T lies around us like a cloud- THE OTHER WORLD. Its gentle breezes fau our cheek; And mingle with our prayers. weet hearts around us throb and beat, The silence-awful, sweet, and calm- So thin, so soft, so sweet they glide, And in the hush of rest they bring How lovely and how sweet a pass To close the eye and close the ear, All sorrow and all care. Sweet souls around us! watch us still, Let death between us be as naught, Your joy be the reality, Our suffering life the dream. YTERNITY will be one glorious morning, with the sun ever climbing higher and higher; one blessed spring-time, and yet richer summer-every plant in full flower, but every flower the bud of a lovelier. I WOULD NOT LIVE ALWAY. WOULD not live alway: I ask not to stay Leaves her brilliance to fade in the night of despair, I would not live alway, thus fettered by sin, I would not live alway: no, welcome the tomb; O, soft be my slumbers on that holy bed! And then the glad morn soon to follow that night, Who, who would live alway, away from his God, Let me hasten my flight to those mansions above, WILLIAM AUGUSTUS MUHLENBERG. THE REST OF THE SOUL. N that hour which of all the twenty-four is most emblematical of heaven and suggestive of repose, the eventide, in which instinctively Isaac went into the fields to meditate when the work of the day is done, when the mind has ceased its tension, when the passions are lulled to rest in spite of themselves, by the spell of the quiet starlit sky-it is then, amidst the silence of the lull of all the lower parts of our nature, that the soul comes forth to do its work. Then the peculiar, strange work of the soul, which the intellect cannot do, meditation begins; awe and worship and wonder are in full exercise; and love begins then its purest form of mystic adoration, and pervasive and undefined tenderness, separate from all that is coarse and earthly, swelling as if it would embrace the All in its desire to bless, and lose itself in the sea of the love of God. the soul-the exercise and play of all the nobler powers. This is the rest of F. W. ROBERTSON. THE ETERNAL HOME. T HE seas are quiet when the winds give o'er; So calm are we when passions are no more. The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, As they draw near to their eternal home. EDMUND WALLER. HEARTS that never cease to yearn. ALL BEFORE. O brimming tears that ne'er are dried! The dead, though they depart, return As though they had not died! The living are the only dead; The dead live - nevermore to die! And often when we mourn them fled, They never were so nigh! And though they lie beneath the waves, Or sleep within the churchyard dim(Ah! through how many different graves God's children go to him!) Yet every grave gives up its dead Alas"? Or why should Memory, veiled with gloom, Sit weeping o'er an empty tomb, 'Tis but a mound, and will be mossed Whene'er the summer grass appears; Nay, Hope may whisper with the dead The joys we lose are but forecast, And we shall find them all once more; |