Puslapio vaizdai
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is an expression of music and melody that takes us back agian to the days of our childhood, places us once more kneeling in the soft lap of a tender parent, and lifts up our little hands in morning and evening prayer.

For my own part, I never think of my mother, without thinking, at the same time, of unnumbered kindnesses, exercised not towards me only, but to all around her. From my earliest years, I can remember that the moment her eye caught the common beggar, her hand mechanically fumbled in her pocket. No shoeless and stockingless Irish-woman, with her cluster of dirty children, could pass unnoticed by her; and no weary and way worn traveller could rest on the mile-stone opposite our habitation, without being beckoned across to satisfy his hunger and thirst. No doubt she assisted many who were unworthy, for she relieved all within her influence.

"Careless their merits or their faults to scan

Her pity gave ero charity began."

Had her kindness, like that of many, been confined to good counsel, or the mere act of giving what she had to bestow, it would not have been that charity which beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things," 1 Cor. xiii. 7. Her benevolence was uniform and unceasing; it was a part of her character. In benefiting another, difficulty only increased her desire and determination to be useful. She was one who searched out" the cause that she knew not; her pen addressed the peer, and her feet trod the threshold of the pauper, with equal alacrity in the cause of charity. To be occupied in relieving the poor, and pleading the cause of the friendless, was medicine to her body and mind.

No child could cry, no accident take place, no sickness occur, without my mother hastening off to render assistance. She had her piques and her prejudices; she never pretended to love those whom she did not like; and she remembered, perhaps too keenly, an act of unkindness, but kindness was the reigning emotion of her heart.

Reader, if you think that I have said enough, bear with me; remember, I am speaking of my mother. Among the many sons and daughters of affliction, whose hearts were made glad by her benevolence, was a poor widow of the name of Winn, who resided in an almshouse; my mother had known her in her childhood. Often have I gazed on the aged woman, as she shaped her tottering steps, leaning on a stick, towards our dwelling. A weekly allowance, a kind welcome, and a good dinner, once a week, were hers to the close of her existence. She had a grateful heart, and the blessing of her who was " ready to perish," literally rested on my mother.

I could weary you with instances of my mother's kindness of heart; one more, and I have done.

With her trowel in her hand, my mother was busily engaged, one day, among the shrubs and flowers of her little garden, and listening with pleasure to the sound of a band of music, which poured around a cheerful air from a neighbouring barrack-yard, where a troop or two of soldiers were quartered; when a neighbour stepped into the garden to tell her, that a soldier was then being flogged, and that the band only played to drown the cries of the suffering offender. Not a word was spoken by my agitated parent; down dropped her trowel on the ground, and away she ran into the house, shutting herself up, and bursting into tears. The garden was forgotten, the pleasure had vanished, and music had turned into mourning in the bosom of my mother.

Reader! have you a mother? If you have, call to mind her forbearance, her kindness, her love. Try also to return them by acts of affection, that when the future years shall arrive, when the green sod shall be springing over the resting-place of a kindhearted parent, you may feel no accusing pang when you hear the endearing expression, My Mother!

THE BRIDGE OF SIGHS.

"Drowned! drowned!" Hamlet.
One more Unfortunate,
Weary of breath,
Rashly importunate,
Gone to her death!
Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!
Look at her garments
Clinging like cerements,
Whilst the wave constantly
Drips from her clothing;
Take her up instantly,
Loving, not loathing.

Touch her not scornfully-
Think of her mournfully,
Gently and humanly,
Not of the stains of her;
All that remains of her
Now is pure womanly.
Make no deep scrutiny
Into her mutiny,
Rash and undutiful;

Past all dishonor,
Death has left on her
Only the beautiful.

Still, for all slips of hers
One of Eve's family-
Wipe those poor lips of hers
Oozing so clammily.

Loop up her tresses

Escaped from the comb,
Her fair auburn tresses;
Whilst wonderment guesses
Where was her home?

Who was her father?
Who was her mother?

Had she a sister?
Had she a brother?

Or was there a dearer one
Still, or a nearer one
Yet, than all other?

Alas! for the rarity
Of Christian charity
Under the sun!
Oh! it was pitiful!
Near a whole city full,
Home she had none.

Sisterly, brotherly, Fatherly, motherly

Feelings had changed:
Love, by harsh evidence,
Thrown from its eminence;
Even God's providence
Seeming estranged.

