to Greenland, or to the isles in the Pacific. As their names are written in the Book of Life, so are their works: and it may be that the noblest memorial of England, in those days, will be the Christian empire of New Zealand. A CHRISTIAN GENTLEMAN. A Christian is God Almighty's gentleman: a gentleman, in the vulgar, superficial way of understanding the word, is the Devil's Christian. But to throw aside these polished and too current counterfeits for something valuable and sterling, the real gentleman should be gentle in every thing, at least in every thing that depends on himself, in carriage, temper, constructions, aims, desires. He ought, therefore, to be mild, calm, quiet, even, temperate, not hasty in judgment, not exorbitant in ambition, not overbearing, not proud, not rapacious, not oppressive; for these things are contrary to gentleness. DESPISE NOT SMALL THINGS. "A pin a day is a groat a year. Take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves." Both these maxims, taken in their true spirit, are admirable prudential rules for the whole of our housekeeping through life. Nor is their usefulness limited to the purse. That still more valuable portion of our property, our time, stands equally in need of good husbandry. It is only by making much of our minutes that we can make much of our days and years. Every stitch that is let down may force us to unravel a score. Moreover, in the intercourse of social life, it is by little acts of watchful kindness, recurring daily and hourly, and opportunities of doing kindnesses, if sought for, are forever starting up,it is by words, by tones, by gestures, by looks, that affection is won and preserved. He who neglects these trifles, yet boasts that whenever a great sacrifice is called for he shall be ready to make it, will rarely be loved. The likelihood is he will not make it; and if he does, it will be much rather for his own sake than for his neighbor's. Many persons, indeed, are said to be penny-wise and pound-foolish; but they who are penny-foolish will hardly be pound-wise, although selfish vanity may now and then, for a moment, get the better of selfish indolence: for Wisdom will always have a microscope in her hand. But these sayings are still more. They are, among the highest maxims of the highest prudence, that which superintends the housekeeping of our souls. The reason why people so ill know how to do their duty on great occasions is, that they will not be diligent in doing their duty on little occasions. Here, too, let us only take care of the pence, and the pounds will take care of themselves: for God will be the paymaster. But how will He pay us? In kind, doubtless, by supplying us with greater occasions, and enabling us to act worthily of them. On the other hand, as there is a law of continuity, whereby in ascending we can only mount step by step, so is there a law of continuity whereby they who descend must sink, and that, too, with an ever-increasing velocity. No propagation or multiplication is more rapid than that of evil, unless it be checked; no growth more certain. He who is in for a penny, to take another expression belonging to the same family, if he does not resolutely fly, will find he is in for a pound. "COMING OF AGE." Everybody is impatient for the time when he shall be his own master. And if coming of age were to make one so, if years could indeed "bring the philosophic mind," it would rightly be a day of rejoicing to a whole household and neighborhood. But too often he who is impatient to become his own master, when the outward checks are removed, merely becomes his own slave,-the slave of a master in the insolent flush of youth, hasty, headstrong, wayward, and tyrannical. Had he really become his own master, the first act of his dominion over himself would have been to put himself under the dominion of a higher master and a wiser. MIRTH. Ridentem dicere verum quid vetat? In the first place, all the sour faces in the world, stiffening into a yet more rigid asperity at the least glimpse of a smile. I have seen faces, too, which, so long as you let them lie in their sleepy torpor, unshaken and unstirred, have a creamy softness and smoothness, and might beguile you into suspecting their owners of being gentle; but, if they catch the sound of a laugh, it acts on them like thunder, and they also turn sour. Nay, strange as it may seem, there have been such incarnate paradoxes as would rather see their fellow-creatures cry than smile. * * * ** * Surely it cannot be requisite to a man's being in earnest that he should wear a perpetual frown. Or is there less of sincerity in Nature during her gambols in spring than during the stiffness and harshness of her wintry gloom? Does not the bird's blithe carolling come from the heart quite as much as the quadruped's monotonous cry? And is it then altogether impossible to take up one's abode with Truth, and to let all sweet homely feelings grow about it and cluster around it, and to smile upon it as on a 1 What forbids one to say what is true in a laughing manner? kind father or mother, and to sport with it, and hold light and 'merry talk with it, as with a loved brother or sister, and to fondle it and play with it as with a child? No otherwise did Socrates and Plato commune with Truth; no otherwise Cervantes and Shakspeare. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * It is true, an exclusive attention to the ridiculous side of things is hurtful to the character and destructive of earnestness and gravity. But no less mischievous is it to fix our attention exclusively, or even mainly, on the vices and other follies of mankind. Such contemplations, unless counteracted by wholesomer thoughts, harden or rot the heart, deaden the moral principle, and make us hopeless and reckless. The objects toward which we should turn our minds habitually are those which are great, and good, and pure; the throne of virtue, and she who sits upon it; the majesty of truth, the beauty of holiness. This is the spiritual sky through which we should strive to mount, "springing from crystal step to crystal step," and bathing our souls in its living, life-giving ether. These are the thoughts by which we should whet and polish our swords for the warfare against evil, that the vapors of the earth may not rust them. But in a warfare against evil, under one or other of its forms, we are all of us called to engage; and it is a childish dream to fancy that we can walk about among mankind without perpetual necessity of remarking that the world is full of many worse incongruities besides those which make us laugh. For the full expansion of the intellect, moreover, to preserve it from that narrowness and partial warp which our proneness to give ourselves up to the sway of the moment