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sehood. For instance, a truthful little girl described to me various appearances of a Christ child, telling what it had said and done. In all those cases in which we do not desire to mirror before the child the black image of a lie, it is sufficient to say, "Be sober, have done with play."

Finally, we must distinguish between untruths relating to the future and the past. We do not attribute to a grown man who breaks his word in reference to some future performance, that blackness of perjury which we charge on him who falsifies what has been already done; so with children, before whose brief vision time, like space, is immeasurable, and who are as unable to look through a day, as we through a year, we should widely separate untruthfulness of promise from untruthfulness of assertion. Truth is a divine blossom upon an earthly root; of course, it is in time not the earliest, but the latest virtue.

REVERENCE FOR LIFE.

Only place all life before the child as within the realm of humanity, and thus the greater reveals to him the less. Put life and soul into everything; describe to him even the lily, which he would pull up as an unorganized thing, as the daughter of a slender mother, standing in her garden-bed, from whom her little white offspring derives nutriment and moisture. And let not this be done to excite an empty enervated habit of pity, a sort of inoculation. hospital for foreign pains, but from the religious cultivation of reverence for life, the God all-moving in the tree top and the human brain. The love of animals, like maternal affections, has this advantage, that it is disinterested and claims no return, and can also at every moment find an object and an oppertunity for its exercise.

THE SKY.

JOHN RUSKIN.

It is a strange thing how little, in general, people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which Nature has done more for the sake of pleas ing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works; and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of their organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as we know, be answered if, once in three days or thereabouts, a great, ugly, black rain-cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well watered, and so all left blue again till next time, with, perhaps, a film of morning and evening mist for dew. And, instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives when Nature is not producing, scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant prin

ciples of the most perfect beauty, that it is quite certain that it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure. And every man, wherever placed, however far from other sources of interest or of beauty, has this doing for him constantly. The noblest scenes of the earth ca be seen and known but by few; it is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them; he injures them by his presence; he ceases to feel them if he be always with them. But the sky is for all; bright as it is, it is not 'too bright or good for human nature's daily food;' it is fitted, in all its functions, for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart; for the soothing it, and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful; never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost Divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinct as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal is essential. And yet we never attend to it; we never make it a subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless and monotonous accidents, too common and too vain to be worthy of a moment of watchfulness or a glance of admiration. If, in our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says it has been wet, and another it has been windy, and another it has been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that gilded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon their summits, until they melted and mouldered away in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds, when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it, like withered leaves? All has passed unregretted or unseen or, if the apathy be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross or what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake nor in the fire, but in the still small voice. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lampblack and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty; the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual; that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood; things which the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally, which are never

wanting, and never repeated; which are to be found always, yet each found but once. It is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught and the - blessing of beauty given.

THE STRUGGLE OF LIFE,

WM. M. THACKERAY.

Is a man very wrong for being after all only a man? Which is the most reasonable, and does his duty best: he who stands aloof from the struggle of life, calmly contemplating it, or he who descends to the ground, and takes his part in the contest? "That philosopher," Pen said, “had held a great place amongst the leaders of the world, and enjoyed to the full what it had to give of rank and riches, renown and pleasure, who came, weary-hearted, out of it, and said that all was vanity and vexation of spirit. Many a teacher of those whom we reverence, and who steps out of his carriage up to his carved cathedral place, shakes his lawn ruffles over the velvet cushion, and cries out that the whole struggle is an accursed one, and the works of the world are evil. Many a conscience-stricken mystic flies from it altogether, and shuts himself out from it within convent walls (real or spiritual), whence he can only look up to the sky, and contemplate the heaven out of which there is no rest, and no good.

