Dim and more dim, my fancy paints thy form,
Thy mild blue eye, thy cheek so thin and fair,
Touched, when I saw thee last, with hectic flush,
Telling in solemn beauty of the grave.
Mine ear hath lost the accents of thy voice,
And faintly o'er my memory comes at times
A glimpse of joys that had their source in thee,
Like one brief strain of some forgotten song!

Anon.

FICTIONS OF ART.

Of its own beauty is the mind diseased,
And fevers into false creation :—where,
Where are the forms the sculptor's soul hath seized?
In him alone. Can Nature show so fair?
Where are the charms and virtues which we dare

Conceive in boyhood and pursue as men,

The unreached Paradise of our despair,
Which o'er-informs the pencil and the pen,

And

overpowers the page where it would bloom again? Byron.

YOUTH.

Ir is on the verge of womanhood that we see the female character in its greatest variety and beauty; while the rich colouring of fresh-born fancy, the warm gush of genuine feeling, and the high aspirations of ambitious youth, are yet unsubdued by the tyranny of custom, or forced back into the bursting heart by the cold hand of experience. Woman, fresh as it were from the garden

of Eden, while the loveliness of her first creation is still lingering around her, * * * in her character and attributes, her beauty, her tenderness, and her liability to danger and suffering, is all that the poet can desire to inspire his happiest lays. S. Stickney.

DREAMS.

Sleep hath its own world,

And a wide realm of wild reality,

And dreams in their developement have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;
They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off our waking toils,
They do divide our being; they become

A portion of ourselves, as of our time,
And look like heralds of eternity;

They pass like spirits of the past, they speak
Like sybils of the future; they have power—
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;

They make us what we were not-what they will,
And shake us with the vision that's gone by,

The dread of vanished shadows.

*

*

The mind can make

Substance, and people planets of its own

With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh.

*

*

*

* A thought,

A slumbering thought, is capable of years,
And curdles a long life into one hour.

Byron.

IMAGINATION.

THE effects of foreign travel have been often remarked, not only in rousing the curiosity of the traveller while abroad, but in correcting, after his return, whatever habits of inattention he had contracted to the institutions and manners among which he was bred. It is in a way somewhat analogous that our occasional excursions into the regions of imagination increase our interest in those familiar realities, from which the stores of imagination are borrowed. We learn insensibly to view nature with the eye of the painter and the poet, and to seize those happy attitudes of things" which their taste at first selected; while, enriched with the accumulation of ages, and with "the spoils of time," we unconsciously combine with what we see, all that we know and all that we feel; and sublime the organical beauties of the material world, by blending with them the inexhaustible delights of the heart and of the fancy.

66

Dugald Stewart.

SOCIETY.

THERE is a certain delicacy of mind which is not incompatible with the highest ambition; but when that ambition receives a check in its early beginning, when that delicacy is hurt by some unexpected and sore misfortune, a person of such a character is apt to quarrel with the world, and to seek for happiness without its range. * * * Men were born to live in society; and from society only can happiness be derived. Let them

not, therefore, in a moment of disgust, give up the ordinary cares and projects of the world, and indulge in ideas of that visionary bliss which exists only in romantic pictures and delusive representations of solitude and retirement. Let not one disappointment, nor even a series of disappointments, induce them to abandon the common road of life.-'Tis only a pettish child, when it is crossed, that is entitled to spurn from it its toy of happiness. The Lounger.

CHARM OF DISTANCE.

Ar summer eve, when heaven's aërial bow
Spans with bright arch the glittering hills below,
Why to yon mountain turns the musing eye,
Whose sunbright summit mingles with the sky?
Why do those cliffs of shadowy tint appear
More sweet than all the landscape smiling near?
'Tis Distance lends enchantment to the view,
And robes the mountain in its azure hue.

Campbell.

INDUSTRY AND LUXURY.

EVERY thing in the world is purchased by labour; and our passions are the only causes of labour. When a nation abounds in manufactures and mechanic arts, the proprietors of land, as well as farmers, study agriculture as a science, and redouble their industry and attention. The superfluity which arises from their labours is not lost; but is exchanged with manufacturers for those commodities which men's luxury now makes them covet.

By this means, land furnishes a great deal more of the necessaries of life than what suffices for those who cultivate it. In times of peace and tranquillity, this superfluity goes to the maintenance of manufacturers and the improvers of liberal arts.

Hume.

RAINBOW.

THE evening was glorious, and light through the trees Played the sunshine and raindrops, the birds and the breeze,

The landscape, outstretching in loveliness, lay

On the lap of the year, in the beauty of May.

The skies, like a banner in sunset unrolled,

O'er the west threw their splendour of azure and gold, But one cloud at a distance rose dense, and increased, Till its margin of black touched the zenith and east. We gazed on the scenes, while around us they glowed, When a vision of beauty appeared on the cloud;—

In the hues of its grandeur, sublimely it stood,
O'er the river, the village, the field, and the wood;

Whose arch was refraction, its key-stone-the Sun;

Awhile, and it sweetly bent over the gloom,
Like Love o'er a death-couch, or Hope o'er the tomb;