doing its work, serpents eyes gleam maliciously from out each gaping fissure, shadows lie thick about us, shadows in which the soul walked through life, "darkness here and nothing more." Alas poor Poe! truly, that bird of omen evil, which even now ogles us through the gloom, was no mere phantasy of thy brain; its black wing overshadowed thy whole life; its gaze struck madness and despair to thy soul. Such are some of the ruin that the perusal of books, reveals to us. Still we must remember that literature is only a quiet by-path of the great thoroughfare of Life.

In this age of statistics, it would be curious, if not startling I think, to see a true statement of the ratio between failure and success in this prosperous world of ours. There are a great many Miss Gilberts of both genders in our land whom such a knowledge would greatly benefit. If every young man, whom we see approaching with such dainty indifference the threshold of active life, could be told the exact proportion of his fellow men to whom the most important problem at this moment is, whence to procure the next meal, many a cheek would pale and many a step falter. We need but to scan the faces of the passing crowd and see how anxiety and wrinkled care is the normal expression of the human countenance, to be convinced that life is a losing game, or at best a fierce even struggle with most. In the forms and features of our fellow-men we are daily contemplating the saddest of all ruins; which belong to the Present rather than to the Past, but which are none the less real. They stand as stubborn facts in the way of us all. They are such as we jostle daily in the street, and encounter in all our intercourse with the world. We may see them reeling out of grog shops; we may find them hived up in our jails, prisons, poor-houses and insane asylums, or crowded together in haunts where vice festers and crime diffuses an atmosphere grateful to the nostrils of fiends; we may meet them of an evening, decked in silk and jewels, with brazen voice and painted cheek, beneath the gas-lamps of all our cities. You read in the daily papers the brief record of a suicide; a blackened bloody corpse is found, still holding with stiffened grasp the empty pistol or gleaming knife-a bloated swollen semblance of humanity is fished up amid the filth and sea-weed in our harbor. These are ruins, not pleasant to gaze upon, it is true, which we had rather not meet face to face in all their horrible reality, but which it would be well for the boasted civilization of this nineteenth century to ponder deeply. How many such wrecks as these are floating wildly about on the broad ocean of life, just ready to sink for ever beneath the waves; what terrible life-tragedies are being enac

ted daily before our very eyes; into how many a bosom does a scarlet letter scorch and rankle, consuming with slow torture the agonized, despairing victim; what histories of treachery and sin remain forever unwritten; what bitter memories of the first fall from virtue, of wealth squandered, of opportunities thrown away, of good counsel spurned, are the bosom companions of some men. No wonder that remorse is daily goading on men and women to destruction! And that moment of phrenzy and despair which in the history of many a human soul, intervenes between time and eternity, what a terrible summing up does it contain; reason nor conscience can endure the retrospect, and the bridge of sighs delivers up another victim. A hurried plunge, a few stifled gasps, a smothered shriek of agony, and as the lifeless clay floats off with the tide, to add another to the long list of the unknown dead, a soul too is borne away upon the bosom of that shoreless sea, Eternity. Forth it goes into the blackness of darkness forever; no ray from Heaven to cheer it, only the gibes and laughter of a cruel world ringing after it from the shore.

Shall we not ponder such scenes as these? Ought they not to sober us a little? Shall we pass them by and forget them in selfish gratification, or shall we meet like men, who feel that we have each of us duties to perform. God grant that through the lives and labors of earnest men, the time may soon come when no such ruins as these will cast their black shadow across the pathway Humanity is now treading doubtfully and in tears.

J. E. M.

The Bending of the Twig.

He must have been a very sarcastic bilious man, who first spoke of the "golden hopes of youth," and pretended to sigh for its "happy days." Following the example of this sour individual, other sarcastie men, in succeeding generations, have praised, with caustic irony, the pleasures of the morning of life, until, of late days, their words are hissed into our shrinking ear just as if we had not long since detected the ill natured jest, and knew perfectly well that they were making game of us. For the young man-and especially the young studious

man-is in no enviable plight. To many of us, understanding is a late gift. It is hardly four years since some of us managed to break the hard enveloping shell of apathy, and thrusting our brainless-pates out into the world, peeped our querulous beseeching for something to eat. We were small and weak, at that time, but of tremendous appetite. We gobbled up, without a wink, whole theories of learned men, and only felt our hunger tickled into aggravation. We bolted, in enormous bites, the wisdom of antiquity, and kept whining for more. We swallowed entire more than one philosophy, and then demanded of Society if she meant to starve us. Now, in our Senior year, we stretch our gorged selves, like surfeited anacondas, and await, uneasily, the slow process of natural digestion.