Where the lamps quiver

So far in the river,

With many a light

From window and casement,

From garret to basement,

She stood, with amazement,
Houseless by night.

The bleak wind of March

Made her tremble and shiver;
But not the dark arch,
Or the black flowing river:
Mad from life's history,
Glad to death's mystery,
Swift to be hurl'd-
Any where, any where,
Out of the world!

In she plunged boldly,
No matter how coldly
The rough river ran-
Over the brink of it,
Picture it-think of it,
Dissolute Man!

Lave in it, drink of it,
Then, if you can!

Take her up tenderly,
Lift her with care;
Fashion'd so slenderly,
Young, and so fair!
Ere her limbs frigidly
Stiffen too rigidly,
Decently-kindly-

Smooth, and compose them;
And her eyes, close them,
Staring so blindly!
Dreadfully staring

Through muddy impurity,
As when with the daring
Last look of despairing
Fixed on futurity.

Perishing gloomily,
Spurred by contumely,
Cold inhumanity,
Burning insanity,
Into her rest-

Cross her hands humbly,
As if praying dumbly,
Over her breast!

Owning her weakness,

Her evil behaviour,

And leaving, with meekness, Her sins to her Saviour!

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James and John leave all to follow him who had the word of eternal life; and when that young carpenter asks Peter, "Who sayest thou that I am?" it has been revealed to that poor unlettered fisherman, not by flesh and blood, but by the word of the Lord, and he can say, "Thou art the Christ the son of the living God." The Pharisee went his way, and preached a doctrine that he knew was false; the fisherman also went his way; but which went to the flesh and the devil?

We cannot tell, no man can tell, the feelings which the large free doctrines of absolute religion awakened when heard for the first time. There must have been many a Simeon waiting for the consolation; many a Mary longing for the better part; many a soul in cabins and cottages and stately dwellings, that caught glimpses of the same truth, as God's light shone through some crevice which piety made in the wall prejudice and superstition had built up betwixt man and God; men who scarce dared to trust that revelation- too good to be true" such was their awe of Moses, their reverence for the priest. To them the word of Jesus must have sounded divine; like the music of their home sung out in the sky, and heard in a distant land, beguiling toil of its weariness, pain of its sting, affliction of despair There must have been men, sick of forms which had lost their meaning, pained with the open secret of sacerdotal hypocrisy, hungering and thirsting after the truth, yet whom error, and prejudice, and priestcraft had blinded so that they dare not think as men, nor look on the sun-light God shed upon the mind.

had sown deepest with the orient pearl of faith; they | words so deep that a child could understand them; who ministered to him in his wants, washed his feet with tears of penitence, and wiped them with the hairs of their head, was it in vain he spoke to them? Alas, for the anointed priest, the child of Levi, the sons of Aaron, men who shut up inspiration in old books, and believed God was asleep --They stumbled in darkness, and fell into the ditch. But doubtless there was many a tear-stained face that brightened like fires new stirred, as truth spoke out of Jesus' lips. His word swayed the multitude as pendent vines swing in the summer wind; as the spirit of God moved on the waters of chaos, and said, "Let there be light," and there was light. No doubt many a rude fisherman of Gennesareth heard his words with a heart bounding and scarce able to keep in his bosom, went home a new man, with a legion of angels in his breast, and from that day lived a life divine and beautiful. No doubt, on the other hand, Rabbi Kozeb Ben Shatan, when he heard of the eloquent Nazarene and his Sermon on the Mount, said to his disciples, in private, at Jerusalem, "This new doctrine will not injure us prudent and educated men; we know that men may worship as well out of the temple as in it; a burnt offering is nothing; the ritual of no value; the Sabbath like any other day; the law faulty in many things, offensive in some, and no more from God than other laws equally good. We know that the priesthood is a human affair, originated and managed like other human affairs. We may confess all this to ourselves, but what is the use of telling it? The people wish to be deceived; let them. The Pharisee will conduct wisely like a Pharisee-for he sees the eternal fitness of thingscven if these doctrines should be proclaimed. But this people, who know not the law, what will become of them? Simon Peter, James, and John, those poor unlettered fishermen on the lake of Galilee, to whom we gave a farthing and the priestly blessing, in our summer excursion, what will become of them when told that every word of the law did not come straight out of the mouth of Jehovah, and the ritual is nothing! They will go over to the flesh and the devil, and will be lost. It is true, that the law and the prophets are well summed up in one word, love God and man. But never let us sanction the saying, it would ruin the seed of Abraham, keep back the kingdom of God, and destroy our usefulness." Thus went it at Jerusalem. The new word was "Blasphemy," the new prophet an " Infidel," "beside himself, had a devil." But at Galilee, things took a shape somewhat different; one which blind guides could not foresee. The common people, not knowing the law, counted him a prophet come up from the dead, and heard him gladly. Yes, thousands of men, and women also, with hearts in their bosoms, gathered in the field, and pressed about him in the city and the desert place, forgetful of hunger and thirst, and were fed to the full with his words,

