We may add to this Table, as coming under the head of Force, a few marks of expression, also borrowed from the art of music.

A gradual increase of loudness is expressed by the word crescendo, or by the sign

A gradual decrease of loudness is expressed by the word diminuendo, or by the sign

An explosive or abrupt utterance is denoted by the word staccato when the expression is spread over a whole clause, or, when limited to a few words, by points or dots (ꞌꞌꞌ

intended syllables.-JOHN MILLARD.

.) placed over the

PART II.

MISCELLANEOUS READINGS IN PROSE.

LABOUR.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

[Thomas Carlyle was born at Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire, in 1795. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, of which college he was installed lordrector, April 2, 1866. Carlyle was intended for the church. On leaving college he adopted, not without hesitation, the scholastic profession; but he gradually drifted into literature, utilizing the results of his studies through the medium of the press. He became a great admirer of the German language and an ardent explorer of its literary treasures. One of his earliest works was a translation of Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister." His works now comprise his "History of the French Revolution," "Past and Present," "Sartor Resartus," "Latter-day Pamphlets," "Life of Sterling," "Life of Frederick the Great," "Life and Correspondence of Cromwell," "Miscellaneous Essays," &c. &c. He married about 1827, and resided in Scotland (near Dumfries) until 1830, when he took up his residence in London. He was ever an honest worker at his craft, and an inveterate exposer of "shams." His style of composition has been the subject of some difference of opinion, many accusing him of an affected ruggedness. It is clearly not the style approved of by those who hold to the polished diction of Addison and his contemporaries as models for the study of elegant English prose. Still his force and power are undeniable, though his cutting satire has often caused him to be (and very undeservedly so) regarded as a cynic. Died 1881.]

Two men I honour, and no third. First, the toil-worn craftsman that with earth-made implement laboriously conquers the earth and makes her man's. Venerable to me is the hand, hard and coarse; wherein notwithstanding lies a cunning virtue, inde feasibly royal, as of this planet. Venerable, too, is the rugged face all weather-tanned, besoiled, with his rude intelligence; for it is the face of a man living man-like. Oh, but the more venerable for thy rudeness, and even because we must pity as well as love thee! Hardly entreated brother! For us was thy back so bent, for us were thy straight limbs and fingers so deformed; thou wert our conscript on whom the lot fell, and fighting our battles wert so marred. For in thee too lay a God-created form, but it was not to be unfolded; encrusted must it stand with the thick adhesions and defacements of labour; and thy body, like thy soul, was not to know freedom. Yet, toil on, toil on: thou art in thy duty, be out of it who may; thou toilest for the altogether indispensable daily bread.

A second man I honour, and still more highly, him who is seen

toiling for the spiritually indispensable-not daily bread, but the bread of life. Is not he, too, in his duty; endeavouring towards inward harmony; revealing this, by act or by word, through all his outward endeavours, be they high or low? Highest of all when his outward and his inward endeavours are one: when we can name him artist; not earthly craftsman only, but inspired thinker, who with heaven-made implement conquers heaven for us! If the poor and humble toil that we have food, must not the high and glorious toil for him in return that he may have light, guidance, freedom, immortality? These two, in all their degrees, I honour; all else is chaff and dust, which let the wind blow whither it listeth.

There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he ever so benighted, or forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works; in idleness alone there is perpetual despair. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into real harmony. He bends himself with free valour against his task; and doubt, desire, sorrow, remorse, indignation, despair itself, shrink murmuring far off in their caves. The glow of labour in him is a purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt up; and of smoke itself there is made a bright and blessed flame.

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness; he has a life purpose. Labour is life. From the heart of the worker rises the celestial force, breathed into him by Almighty God, awakening him to all nobleness, to all knowledge. Hast thou valued patience, courage, openness to light, or readiness to own thy mistakes? In wrestling with the dim brute powers of fact, thou wilt continually learn. For every noble work the possibilities are diffused through immensity, undiscoverable, except to faith.

Man, son of heaven! is there not in thine inmost heart a spirit of active method, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it? Complain not. Look up, wearied brother. See thy fellow-workmen surviving through eternity, the sacred band of immortals.

THE CLOUDS.

JOHN RUSKIN.

[Mr. Ruskin, the eminent art-critic, was born in 1819, and is still living. He was educated at Oxford, and studied the pictorial art under Copley Fielding and J. D. Harding. His principal works are his "Modern Painters," "The Seven Lamps of Architecture," and "The Stones of Venice."]

Ir 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 pleasing 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 principles 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 can 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 nor 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, out in the still small voice. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature which can only be addressed through Jampblack 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.

(From the "Stones of Venice." By permission of Messrs. Smith and Elder.)

AUTUMN.

REV. ARCHIBALD ALISON.

[The Rev. Archibald Alison, who was senior minister of St. Paul's Chapel, Edinburgh, was born in 1757, and, after a careful preparation at Glasgow University, he proceeded to Balliol College, Oxford, where he took his degree of B.C.L. in 1784. In 1790 he published an " Essay on the Nature and Principles of Taste," and in 1814 two volumes of sermons. A selection from the latter, comprising those on the Four Seasons, was afterwards published in a handy volume.-Died 1838.]

LET the young go out, in these hours, under the descending sun of the year, into the fields of nature. Their hearts are now ardent with hope, with the hopes of fame, of honour, or of happiness; and, in the long perspective which is before them, their imagination creates a world where all may be enjoyed. Let the scenes which they now may witness moderate, but not extinguish their ambition;-while they see the yearly desolation of nature, let them see it as the emblem of mortal hope ;-while they feel the disproportion between the powers they possess, and the time they are to be employed, let them carry their ambitious eye beyond the world ;and while, in these sacred solitudes, a voice in their own bosom corresponds to the voice of decaying nature, let them take that high decision which becomes those who feel themselves the inhabitants of a greater world, and who look to a being incapable of decay.

Let the busy and the active go out, and pause for a time amid the scenes which surround them, and learn the high lesson which nature teaches in the hours of its fall. They are now ardent with all the desires of mortality; and fame, and interest, and pleasure, are displaying to them their shadowy promises, and, in the vulgar race of life, many weak and many worthless passions are too naturally engendered. Let them withdraw themselves, for a time, from the agitations of the world; let them mark the desolation of summer, and listen to the winds of winter, which begin to murmur above their heads. It is a scene which, with all its powers, has yet no reproach; it tells them, that such is also the fate to which they must come; that the pulse of passion must one day beat low; that the illusions of time must pass; and that "the spirit must return