COMMON THINGS. THEY smile at me; they laughing say, The parting year leaves you the boy And I, in love with the disgrace, Their smiles and jests enjoy, And thank kind Heaven that, old in years, What is it, this they'd have me win, A keener calculating head Ah loss!-a colder heart; Well, manhood's sense or boyhood's warmth, Leave, leave the heart and keep the head, 295 W. C. BENNETT. XXVI. COMMON THINGS. "ONE great cause of our insensibility to the goodness of the Creator is the very extensiveness of his bounty. We prize but little what we share only in common with the rest, or with the generality of our species. When we hear of blessings, we think forthwith of successes, of prosperous fortunes, of honours, riches, preferments, i.e. of those advantages and superiorities over others, which we happen either to possess,r to be in pursuit of, or to covet. The common benefits of our nature entirely escape us. Yet these are the great things. These constitute what most properly ought to be accounted blessings of Providence; what alone, if we might so speak, are worthy of its care. Nightly rest and daily bread, the ordinary use of our limbs, and senses, and understandings, are gifts which admit of no comparison with any other. Yet. because almost every man we meet with possesses these, we leave them out of our enumeration. They raise no sentiment; they move no gratitude. Now, herein is our judgment perverted by our selfishness. A blessing ought in truth to be the more satisfactory, the bounty at least of the donor is rendered more conspicuous by its very diffusion, its commouness, its cheapness: by its falling to the lot, and forming the happiness, of the great bulk and body of our species, as well as of oursel es. Nay even when we do not possess it, it ought to be the matter of thankfulness that others do. But we have a different way of thinking. We court distinction. That is not the worst we see nothing but what has distinction to recommend it. This necessarily contracts our views of the Creator's beneficence within a narrow compass; and most unjustly. It is in those things which are so common as to be no distinction, that the amplitude of the Divine benignity is perceived."-Paley. 298 They soothe the grieved, the stubborn they chastise And want the host and c'er the aching head, 1 THE BELEAGUERED CITY. 299 cient to attach us to the eager pursuit of them. A regard to a future state can hardly keep its place as it is. If we were designed therefore, to be influenced by that regard, might not a more indulgent system, a higher or more uninterrupted state of gratification, have interfered with the design? At least it seems expedient, that mankind should be susceptible of this influence, when presented to them; that the condition of the world should not be such, as to exclude its operation, or even to weaken it more than it does. In a religious view (however we may complain of them in every other), privation, disappointment and satiety, are not without the most salutary tendencies."-Paley. I HAVE read in some old marvellous tale, Beside the Moldau's rushing stream, White as a sea-fog, landward bound, No other voice nor sound was there, But when the old cathedral bell Proclaimed the morning prayer, Down the broad valley fast and far Up rose the glorious morning star, I have read the marvellous heart of man, That an army of phantoms vast and wan Encamped beside life's rushing stream, Gigantic shapes and shadows gleam THE sun is a glorious thing, That comes alike to all, The moonlight is a gentle thing, It shines upon the fisher's boat, Or where the little lambkins lie, The dew-drops on the summer morn, The village children brush them off, There are no gems in monarch's crowns Poor Robin on the pear-tree sings, Beside the cottage door; The heath-flower fills the air with sweets Upon the pathless moor. There are as many lovely things, For those who sit by cottage-hearths As those who sit on thrones ! MRS. HAWKSHAWE, XXVII. TO THE BUTTERFLY. "FROM our being born into the present world in the helpless imperfect state of infancy, and having arrived from thence to mature age, we find it to be a general law of nature in our own species, that the same creatures, the same individuals, should exist in degrees of life and perception, with capacities of action, of enjoyment and suffering, in one period of their being, greatly different from those appointed to them in another period of it. And in other creatures the same law holds. For the difference of their capacities and states of life at their birth (to go no higher) and in maturity; the change of worms. into flies, and the vast enlargement of their locomotive powers by such Yet wert thou once a worm, a thing that crept ROGERS. XXVIII. BOOKS. "IT is chiefly through books that we enjoy intercourse with superior minds, and these invaluable means of communication are in the reach of all. In the best books, great men talk to us, give us their most precious thoughts, and pour their souls into ours. God be thanked for books. They are the voices of the distant and the dead, and make us heirs of the spiritual life of past ages. Books are the true levellers. They give to all, who will faithfully use them, the society, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of our race. No matter how poor I am. No matter, though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling. If the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof, if Milton will cross my threshold, to sing to me of Paradise, and Shakspeare to open to me the world of imagination and the workings of the human heart, and Franklin to enrich me with his practical wisdom, I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, and I may become a cultivated man, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live."— Channing. "If I were to pray for a taste which should stand me in stead under every variety of circumstances, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness to me through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be a taste for reading."-Sir John Herschel. BUT what strange art, what magic can dispose |