But the earth, where our feet are, is the work of the same Power as the immeasurable blue yonder, in which the future lies into which we would peer. Who ordered toil as the condition of life, ordered weariness, ordered sickness, ordered poverty, failure, success to this man a foremost place, to the other a nameless struggle with the crowd-to that a shameful fall, or paralyzed limb, or sudden accident-to each some work upon the ground he stands on, until he is laid beneath it." While they were talking, the dawn came shining through the windows of the room, and Pen threw them open to receive the fresh morning air. "Look, George," said he; "look and see the sun rise: he sees the laborer on his way to a field; the work-girl plying her poor needle; the law. yer at his desk, perhaps; the beauty smiling asleep upon her pillow of down; or the jaded reveler reeling to bed; or the fevered patient tossing on it; or the doctor watching by it, over the throes of the mother for the child that is to be born into the world:-to be born and to take his part in the suffering and struggling, the tears and laughter, the crime, remorse, love, folly, sorrow, rest."

THE FAIR AND HAPPY MILKMAID.

SIR THOMAS OVERBURY,

The fair and happy milkmaid is a country wench that is so far from making herself beautiful by art, that one look of hers is able to put all face-physic out of countenance. She knows a fair look is but a

dumb orator to commend virtue, therefore minds it not. All her excellences stand in her so silently, as if they had stolen upon her without her knowledge. The lining of her apparel, which is herself, is far better than outsides of tissue; for though she be not arrayed in the spoil of the silk-worm, she is decked in innocence, a far better wearing. She doth not, with lying long in bed, spoil both her complexion and conditions: nature hath taught her, too, immoderate sleep is rust to the soul; she rises, therefore, with Chanticleer, her dame's cock, and at night makes the lamb her curfew. In milking a co 7, and straining the teats through her fingers, it seems that so sweet a milk-press makes the milk whiter or sweeter; for never came almond-glore or aromatic ointment on her palm to taint it. The golden ears of corn fall and kiss her feet when she reaps them, as if they wished to be bound and led prisoners by the same hand that felled them. Her breath is her own, which scents, all the year long, of June, like a new-made haycock. She makes her hand hard with labor, and her heart soft with pity; and when winter evenings fall early, sitting at her merry wheel, she bids defiance to the giddy wheel of fortune. She doth all things with so sweet a grace, it seems ignor. ance will not suffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well. She bestows her year's wages at next fair, and in choosing her garments, counts no bravery in the world like decency. The garden and bee. hive are all her physic and surgery, and she lives the longer for it. She dares go alone, and unfold sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill, because she means none; yet, to say truth, she is never alone, but is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but short ones; yet they have their efficacy, in that they are not appalled with ensuing idle cogitations. Lastly, her dreams are so chaste, that she dare tell them; only a Friday's dream is all her superstition; that she conceals for fear of anger. Thus lives she, and all her care is, she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet.

WIT THE FLAVOR OF THE MIND.

SIDNEY SMITH.

When wit is combined with sense and information; when it is softened by benevolence and restrained by principle; when it is in the hands of a man who can use it and despise it-who can be witty and something more than witty-who loves honor, justice, decency, good-nature, morality, and religion ten thousand times better than wit-wit is then a beau. tiful and delightful part of our nature. Genuine and innocent wit like this is surely the flavor of the mind. Man could direct his ways by plain reason, and sup port his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit, and flavor, and brightness, and laughter, and perfumes, to enliven the days of man's pilgrimage, and to charm his pained steps over the burning marl.

CONQUEST OF JERUSALEM BY THE

CRUSADERS.

EWD. GIBBON--"DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE."