is apt to produce, its various faculties, however opposite, should grow and be trained up side by side,—should twine their arms together and strengthen each other by love-wrestles. *** Our graver faculties and thoughts are much chastened and bettered by a blending and interfusion of the lighter, so that "the sable cloud" may "turn her silver lining on the night;" while our lighter thoughts require the graver to substantiate them and keep them from evaporating. Thus Socrates is said, in Plato's Banquet, to have maintained that a great tragic poet ought likewise to be a great comic poet. This combination was realized in himself and in his great pupil, and may, perhaps, have been so to a certain extent in Eschylus, if we may judge from the fame of his satiric dramas. At all events the assertion, as has been remarked more than once, is a wonderful prophetical intuition, which has received its fulfilment in Shakspeare. No heart would have been strong enough to hold the woe of Lear and Othello, except that which had the unquenchable elasticity of Falstaff and the "Midsummer Night's Dream." He, too, is an example that the perception of the ridiculous does not necessarily imply bitterness and scorn. Along with his intense humor, and his equally intense piercing insight into the darkest, most fearful depths of human nature, there is still a spirit of universal kindness, as well as universal justice, pervading his works; and Ben Jonson has left us a precious memorial of him, where he calls him "My gentle Shakspeare." This one epithet sheds a beautiful light on his character: its truth is attested by his wisdom, which could never have been so perfect unless it had been harmonized by the gentleness of the dove. HOW WE MAY "INHERIT THE EARTH." The inheritance of the earth is promised to the godly. How inseparably is this promise bound up with the command to love our neighbors as ourselves! For what is it to inherit land? To possess it; to enjoy it; to have it as our own. Now, if we did love our fellow-men as ourselves,—if their interests, their joys, their good, were as dear to us as our own,-then would all their property be ours. We should have the same enjoyment from it as if it were called by our name. We can feel the truth of this in the case of a dear friend, of a brother; still more in that of a husband and wife, who, though two persons, are in every interest one. Were this love extended to all, it would once more make all mankind one people and one family. To this end, the first Christians sought to have all things in common: neither said any of them that aught of the things which he possessed was his own. (Acts iv. 32.) In proportion as we grow to think and feel that the concerns of others are no less important to us than our own, in proportion as we learn to share their pleasures and their sorrows, to rejoice with them when they rejoice, and to suffer and mourn with them when they suffer and mourn,-in the selfsame measure do we taste the blessedness of the promise that we shall inherit the earth. It is not the narrow span of our own garden, of our own field, that we then enjoy. Our own prosperity does not bound our happiness. That happiness is infinitely multiplied as we take interest in all that befalls our neighbors, and find an ever-flowing source of fresh joy in every blessing bestowed on every soul around us. CLOUD-SUNSHINE. We often live under a cloud; and it is well for us that we should do so. Uninterrupted sunshine would parch our hearts: we want shade and rain to cool and refresh them. Only it behooves us to take care that, whatever cloud may be spread over us, it should be a cloud of witnesses. And every cloud may be such, if we can only look through to the sunshine that broods behind it. CHARLOTTE BRONTË, one of the most original novelists of her time, was born at Thornton, Yorkshire, April 21, 1816. Her father was a curate, of Irish descent, and in 1821 removed from Thornton to Haworth, in the same county. Soon after, the mother died, and Charlotte, when but eight years old, was sent with three of her sisters to Cowan's Bridge Boarding-School, the discomforts and tyranny of which she afterwards very graphically described in her novel of Jane Eyre. Two of the sisters soon died, and Charlotte returned to a home that had not many comforts; for her father was a man of eccentric and solitary habits, and withal very poor. But the sisters nobly determined to exert all their powers to make themselves and their solitary father more comfortable. In 1842, Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels, to qualify themselves for teaching foreign languages. On their return they advertised that they would receive pupils in the parsonage; but none came. The three sisters, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, then ventured to publish a volume of their poems, their names being veiled under those of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. This choice of names was dictated, as Charlotte writes, by "a sort of conscientious scruple at assuming Christian names positively masculine, while they did not like to declare themselves women." But the volume had little success. Charlotte's next venture was a prose tale,―The Professor,-which was rejected by the London publishers; but the rejection was sweetened by the encouragement to try her hand at another book. The fruit of this advice was soon beheld in Jane Eyre (1847),—a work of startling interest and power, and which at once made the author famous. In 1849 she published Shirley, and in 1852 Villette,the last work of this woman of true genius. In June, 1854, she was married to her father's curate, Mr. Nichol, but died in the following March, in her thirtyninth year. DEATH OF EMILY AND ANNE BRONTË. Never in all her life had Emily lingered over any task that lay before her, and she did not linger now. She sank rapidly. She made haste to leave us. Yet, while physically she perished, mentally she grew stronger than we had yet known her. Day by day, when I saw with what a front she met suffering, I looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love. I have seen nothing like it; but, indeed, I have never seen her parallel in any thing. Stronger than a man, simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The awful point was, that while full of ruth for others, on herself she had no pity; the spirit was inexorable to the flesh; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the faded eyes, the same service was exacted as they had rendered in health. To stand by and witness this, and not dare to remonstrate, was a pain no words can render. Two cruel months of hope and fear 1 Her sister Emily, the author of Wuthering Heights, had died in 1848; and Anne, who wrote Agnes Grey, in 1849. |