peculiar beauty. There was not a cloud to be seen in the heavens. The sun was not yet up, but his brightness came before him over the mountains, as if waking them from their slumbers. All was still, as one loves it to be on a Sabbath morning, save the sweet orisons of the red-breast and oriole, going up to Him who feedeth the birds,' and the sound of a distant waterfall breaking clear upon the ear. I stood upon a little eminence, which overlooked the country a few miles around. The sun had now risen, the earth looked beautiful and new as at the creation, and lo! sunward a hundred peaks were glowing in gold and amethyst, like giant spirits of a world. Over the whole landscape there is a stillness, showing that man rests from his labors, and every thing rests with him. The sturdy ox which had toiled at the plough or dragged along the weary load, through the successive week days, is grazing quietly on the sunny slopes; the cows are sluggishly moving toward the pastures; the milk-maid suppresses her song as she bears the plentiful store from the farm-yard; and the very herd boy looks cautiously far up and down the lane, before he ventures the stone, twice aimed, at the unoffending chip-muck.

All look as if they knew the day and hour,

And felt with man the need and joy of thanks.'

The breakfast is partaken in quietness; the Sunday morning breakfast, of rich brown mush; the tables are cleared and set away; and the household are assembled around the family altar, while from the 'big ha' Bible,' the father' wales a portion with judicious care,' and leads in the devotions. After prayers, each betakes himself to preparations for church. The children are made ready in well-brushed Sunday clothes, with clean faces and smooth hair, and seated to their lessons for the Sunday school. So still is every duty performed, that the tick of the tall clock is audible through the house, and the sense of religious awe seems to live in the very atmosphere.

As we took our way to the church, the same stillness covered the whole face of nature, broken only by the hum of the honey-bees gathering sweets from the way-side flowers, or the cawing of the crows from the distant fields. Neatly dressed people were moving in groups toward the sanctuary; the bright-eyed girl and her mother; young men, children, and the gray-headed, with a sobriety and decorum in unison with the solemnity of the day. The church was a neat white building, standing just out of the deep mountain forest, and overlooking a wide country of water and land, many miles around. It had no bell, no steeple, no organ; nothing but the four unadorned walls, the simple pews, and the high massive pulpit, where the rich man found no incitements to his pride, nor the poor man temptations to his envy. Every thing was in keeping; the people with the house, the pastor with his people. There was not only a sincerity and solemnity, but also a congruity about the whole, which I have often felt the want of in more splendid sanctuaries.

Notwithstanding the change which increasing years bring over our affections, I can never visit the church to which I was wont to go in my childhood, without deep emotion. The place, the occasion, the old form of worship, carry one insensibly back to former days, and make us forget for a time the interval which has elapsed. The changes which have taken place affect the mind with sadness. That

is the same scene from the window on which I used to gaze during the service; this is the same pulpit; these are the same quaint, oldfashioned pews. But where are the inmates? How few, very few of them remain! The scythe of Time has made dreadful havoc. The old have passed away like a tale that is told; the mature, such as remain of them, are gray headed, and bending under the weight of years. Boys are transformed into the thoughtful fathers of families, and jocund thoughtlessness has given place to the furrowing lines of Around me is a generation which, mushroom-like, has sprung up in my absence; and more than once I mistook the children for their parents, pictured in my remembrance as if they had been destined never to grow old.

care.

Our good pastor, whose gray head and kindly greeting have so associated old age in my mind with benevolence of heart, that I can never yet separate them, is not here. How well I remember his grave deportment, his calm and deliberate air, and his venerable presence, which inspired an awe I have never since felt in the presence of any man. He has gone, years since, to receive the reward of those who turn many to righteousness.'

Our country doctor, too, with his red, round face, and small, gray eyes, is gone. He sat in the pew yonder, just below the pulpit; and it requires no great stretch of fancy, to see his queued and powdered head peering above the railing, or to mark his grand and self-complacent air, which however offended no man's self-love, as with cockedhat and top boots, for he always affected the old style of dress, he followed the minister out of church. He was a man of great eccentricity of character, and had he fallen in the way of Charles Matthews, it would have made the comedian's fortune. During his professional studies, the doctor had been the pupil of the celebrated Warren, whose name is so intimately associated with American history, by his lamented death at the battle of Bunker's Hill; and in his eyes, Doctor Warren was the greatest man the world ever produced. If you differed from him in opinion, no matter what the subject might be, he would all at once stare you in the face, draw his long queue through his hand, and close upon you with the unanswerable argument, 'Sir, the immortal Doctor Warren thought so!' After this there was no more to be said, for Doctor Warren was the oracle, whose authority admitted neither of doubt nor appeal. He had great vivacity and fund of anecdote, was well read in his profession, and had a strong fondness for antiquarian research. His office was a perfect Noah's ark, hung with old paintings, and stuffed full of all sorts of curious things. Alas! that kind heart and busy head are now resting in the quiet grave!

And Uncle Jacob too is dead! Kind hearted, easy, thriftless Uncle Jacob! He was our oldest man in town, and his stories of olden time were the wonder of my childish imagination. He had served in the war of our revolution; and nothing delighted the old man more than to find a good listener to his long stories:

"While thrice he vanquished all his foes,

And thrice he slew the slain.'

If one might believe him, his feats had been more marvellous than those of Munchausen himself. He was none of your hesitating, halfstory tellers, ever distrusting your faith, and doubting how far he should

go; but a bold, hearty liar, plunging at once into the very fulness of your credulity. Indeed, you could never disbelieve him while he was talking to you, for his well bronzed face was turned toward you in earnest sincerity, and the current of his thoughts flowed as clearly as one of our own mountain streams. In fact, I doubt if he had not cheated himself into a belief of the wonderful feats he recounted. My earliest recollections of him are as the leader of our choir, and until I left the place, he sang every Sunday, I was about to say 'to the honor and glory of God,' but I fear it was sometimes to the honor and glory of the sons and daughters of music around him, in whose proficiency he so exulted.

