Precipices of the Alps.

Dark in color, robed with everlasting mourning, forever tottering like a great fortress shaken by war, fearful as much in their weakness as in their strength, and yet gathered after every fall into darker frowns and unhumiliating threatening; forever incapable of comfort or healing from herb or flower, nourishing no root in their crevices, touched by no hue of life on buttress or ledge, but to the utmost desolate; knowing no shaking of leaves in the wind, nor of grass beside the stream-no other motion but their own mortal shivering, the dreadful crumbling of atom from atom in their corrupting stones; knowing no sound of living voice or living tread, cheered neither by the kid's bleat nor the marmot's cry; haunted only by uninterrupted echoes from afar off, wandering hither and thither among their walls unable to escape, and by the hiss of angry torrents, and sometimes the shriek of a bird that flits near the face of them, and sweeps, frightened, back from under their shadow into the gulf of air; and sometimes, when the echo has fainted, and the wind has carried the sound of the torrent away, and the bird has vanished, and the moldering stones are still for a little time a brown moth, opening and shutting its wings upon a grain of dust, may be the only thing that moves or feels in all the waste of weary precipice darkening five thousand feet of the blue depth of heaven.

The Fall of the Leaf.

If ever, in Autumn, a pensiveness falls upon us as the leaves drift by in their fading, may we not wisely look up in hope to their mighty monuments? Behold how fair, how far prolonged in arch and aisle, the avenues of the valleys, the fringes of the hills!

So

stately so eternal; the joy of man, the comfort of all living creatures, the glory of the earth-they are but the monuments of those poor leaves that flit faintly past us to die. Let them not pass without our understanding their last counsel and example; that we also, careless of monument by the grave, may build it in the world -monument by which men may be taught to remember, not where we died, but where we lived.

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The Sky.

Not long ago I was slowly descending the carriage road after leave Albano. It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct, lighting up its arches like the bridge of chaos. But as I climbed the long slope of the Alban mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano and the graceful darkness of its ilex grove rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber, the upper sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of rain-cloud, in deep palpitating azure, half ether and half dew. The noon-day sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Ricca, and its masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it color, it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas, arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of

orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the gray walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every blade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet lightning opens in a cloud at sunset the motionless masses of dark rock-dark, though flushed with scarlet lichen, casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound, and, over all, the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only exist to illumine, were seen in intervals between the solemn and orbed repose of the stone pines, passing to lose themselves in the last, white, blinding luster of the measureless line where the Campagna melted into the blaze of the sea.

Are not all natural things, it may be asked, as lovely near as far away? By no means. Look at the clouds and watch the delicate sculpture of their alabaster sides, and the rounded luster of their magnificent rolling. They are meant to be beheld far away: they were shaped for their place high above your head: approach them and they fuse into vague mists, or whirl away in fierce fragments of thunderous vapor. Look at the crest of the Alp from the far away plains over which its light is cast, whence human souls have communed with it by their myriads. It was built for its place in the far off sky: approach it, and as the sound of the voice of man dies away about its foundations, and the tide of human life is met at last by the eternal "Here shall thy waves be stayed," the glory of its aspect fades into blanched fearfulness: its purple walls are rent into grisly rocks, its silver fret-work saddened into wasting snow: the storm-brands of ages are on its breast, the ashes of its own ruin lie solemnly on its white raiment.

If you desire to perceive the great harmonies of the form of a rocky mountain, you must not ascend upon its sides. All there is disorder and accident, or seems so. Retire from it, and as your eye commands

it more and more, you see the ruined mountain world with a wider glance; behold! dim sympathies begin to busy themselves in the disjointed mass: line binds itself into stealthy fellowship with line: group by group the helpless fragments gather themselves into ordered companies: new captains of hosts, and masses of battalions become visible one by one; and far away answers of foot to foot and of bone to bone, until the powerless is seen risen up with girded loins, and not one piece of all the unregarded heap can now be spared from the mystic whole.

The Old Churchyard.

The next day, the day of the resurrection, rose glorious from its sepulchre of sea-fog and drizzle. It had poured all night long, but at sunrise the clouds had broken and scattered, and the air was the purer for the cleansing rain, while the earth shone with that peculiar luster which follows the weeping which has endured its appointed night. The larks were at it again, singing as if their hearts would break for joy as they hovered in brooding exultation over the song of the future; for their nests beneath hoarded a wealth of larks for Summers to come. Especially about the old churchyard, half buried in the ancient trees of Lossie House, the birds that day were jubilant; their throats seemed too narrow to let out the joyful air that filled all their hollow bones and quills; they sang as if they must sing or choke with too much gladness. Beyond the short spire and its shining cock rose the balls and stars and arrowy vanes of the house, glittering in gold and sunshine. The inward hush of the resurrection, broken only by the prophetic birds, the poets of the groaning and travailing creation, held time and space as in a trance; and the center from which radiated both the hush and the caroling expectation seemed to Alexander Graham to be the churchyard in which he was now walking in the cool of the

morning. It was more carefully kept than most Scottish churchyards, and yet was not too trim; nature had a word in the affairwas allowed her part of mourning in long grass and moss and the crumbling away of stone. The wholesomeness of decay, which both in nature and humanity is but the miry road back to life, was not unrecognized here, there was nothing of the hideous attempt to hide death in the garments of life. The master walked about gently, now stopping to read some well-known inscription, and ponder for a moment over the words; and now wandering across the stoneless mounds, content to be forgotten by all but those who loved the departed. At length he seated himself on a slab by the side of the mound that rose but yesterday; it was sculptured with symbols of decay-needless, surely, where the originals lay about the mouth of every newly-opened grave, as surely ill befitting the precincts of a church whose indwelling gospel is of life victorious over death! "What are these stones," he said to himself, "but monuments to oblivion!" They are not memorials of the dead, but memorials of the forgetfulness of the living. How vain it is to send a poor forsaken name, like the title-page of a lost book, down the careless stream of time! Let me serve my generation, and

may God remember me!

Home

Society is marked by greater and smaller divisions, as into nations, communities, and families. A man is a member of the commonwealth, a smaller community, as a hamlet or city, and his family at the same time; and the more perfectly all his duties to his family are discharged, the more fully does he discharge his duties to the community and the nation; for a good member of a family cannot be a bad member of the commonwealth, for he that is faithful in what is least will also be faithful in what is greater. Indeed,