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In a recent work of L. F. Tasistro-"Random Shots and Southern Breezes"-is a description of a slave auction at New Orleans, at which the auctioneer recommends the woman on the stand as a good Christian!

A CHRISTIAN SLAVE.

BY JOHN G. WHITTIER.

A Christian-going, gone!

Who bids for God's own image? for His grace,
Which that poor victim of the market-place
Hath, in her suffering, won?

My God! Can such things be?
Hast thou not said—that whatso'er is done
Unto thy weakest and thy humblest one,
Is even done to Thee?

In that sad victim, then,
Child of thy pitying love, I see Thee stand-
Once more the jest-word of a mocking-band,

Bound, sold, and scourged again!

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The songs of a nation are like wild flowers pressed, as it were, by chance, between the blood-stained pages of history. As if man's heart had paused for a moment in its dusty march, and looked back, with a flutter of the pulse and a tearful smile, upon the simple peacefulness of happier and purer days, gathering some wayside blossom to remind it of childhood and home, amid the crash of battle or the din of the market. Listening to these strains of pastoral music, we are lured away from the records of patriotic frauds of a cannibal policy which devours whole nations with the refined appetite of a converted and polished Polyphemus who has learned to eat with a silver fork, and never to put his knife in his mouth, -we forget the wars and the false standards of honor which have cleated men into wearing the fratricidal brand of Cain, as if it were but the glorious trace of a dignifying wreath, and hear the rustle of the leaves and the innocent bleat of lambs, and the low murmur of lovers beneath the moon of Arcady, or the long twilight of the north. The earth grows green again, and flowers spring up in the scorching footprints of Alaric, but where love hath but only smiled, some gentle trace of it remains freshly forever. The infinite sends its messages to us by urtutored spirits, and the lips of little children, and the unboastful beauty of simple nature; not with the sound of trumpet, and the tramp of mail-clad hosts. Simplicity and commonness are the proofs of Beauty's divinity. Earnestly and beautifully touching is this eternity of simple feeling from age to age, this trustfulness with which the heart flings forth to the wind its sybilline leaves to be gathered and cherished as oracles forever. The unwieldy current of life whirls and writhes and struggles muddily onward, and there in midcurrent the snowwhite lilies blow in unstained safety, generation after generation. The cloud-capt monuments of mighty kings and captains crumble into dust and mingle with the nameless ashes of those who reared them; but we know perhaps the name and even the color of the hair and eyes of some humble shepherd's mistress who brushed through the dew to meet her lover's kiss, when the rising sun glittered on the golden images that crowned the palace-roof of Semiramis. Fleets and navies are overwhelmed and forgotten, but some tiny, love-freighted argossy launched (like those of the Hindoo maidens) upon the stream of time in days now behind the horizon, floats down to us with its frail lamp yet burning Theories for which great philosophers wore their hearts out, histories over which the eyes of wise men ached for weary years, creeds for which hundreds underwent an exulting martyrdom, poems which had once quickened the beating of the world's great heart, and the certainty of whose deathless

ness had made death sweet to the poet, all these have mouldered to nothing, but some word of love, some outvent of a sorrow which haply filled only one pair of eyes with tears, there seem to have become a part of earth's very lifeblood. They live because those who wrote never thought whether they would live or not. Because they were the children of human nature, human nature has tenderly fostered them, while children only begot to perpetuate the foolish vanity of their father's name, must trust for their support to such inheritance of livelihood as their father left them. There are no pensions, and no retired lists in the pure democracy of nature and truth.