Jerusalem has derived some reputation from the number and importance of her memorable sieges. It was not till after a long and obstinate contest that Babylon and Rome could prevail against the obstinacy of the people, the craggy ground that might supersede the necessity of fortifications, and the walls and towers that would have fortified the most accessible plain. These obstacles were diminished in the age of the crusades. The bulwarks had been completely destroyed and imperfectly restored: the Jews, their nation and worship, were forever banished; but nature is less changeable than man, and the site of Jerusalem, though somewhat softened and somewhat removed, was still strong against the assaults of an. enemy. By the experience of a recent siege, and a three years' possession, the Saracens of Egypt had been taught to discern, and in some degree to remedy, the defects of a place which religion as well as honor forbade them to resign. Aladin, of Iftikhar, the caliph's lieutenant, was entrusted with the defence; his policy strove to restrain the native Christians by the dread of their own ruin and that of the holy sepulchre; to animate the Moslems by the assurance of temporal and eternal rewards. His garrison is said to have consisted of forty thousand Turks and Arabians; and if he could muster twenty thousand of the inhabitants, it must be confessed that the besiegea were more numerous than the besieging army. Had the diminished strength and numbers of the Latins allowed them to grasp the whole circumference of four thousand yards-about two English miles and a half-to what useful purpose should they have descended into the valley of Ben Himmon and torrent of Cedron, or approached the precipices of the south and east, from whence they had nothing either to hope or fear? Their siege was more reason. ably directed against the northern and western sides of the city. Godfrey, of Bouillon, erected his standard on the first swell of Mount Calvary, to the left, as far as St. Stephen's gate, the line of attack was ontinued by Tancred and the two Roberts; and Count Raymond established his quarters from the citadel to the foot of Mount Sion, which was no longer included within the precincts of the city. On the fifth day the crusaders made a general assault, in the fanatic hope of battering down the walls without engines, and of scaling them without ladders. By the dint of brutal force, they burst the first barrier, but they were driven back with shame and slaughter to the cap. the influence of vision and prophecy was deadened by the too frequent abuse of those pious stratagems, and time and labor were found to be the only means of victory. The time of the siege was indeed ulfilled in forty days, but they were forty days of calamity and anguish. A repetition of the old complaint of famine may be imputed in some

degree to the voracious or disorderly appetite of the Franks, but the stony soil of Jerusalem is almost destitute of water; the scanty springs and hasty tor rents were dry in the summer season; nor was the thirst of the besiegers relieved, as in the city, by the artificial supply of cisterns and aqueducts. The circumjacent country is equally destitute of trees for the uses of shade or building, but some large beams were discovered in a cave by the crusaders: a wood near Sichem, the enchanted grove of Tasso, was cut down: the necessary timber was transported to the camp by the vigor and dexterity of Tancred; and the engines were framed by some Genoese artists, who had fortunately landed in the harbor of Jaffa. Two movable turrets were constructed at the expense and in the stations of the Duke of Lorraine and the Count of Tholouse, and rolled forwards with devout labor, not to the most accessible, but to the most neglected parts of the fortification. Raymond's tower was reduced to ashes by the fire of the besieged, but his colleague was more vigilant and successful; the enemies were driven by his archers from the rampart; the drawbridge was let down; and on a Friday, at three in the afternoon, the day and hour of the Passion, Godfrey, of Bouillon, stood victorious on the walls of Jerusalem. His example was followed on every side by the emulation of valor; and about four hundred and sixty years after the conquest of Omar, the holy city was rescued from the Mohammedan yoke. In the pillage of public and private wealth, the adventurers had agreed to respect the exclusive property of the first occupant; and the spoils of the great mosque-seventy lamps and massy vases of gold and silver-rewarded the diligence and displayed the generosity of Tancred. A bloody sacrifice was offered by his mistaken votaries to the God of the Christians: resistance might provoke, but neither age nor sex could mollify their implacable rage; they indulged themselves three days in a promiscuous massacre, and the infection of the dead bodies produced an epidemical disease. After seventy thousand Moslems had been put to the sword, and the harmless Jews had been burnt in their synagogue, they could still reserve a multitude of captives whom interest or lassitude persuaded them to spare. Of these savage heroes of the cross, Tancred alone betrayed some sentiments of compassion; yet we may praise the more selfish lenity of Raymond, who granted a capitulation and safe-conduct to the garrison of the citadel. The holy sepulchre was now free; and the bloody victors prepared to accomplish their vow. Barcheaded and barefoot, with contrite hearts, and in a humble posture, they ascended the hill of Calvary amidst the loud anthems of the clergy; kissed the stone which had covered the Saviour of the world, and bedewed with tears of joy and penitence the monument of their redemption.

FEAR. The religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.

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