sister. The stars of Heaven and Earth! Look on these, and see life's shifting scenes; three words express them: budded, blossomed,- -blasted! and these three are all. Gaze

up to those, and in their quenchless light, still shining on through clear and cloud the same, read of immortality. These are the stars of life's brief summer day; those are the stars that shed still brighter rays, amid the cold, clear winter's night of death. Turn to these; their faded forms remind you, you must die; then look on those; they tell you, you will live!

"Heaven bless our stars!" is often uttered as an idle word, but let me say, will all their lessons now newly graven on my heart, Heaven bless our stars!

You have sometimes continued gazing at them, till the dews of the listening night fell free and fast; till you felt how diminutive was the little craft you sailed upon, when the great unnumbered fleet of worlds hung out their signal lights; till the tumult of passion was all hushed, and the thoughts of your heart, like the tides of the sea, flowed up towards Heaven and God. Then the stars whispered humility's lesson in

your ear.

Then there are stars of the morning too. See that bright sentinel-star, that yet far from its setting, has outwatched the night; like a ship at sea, whose unextinguished watch-fire still faintly gleams across the deep, through the morning's pearl and gold, that finds it out of port.

See how its feeble ray struggles with the sunbeams; one can almost fancy it receding into the liquid depths of heaven, a fugitive from day. Now the strained eye can scarce discern its pale and fading form; brighter now-now dim-a point; 'tis lost-melted, melted into light.

What a beautiful language does it speak from its high

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home, to a struggling hope; what a rebuke to the doubting! Many a spirit bright and heavenly as that star, waiting not to set, has "gone out" in the midst of a career as high and glorious as its own; gone out, amid the wonder and grief and doubt and murmurings of men. 'A fate so dark, so saddening' they say. Dark? Saddening? In the teachings of that star, how beautiful, how sublime, when the pure, parting spirit, in the language of White,

"Sets as sets the morning star, which goes

Not down behind the darken'd west, nor hides,
Obscured among the tempest of the sky,

But melts away into the light of heaven."

There is the Polar Star,

"Whose faithful beams conduct the wand'ring ship,
Through the wide desert of the pathless deep."

Who ever saw it shining from out its northern home,

"With the faint tremblings of a distant light,"

and his thought did not hover over the mariner on the yeasty deep? When the storm howls through the shattered rigging, and shreds the half-reefed sails; when the masts creak and bend beneath its power, and the hoarse call of the speakingtrumpet, “all hands on deck!" is faintly heard amid the crash of spars and the roar of waters; when the reckoning is lost, and the compass dashed in pieces, then the poor sailor looks aloft, and there, above the gloom of storm and night, the curtaining clouds half-drawn, shines the Pole-star, the hope-light of his soul, beaming down, bright, beautiful, fair as ever!

Is there no language in the Polar Star, reader? Life is a - troublous sea, and all men, mariners; when earthly guides and hopes are almost gone together, that star whispers, “look aloft! look aloft!"

While gazing at those bright, untarnished links of time, one feels a kind of companionship with the men of other and far distant days, and the long ages dwindle down to years. Why, just over your head in a clear January evening shines Orion; the same Orion that Chaldean shepherds saw; the same "dire Orion," that roused the sea in Virgil's time, when

"All charg'd with tempest rose the baleful star;"

the same Orion to which the inspired prophet alluded, when gazing at the stars as we do now, he uttered the sublime injunction, "Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into morning." Yes, the seven stars are there, and "Arcturus with his sons." Then southeast of the zenith shines Sirius the dog-star, to which Rome's haughty priests made sacrifice, and earlier yet, the dark Egyptian watched its glowing disc, his herald-star of harvest and the rising Nile, and older still, 'twas time-piece of old Thebes!

Did you ever think as you watched its fair light, that Sirius was a near neighbor of ours, in the universe of God? It is, and yet were it to fly from its orbit towards the earth, at the rate of a million of miles each day, forty three thousand, three hundred years would roll by, before its journey would be done. Sixteen billions of miles! Who can comprehend it? Express it in figures: 16,000,000,000,000! Who can number it? And this, reader, this is a neighbor too! Take the wings of the morning light and visit it, and then, as you stand on that far-off isle, look away on, into the depths of immeasurable space, where thickly blaze the congregated fires of suns, perhaps the destined centres of new and nobler systems, which shall yet people some distant region of infinity! Who will say, even then, that mortal eye has seen or human

turn with confidence and delight to the pages of nature so diversified, yet so consistent, so beautiful, yet true.

Poverty may deprive you of books and papers, but you may have occasion to bless that poverty, as it compels you to read nature, if you read at all.

The splendid volumes of a princely library might assist you to find this or that in the great book of nature, for after all, they are nothing but its tables of contents, and who would reject a volume which cost them nothing, and such a volume! In conclusion, are you not ready to exclaim with the poet ? "There is a language in each flower

That opens to the eye;

A voiceless but a magic power,

Doth in earth's blossoms lie."

CHAPTER IV.

What we have done-Chat with the reader-Anecdote-Learning and knowing are two things-Language of the nightDistant lands-Morning on the Alps--What is nobler than mountain scenery.

Well, reader, we have had a short chat with the flowers; we put our ear to the earth, and caught the Violet's modest whisper, "trust in Providence," and the frost-chained prisoner's song of hope; we looked up and heard the Mistletoe's stirring exhortation, and the Aspen's thrilling words; we crushed the Camomile, and it blessed us.

Short as was our talk, it was long enough, I hope, to remind you what a vast treasure-house, Nature is, and more than this, that it is all your own.

That you thought of a hundred things that were omitted, I can easily believe; that you glanced at a hundred objects, which you would have gladly tarried to gaze upon, and wondered that I did not feel so too, is not strange.

In a theme, for which the field, the forest and the wayside furnish materials in almost boundless profusion, my duty is the pleasing but arduous one of selection rather than collection.

Are you so dissatisfied with me that you feel resolved to do your own selecting for the future? Have I discharged the duty so imperfectly, that you are more than half inclined to review the ground, with some better guide than I am; to become better acquainted, not with distant nations and far-off lands, but with the rainbow-painted tribes that inhabit the pastures, and whose forms are mirrored in the reed-hidden brooks? Then, indeed, have I been eminently successful, and can in sincerity bid you God-speed.