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noble capabilities as men. He who aspires to the
highest triumphs of the muse, must look at first for
appreciation and sympathy only from the few, and
must wait till the progress of education shall have
enlarged the number and quickened the sensibility
and apprehension of his readers.
But the song-
writer finds his ready welcome in those homespun,
untutored artistic perceptions which are the birth-
right of every human soul, and which are the sure
pledges of the coming greatness and ennoblement of
the race. He makes men's hearts ready to receive
the teachings of his nobler brother. He is not
positively, but only relatively a greater blessing to
his kind, since, in God's good season, by the sure
advance of freedom, all men shall be able to enjoy
what is now the privilege of the few, and Shakspeare
and Milton shall be as dear to the heart of the cot-
tager and the craftsman as Burns or Beranger. Full
of grandeur, then, and yet fuller of awful responsi-
bility is the calling of the song-writer. It is no

coming ages. Like an electric spark his musical thought flits glittering from heart to heart, and from lip to lip through the land. Luther's noble hymns made more and truer protestants than ever did his sermons or his tracts. The song hummed by some toiling mother to beguile the long monotony of the spinning-wheel, may have turned the current of her child's thoughts as he played about her knee, and given the world a hero or apostle. We know not when or in what soil God may plant the seeds of

A good song is as if the poet had pressed his heart against the paper, and that could have conveyed its hot, tumultuous throbbings to the reader. The low, musical rustle of the wind among the leaves is songlike, but the slow unfolding of the leaves and blossoms, and under them the conception and ripening of the golden fruit through long summer days of sun-wild fancy to deem that he may shape the destiny of shine and of rain, are like the grander, but not more beautiful or eternal, offspring of poesy. The song writer must take his place somewhere between the poet and the musician, and must form a distinct class by himself. The faculty of writing songs is certainly a peculiar one, and as perfect in its kind as that of writing epics. They can only be written by true poets; like the mistletoe they are slender and delicate, but they only grow in oaks. Burns is as wholly a poet, but not as great a poet as Milton. Songs relate to us the experience and hoarded learn-our spiritual enlightenment and regeneration, but ing of the feelings, greater poems detail that of the we may be sure that it will be in some piece of clay mind. One is the result of that wisdom which the common to all mankind. Some heart whose simple heart keeps by remaining young, the other of that feelings call the whole world kin. Not from mighty which it gains by growing old. Songs are like in-poet or deep-seeking philosopher will come the word spired nursery-rhymes which makes the soul child- which all men love to hear, but in the lowly Nazalike again. The best songs have always some tingereth of some unlearned soul, in the rough manger of of a mysterious sadness in them. They seem writ-rudest, humblest sympathies, shall the true Messiah ten in the night-watches of the heart, and reflect the spiritual moonlight, or the shifting flashes of the northern-light, or the trembling lustre of the stars, rather than the broad and cheerful benediction of the sunny day. Often they are the merest breaths, vague snatches of half-heard music which fell dream-flash of a fiery verse, and, ere the guilty heart of the ily on the ear of the poet while he was listening for grander melodies, and which he hummed over afterwards to himself, not knowing how or where he learned them.

A true song touches no feeling or prejudice of education, but only the simple, original elements of our common nature. And perhaps the mission of the song-writer may herein be deemed loftier and diviner than any other, since he sheds delight over more hearts, and opens more rude natures to the advances of civilization, refinement and a softened humanity, by revealing to them a beauty in their own simple thoughts and feelings, which wins them unconsciously to a dignified reverence for their own

be born and cradled. In the inspired heart, not in the philosophic intellect, all true reforms originate, and it is over this that the song-writer has unbridled sway. He concentrates the inarticulate murmur and longing of a trampled people into the lightning

oppressor has ceased to flutter, follows the deafening thunderclap of revolution. He gives vent to his love of a flower or a maiden, and adds so much to the store of everyday romance in the heart of the world, refining men's crude perceptions of beauty and dignifying their sweet natural affections. Once it was the fashion to write pastorals, but he teaches us that it is not nature to make all men talk like rustics, but rather to show that one heart beats under homespun and broadcloth, and that it alone is truly classical, and gives eternity to verse.

Songs are scarcely amenable to the common laws of criticism. If anything were needed to prove the utter foolishness of the assertion, that that only is

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