broad wings in the upper sunshine. They are among the most picturesque of birds, because they so float and rest upon the air as to become almost stationary parts of the landscape. The imagination has time to grow acquainted with them; they have not flitted away in a moment. You go up among the clouds and greet these loftyflighted gulls, and repose confidently with them upon the sustaining atmosphere. Ducks have their haunts along the solitary places of the river, and alight in flocks upon the broad bosom of the overflowed meadows. Their flight is too rapid and determined for the eye to catch enjoyment from it, although it never fails to stir up the heart with the sportsman's ineradicable instinct. They have now gone farther northward, but will visit us again in Autumn.

The smaller birds, the little songsters of the woods, and those that haunt man's dwellings and claim human friendship by building their nests under the sheltering eaves or among the orchard trees,— these require a touch more delicate and a gentler heart than mine to do them justice. Their outburst of melody is like a brook let loose from wintry chains. We need not deem it a too high and solemn word to call it a hymn of praise to the Creator, since Nature, who pictures the reviving year in so many sights of beauty, has expressed the sentiments of renewed life in no other sound save the notes of these blessed birds. Their music, however, just now, seems to be incidental, and not the result of a set purpose. They are discussing the economy of life and love, and the site and architecture of their Summer residences, and have no time to sit on a twig and pour forth solemn hymns, or overtures, operas, symphonies, and waltzes. Anxious questions are asked; grave subjects are settled in quick and animated debate; and only by occasional accident, as from purc ecstacy, does a rich warble roll its tiny waves of golden sound through the atmosphere. Their little bodies are as busy as their voices; they are in constant flutter and restlessness. Even when two or three retreat to a tree top to hold council, they wag their tails and heads all the time with the irrepressible activity of their nature, which perhaps renders their brief span of life in reality as long as the patriarchal age of sluggish man. The black-birds,

three species of which consort together, are the noisiest of all our feathered citizens. Great companies of them-more than the famous "four-and-twenty" whom Mother Goose has immortalized— congregate in contiguous tree tops, and vociferate with all the clamor and confusion of a turbulent political meeting. Politics, certainly, must be the occasion of such tumultuous debates; but still, unlike all other politicians, they instill melody into their individual utterances, and produce harmony as a general effect. Of all bird voices, none are more sweet and cheerful to my ear than those of swallows, in the dim, sun-streaked interior of a lofty barn; they address the heart with even a closer sympathy than robin-redbreast. But, indeed, all these winged people, that dwell in the vicinity of homesteads, seem to partake of human nature, and possess the germ, if not the development, of immortal souls. We hear them saying their melodious prayers at morning's blush and eventide. A little while ago, in the deep of night, there came the lively thrill of a bird's note from a neighboring tree,-a real song, such as greets the purple dawn or mingles with the yellow sunshine. What could the little bird mean by pouring it forth at midnight? Probably the music gushed out of the midst of a dream in which he fancied himself in paradise with his mate, but suddenly awoke on a cold, leafless bough, with a New England mist penetrating through his feathers. That was a sad exchange of imagination for reality.

Spring.

Thank Providence for Spring! The earth and man himself, by sympathy with his birthplace, would be far other than we find them if life toiled wearily onward without this periodical infusion of the primal spirit. Will the world ever be so decayed that Spring may not renew its greenness? Can man be so dismally age-stricken that no faintest sunshine of his youth may revisit him once a year? It is impossible. The moss on our time-worn mansion brightens

into beauty; the good old pastor who once dwelt here renewed his prime, regained his boyhood, in the genial breezes of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and heavy soul if, whether in youth of age, it has outlived its privilege of Spring-time sprightliness! From such a soul the world must hope no reformation of its evil, no sympathy with the lofty faith and gallant struggles of those who contend in its behalf. Summer works in the present, and thinks not of the future; Autumn is a rich conservative; Winter has utterly lost its faith, and clings tremulously to the remembrance of what has been; but Spring, with its outgushing life, is the true type of movement.

Autumn at Concord, Massachusetts.

Alas for the Summer! The grass is still verdant on the hills and in the valleys; the foliage of the trees is as dense as ever, and as green; the flowers are abundant along the margin of the river, and in the hedge-rows, and deep among the woods; the days, too. are as fervid as they were a month ago; and yet, in every breath of wind and in every beam of sunshine, there is an Autumnal influence. I know not how to describe it. Methinks there is a sort of coolness amid all the heat, and a mildness in the brightest of the sunshine. A breeze cannot stir without thrilling me with the breath of Autumn; and I behold its pensive glory in the far, golden gleams among the huge shadows of trees.

The flowers, even the brightest of them, the golden-rod and the gorgeous cardinals-the most glorious flowers of the year-have this gentle sadness amid their pomp. Pensive Autumn is expressed in the glow of every one of them. I have felt this influence earlier in some years than in others. Sometimes Autumn may be perceived even in the early days of July. There is no other feeling like that caused by this faint, doubtful, yet real perception, or rather

prophecy of the year's decay, so deliciously sweet and sad at the same time.

I scarcely remember a scene of more complete and lovely seclusion than the passage of the river through this wood (North Branch). Even an Indian canoe, in olden times, could not have floated onward in deeper solitude than my boat. I have never elsewhere had such an opportunity to observe how much more beautiful reflection is than what we call reality. The sky and the clustering foliage on either hand, and the effect of sunlight as it found its way through the shade, giving lightsome hues in contrast with the quiet depth of the prevailing tints-all these seemed unsurpassably beautiful when beheld in upper air. But on gazing downward, there they were, the same even to the minutest particular, yet arrayed in ideal beauty, which satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality, the real thing which nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense. At any rate the disembodied shadow is nearest. to the soul. There were many tokens of Autumn in this beautiful picture. Two or three of the trees were actually dressed in their coats of many colors-the real scarlet and gold which they wear before they put on mourning.

There is a pervading blessing diffused over all the world. I look out of the window, and think: O perfect day! O beautiful world! O good God! And such a day is the promise of a blissful eternity. Our Creator would never have made such weather, and given us the deep heart to enjoy it, above and beyond all thought, if he had not meant us to be immortal. It opens the gates of heaven, and gives us glimpses far inward.

A Plea For the Erring.

There are few subjects upon which men are so likely to err in forming their judgments as in estimating the degrees of guilt involved in the conduct of their erring and depraved fellow men. Especially is this the case when the judgments are passed upon the poor and the outcast,-the unhappy persons who from infancy have lived in daily communion with wretchedness and vice. In spite of Cannings's sneer at the nice judge who

"found with keen, discriminating sight,

Black's not so black, nor white so very white."

the doctrine thus ridiculed is nevertheless true in morals, if not in physics; and not to recognize it is to incur the risk of undue harshness in our estimates of our fellow men. If there is any one lesson which frequent intercourse with them teaches, it is the folly of attempting nicely to classify their characters, so as to place them distinctly among the sheep or the goats. Here and there a man is found who is almost wholly bad, and another who is almost wholly good; but, in the infinite majority of cases, the problem is so complex as to defy all our powers of analysis. A young men's debating society may easily enough resolve that some famous man or woman was worthy of approbation or of reprobation; but men of experience, who have learned the infinite complexity of human nature, know that a just judgment of human beings is not to be packed into any such summary formula. Even in judging our friends, whom we see daily, we make the grossest mistakes; they are constantly startling us by acts which show us how little we know of the fathomless depths of their moral being. How, then, can we expect to judge accurately of those who are utter strangers to us, and by what right do we presume to place them irrevocably in our moral pigeon-holes?

It is difficult to say how far in our judgments of the vilest men, or those who seem to be such, allowance should be made for