Such gormandizing naturally brings on nightmares and mental dyspepsia. We are soon divided into two classes. The type of one is he who is willing to take the views which he finds ready to his use, and had rather listen to wiser judgments than his own. This one has a plain future. He is a common soldier in the army of Progress, but may be faithful even here, and do some stout fighting. He is the only autocrat, for he commands his destiny. Fair digestion, good morality and average success render his career common-place. He lives in enviable comfort, and dies without a sigh. The other class is represented by him who has to begin at first principles and painfully struggle on towards conviction; who in no case, will trust the answer before he has solved the sum-who has quarrels with every result; who feels himself thoroughly unique and solitary, bound to no past or future, but only concerned with the immediate present. He is like one who has been traveling all night, and, wakening near dawn, wonders into what country he has journeyed. Everything is so strange. He sits in his College room, able to make out that he is a reality among realities, but scarcely daring to say whether life is an enormous joke, very irresistible to those who can appreciate it, or a holy probation, out of which shall be evolved hereafter goodness without end. There lies upon his table, in compass of a few inches, all that is known of the history of the world; how the children in their present nursery, have been bickering over their toys; how they have been busy in setting up one to rule over them, and binding him to his supremacy with rule and precedent, merely to tear him from it with louder brawling. What final inference is he to gain? Amid the myriad voices, is the vote for vice or virtue? Then he turns to metaphysics, and while two philosophers are wrangling till exhausted, lo! a third comes galloping up, brandishing his syllogisms, and quickly makes an end of them: there

too, after every chapter, he seems to see the same question, "Which is true; which is false?" He listens to the preacher, and hears a vicious whisper, asking whether religion is any determined thing; in a word, whether the universe is well-conducted or only a snarl of castaway laws and responsibilities.

It is at this bewildered period that he hears of such a thing as Cant. He has assumed the premise, heretofore, that truth is the only valuable possession, but the monosyllable suggests a grave suspicion. Resolving to examine the word, he finds it chiefly in the mouths of two sorts of men.

If our stupid man hates anything, he does hate Cant. He, for his part, is a blunt plain man, but he cannot abide Cant. This world is rough, and it is a flying in the face of Providence to try to make it smooth. He pays his debts, has his pew in church, and votes for the most available candidate, and little else can be expected of him. The chief end of man, he will tell you, (after a consultation of the catechism,) is to glorify God; and by this is meant to mind your own business and keep the commandments. The Student finds it hard to restrain his disgust for this man, repetitions of whom, wearing the same stolid, anxious stare of greed, he jostles in every stroll about the town. Number Two, however, is a wretch after a more atrocious pattern. He has some glimmering of the harmony and fitness of things. While the first denounces, in his drivelling invective, all systems of morals as fanciful, never dreaming that he is living in accordance with one of the worst of them, Number Two appreciates various theories, but demurs to their operation. He will write you one of the chastest creeds that can be compiled from all the Gospels; expatiate on its ineffable beauties, demonstrate its unavoidable verity, and conclude by lamenting that so fine a ware cannot be exhibited in the market. He evidently thinks that, in our characters and codes of law, we should make terms with the devil-that right shall, indeed, have the broadest control, but that certain delicate perquisites shall fall to evil, which right must in no case tamper with. Hence, when he hears one hint of "infinite truth," or "universal justice," he is moved by emotions of the liveliest scorn, and cannot but deplore the alarming extent, to which the flagitious tenets of German philosophy have insinuated themselves into the minds of youth. Number Two ably conducts a secular newspaper, perhaps. In this event, with gentle negatives, he opposes the economy of amiable philanthropists, or again explodes into derisive mirth over the propositions of Mr. Wendell Phillips. "Really this Phillips is a most amusing man. Good pow

ers of rhetoric-quite good. Can choose you a nosegay of Greek myths-none easier. But then his cant about "eternal justice," and the like is so delightfully unsophisticated." And, with this pleasantry, Number Two goes his way, leaving our Student undecided whether to cry after him, "Most august and gracious teacher!" or "Most ungodly and abominable infidel!"

When his perplexity, however, has at last subsided, he finds he has drifted upon the unexpected conclusion that "cant" consists in advocating too rigid an adherence to the law of virtue. It cannot consist in advocating depravity, for who ever heard of a canting lawyer, editor, or even a canting alderman? They are weak but well-meaning preachers, scholars, or philosophers who indulge in this reprobated habit, and, of course, the censure implied in it must have been provoked by their pressing the claims of virtue with too much energy. It is extremely unlikely that he will admit the word into his own vocabulary, for its craftiness and policy directly oppose the fervor and enthusiasm of youth. Besides, let him take up his Universal History, and where will he find that anything other than disaster ever came of conceding to evil, or anything other than good ever came of legislating from both tables of the law? Or let him look out upon the world, and where will he find that kindling the altar-fire with "cunning sparks of hell," ever made the offering more acceptable? There is more than hope for that young man who is not afraid to be called visionary, or who is too circumspect to worship in the popular theology which certain profess. The twig is bending, and in the name of a venerable proverb, the tree shall be gracefully inclined!

An ugly problem at this juncture comes in upon him. He has read his history, fought its last battle, crowned its last king, and quelled its last rebellion. Now to what end, unless to find out the truth of human living, and act by its suggestion? There is but one tribunal and when the good judge is puzzled beyond recovery, what can he do? The faculties have gone through high and low places, and have gathered in a rabble of assertions, every saint and vagabond of them all, swearing he alone is fact. Summon each in his turn upon the witnessstand, and administer the solemn oath "to state the whole truth and nothing but the truth!" The first depones that he never was born, that he remembers the unlucky affair in Eden as a thing of yesterday; that, in short, he was ancient and irreproachable in that old time "when the morning stars sang together." The second has no hesitation in pronouncing the first an imposter; he goes on to state that he has kept himself concealed during all previous ages-only starting up at intervals, like a ghost, to terrify some anxious thinker