And Aunt Anne not Uncle Jacob's wife, gentle reader - oh no! shade of the virgin queen shield us ! -for the bare supposition of such a thing, would start her very bones from their mouldering cerements ! our maiden Aunt Anne, too, is gone. She was the very beau ideal of stale aristocratical virginity; a meddling, gossiping, curious, busy old maid. Her stiff, starched figure, sitting upright in her pew, and her grimalkin eyes, peering from beneath her false puffs, during prayer and sermon, lest some graceless youth should gaze on the fair niece by her side, were the fear and hatred of my boyhood. She was a genuine daughter of the Doleful family. Sitting sour in her solitary blessedness, watchful lest the corners of her mouth should relax into the sin of smiling, I verily believe she would have spoken evil of the sun, when he edged the dark clouds with light. But let her pass. She too sleeps in the church-yard:

'De mortuis nihil, nisi bonum.'

But it was not the aged only whom I missed from their wonted seats in the house of God. Many of the associates of my boyhood were gone; some doubtless to distant places, but many more to the quiet home of the grave. As I walked through the church-yard after the evening service, there were many names on the plain head-stones which I remembered, and with which were associated the pleasantest scenes of my early life. Among them were some I had loved; loved as the heart only loves in the spring-time of its being. Many of them had died young. I could not mourn for them, for they had carried with them the warmth of the affections, the beauty of the soul. One slept there, who in her gentle and spotless virtue might have claimed kindred with the beautiful spirits of heaven. Perfidy had never chilled, unkindness never wounded her. Her heart was still in the bloom of its first emotions, and with its last throb turned to the eye of love, which for her had never changed.

But I have wandered far away from my description of a Sunday in the Country, and it is too late to retrace my steps. To those who would know the true value of the Sabbath, as it dwells in the heart of a descendant of the Pilgrims, from which all worldly thoughts are banished, and where the mind is freed from every earthly association, we would point out the plain good men who yet live in the secluded glens of New-England. I have dwelt far from the home of my childhood, and have seen the day spent in rest, in mirthfulness, in formal devotion; but never yet has it returned to me, without bringing with it the associations of awe, and love, and humble piety, which are connected with the sunny tranquillity and unbroken quiet of a Puritan Sabbath.

THE CYPRESS TREE OF

CEYLON.

BY JOHN G.

WHITTIER.

IBN BATUTA, the celebrated Mussulman traveller of the fourteenth century, speaks of a cypress tree in Ceylon, universally held sacred by the inhabitants, the leaves of which were said to fall only at long and uncertain periods; and he who had the happiness to find and eat one of them, was restored at once to youth and vigor. The traveller saw several venerable Jogees, or saints, sitting silent and motionless under the tree, patiently waiting the falling of a leaf.

THEY sat in silent watchfulness
The sacred cypress tree about,

And from the wrinkled brows of Age,
Their failing eyes looked out.

Gray Age and Sickness waiting there,
Through weary night and lingering day;
Grim as the idols at their side,

And motionless as they.

Unheeded in the boughs above

The song of Ceylon's birds was sweet,
Unseen of them, the island flowers
Bloomed brightly at their feet.

O'er them the tropic night-storm swept,
The thunder crashed on rock and hill;
The lightning wrapped them like a shroud,
Yet there they waited still!

What was the world without to them?
The Moslem's sunset-call- the dance
Of Ceylon's maids- the passing gleam
Of battle-flag and lance?

They waited for that falling leaf

Of which the wandering Jogees sing;
Which lends once more to wintry Age
The greenness of its Spring.

Oh! if these poor and blinded ones
In trustful patience wait to feel
O'er torpid pulse and failing limb
A youthful freshness steal:

Shall we who sit beneath that Tree
Whose healing leaves of life are shed,
In answer to the breath of prayer,
Upon the waiting head:

Not to restore our failing forms,

Nor build the spirit's broken shrine,

But, on the fainting soul to shed
A light and lite divine:

Shall we grow weary at our watch,
And murmur at the long delay?
Impatient of our Father's time,
And His appointed way?

Or shall the stir of outward things
Allure and claim the Christian's eye,
When on the heathen watcher's ear
Their powerless murmurs die?

'Faith, Hope, Charity-but the greatest of these is Charity.'-SAINT PAUL.

I WOULD fain know, (quoth the Rev. Democritus, as he reclined one Sunday afternoon against the wall of a summer-house, his portly person threatening destruction to the two legs of the chair which supported him,) I would fain know why the clergy so belie the loveliest of the Christian graces, Charity. Under their hands she has sunk to be a mere hospital nurse. Does not the word charity now-a-days suggest putting your hand into your pocket, or your name to a subscription list? Ah! that was not the glowing thought which lighted up the Apostle's soul. It was Love he wrote of - love for our fellow men; the offering of our hearts to humanity, not of our purses.

It is not difficult to perceive in what manner Charity became chained to the ground. We need not have recourse to begging Franciscans and Benedictines to account for it. The rich and the powerful were ever ready, by a sacrifice of what was to them no sacrifice, to make their peace with Heaven; and the Church, alas for it! was but too willing to be thus appeased. A robber baron, whose life had been one long scene of iniquity and debauchery, would separate from the spoils of the plundered the wherewithal to build a chapel to the saint whose aid he had invoked in his expeditions, and some holy father would present him with a written acquittal of all sins up to a certain date, by way of value received; or an assassin would order a certain