein you may sometimes become your own monitor."

This "gradual dusky veil" of evening reminds me that the road of time has taken a new turn. Let me recollect the admonition of a famous man, that the humblest persons are bound to give an account of their leisure; and, in the midst of solitude, to be of some use to society. Very grand and true are the lines of Herrick :

"Who by his gray hairs doth his lustres tell,

Lives not those years, but he that lives them well.
One man has reach'd his sixty years; but he

Of all those three-score has not lived half three.

He lives, who lives to virtue; men, who cast
Their ends for pleasure, do not live, but last."

This meditation on a woodland bridge ought not to be fruitless. The spare minutes of a year are mighty architects, if kept to their work. They overthrow, and build up; dig, or empty. There is a tradition in Barbary that the sea was once absorbed by ants.

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as

No pyramid may rise under the busy labour of our swarming thoughts. Be not cast down. We read of those who had toiled all night, that, soon as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals, and fish laid thereon, and bread." It was a lone and dreary shore; yet an unexpected flame cheered, and a strange Visitor walked along it. The chimes of ages promise the same food and light to me. In this dark, troubled sea of life, I may row up and down all night and catch nothing; but at last the net will be let down for a great draught. A clear fire burns, and a rich supper is spread upon the calm shore of the future. The haven shines in the distance. Happy! if I leave behind me the short epitaph

"Proved by the ends of being, to have been!"

JUNE THE THIRTEENTH.

EGAN Mr. Keble's Latin lectures, the fruit of his professorship at Oxford. He discovers an interesting variety of expression in the rural temper of Lucretius and Virgil; one retiring to investigate the mysteries, the other to enjoy the beauties of Nature. The first lifts her veil as an anatomist; the second, as a lover. Virgil might desire to imitate, as he certainly wished to honour, the genius of his predecessor; but he left his difficult paths. He felt that, for his own hand, sweeter flowers, and of brighter colours, grew in the sheltered recesses of the hills.

It seems to be ascertained that, in the year in which Lucretius died at Athens, Virgil, assuming the Virile Toga, quitted Cremona for Rome. The melancholy fate of his contemporary could not but touch his heart, and the allusion to suicide, in the sixth book of the Æneid, breathes the pathos of affection; nor may it be unjust to discover, in the sunnier tone of Virgil's colouring, and the general gaiety of his manner, a designed antidote for the gloom and austerity of his rival in the art.

A particular charm of Virgil's poetry resides in this engaging freshness and buoyancy, connected,