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READING.

If I were to pray for a taste which would stand by me under every variety of circumstance, and be a source of happiness and cheerfulness through life, and a shield against its ills, however things might go amiss, and the world frown upon me, it would be, a taste for reading. I speak of it, of course, only as a worldly advantage, and not in the slightest degree superseding or derogating from the higher office, and surer and stronger panoply of religious principles, but as a taste, an amusement, and a mode of pleasurable gratification. Give a man this taste, and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail to make him a happy man, unless, indeed, you put into his hands a most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society, in every period of history with the wisest, the wittiest, the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters that have adorned humanity. You make him a denizen

of all nations, a contemporary of all ages. It is hardly possible but that the character should take a higher tone from the constant habit of associating in thought with a class of thinkers, to say the least of it, above the average of humanity.

Sir John Herschel.

DULL must be the sight which fails to perceive great events and great actions; but it requires sagacity to detect the indications afforded by the bubbles of the day. A great mind is equal to comprehension of the trifling as well as the important, as the trunk of the elephant can pick up a pin or uproot a tree.

THE damps of autumn sink into the leaves and prepare them for the necessity of their fall; and thus insensibly are we, as years close round us, detached from our tenacity of life by the gentle pressure of recorded sorrows.

Landor.

TO MUSIC.

TO BECALM HIS FEVER.

CHARM me to sleep, and melt me so
With thy delicious numbers,

That being ravish'd, hence I go
Away in easy slumbers.

Oh, make me weep
My pains asleep,

And give me such reposes,

That I, poor I,

May think thereby

I live, and die, 'midst roses.

Fall on me like a silent dew,

Or like those maiden showers, Which, at the peep of day, do strew A baptism o'er the flowers.

Melt, melt my pains

With thy soft strains,

That, ease unto me given,

With full delight

I leave this light,

And take my flight to heaven.

Herrick.

LOVE is the shadow of the morning, decreasing as the day advances. Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which strengthens with the setting sun of life.

A MAN with knowledge, but without energy, is a house furnished but not inhabited; a man with energy, but no knowledge, a house dwelt in but unfurnished.

SILENT INFLUENCE.

THERE is, in the human body, voluntary action and involuntary action. When I move my hand, or my tongue, or my legs, that is voluntary; I can stop, or I can go on; but my heart and my lungs go on in spite of me; they are involuntary movements: so in the human character there are two influences; there is the voluntary influence, as when I go out and speak to a person in order to convince him, or appeal to a person in order to make him better; I am then exercising a designed and a voluntary influence upon that individual; but there is an involuntary influence, in my character, my conduct, my temper, when I think no man sees me, though many may be seeing me; all these, without my volition, and in spite of my volition, are shaping the character, and giving tone and temper, and it may be everlasting colours to the souls of mankind. In other words, it is impossible to be in the world, and not in some shape to influence the world.

Dr. Cumming.

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