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creep over us and bind our giant strength. Small cares, some deficiencies in the mere arrangement and ordering of our lives, daily fret our hearts, and cross the clearness of our faculties; and these entanglements hang around us, and leave us no free soul able to give itself up, in power and gladness, to the true work of life. There is the profoundest moral truth in that doctrine of St. Paul's, that entire mastery over the physical nature is the only basis from which all the higher power of character must proceed. The severest training and self-denial, a superiority to the servitude of indulgence, are the indispensable conditions even of genial spirits, of unclouded energies, of tempers free from morbidness, much more of the practised and vigorous mind, ready at every call, and thoroughly furnished unto all good works. In the lassitude and indulgence by which we deprive the soul of this physical fitness and freedom, many of us greatly sin; nor is there a spiritual counsel that ought daily to penetrate the soul with more solemn tone than that high resolve of Christ's freeman, — I will not be brought under the power of any thing. J. H. Thom.

If a disembodied spirit might, in all probability it could not profit by the world, its wisdom or its scenes. The soul's salvation depends somewhat on its tenure of the body. We have no longer time for improvement than while we can keep this covering of " vile members" about us. It is only in contact with earth that preparation for heaven goes on. The consciousness of mortality is not

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necessarily depressing. It is given us to infuse earnestness into thought, and into and throughout the soul, a solemn, quickening sense of dependence upon God. Man's feet are created subject to palsy and the deadening effect of old age, that they may take hold of the path of life the more gladly. The right hand may and will forget its cunning; and it is therefore, that whatsoever it findeth to do should be done with the greater might. Mountford.

Health is the ground which great persons cultivate, whereby they exchange the light flying hours into golden usage. To them it is industry represented in its power; the human riches of time. The minute-glass runs willingly sand of centuries when great ideas are in the healthful moments. Wilkinson.

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them. Thoreau.

John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running on his Labor more or less. Having bathed, he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. It was rather a cool evening, and some of his neighbors were apprehending a frost.

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He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work; but the burden of his thought was, that though this kept running in his head, and he found himself planning and contriving it against his will, yet it concerned him very little. It was no more than the scurf of his skin, which was constantly shuffled off. But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived. A voice said to him, why do you stay here and lead this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you? Those same stars twinkle over other fields than these. But how to come out of this condition and actually migrate thither? All that he could think of was to practise some new austerity, to let his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat himself with ever increasing respect. Thoreau.

Only to the Pariahs is the use of all kinds of food allowed.

I am glad to have drunk Water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to an opium-eater's heaven. I would fain keep sober always; and there are infinite degrees of drunkenness. I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man; wine is not so noble a

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liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Thoreau.

"That in which men differ from brute beasts," says Mencius, "is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully."

He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. Ib.

The principality which the angels kept not was their lordly power and dominion over their worse and inferior part, they having also a certain duplicity in their nature, of a better and worser principle, of a superior part which ought to rule and govern, and of an inferior which ought to be governed; nor is it indeed otherwise easily conceivable, how they should be capable of sinning.

Cudworth.

It is said no man ever did anything from a single motive. Low motives rush in, and pass themselves off for higher ones.

As for the shadow which hung over Hartley Coleridge's life, we will only say that every man who feels in himself (and who does not?) the truth of the ancient confession,

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"Video meliora, &c." has in himself the germ of an infirmity which may explain to him the nature of it, and enable him to sympathize with the strain of passionate contrition which runs through so many of the finest and most touching poems in these volumes. It is an infirmity which takes many different directions, and meets with much variety of treatment from society-not so much according to the amount of criminality in each case, as according to the degree in which it interferes with social arrangements. In its highest degree it is called madness, and exempted from moral censure as a disease in humanity; in its lowest degree it is almost universal, and acquiesced in as a characteristic of humanity; in its middle degrees it is denounced as a vice. But the difference is in degree not in kind; and any one who lies in bed after he has distinctly felt that he ought to get up, or who eats of a dish which he knows he had better not eat of, or who feels that he will be too late for an appointment if he does not go at once, and yet remains sitting where he is— any such man can understand how he might have come to be incapable of keeping an engagement, or of resisting the temptation of a glass beyond Nature's allowance, and yet retained a strong religious sense of duty, a deep feeling of shame, and a devout hope of redemption.

Tait's Magazine.

Hartley Coleridge yielded as it were to slight temptations, slight in themselves, and slight to him, as if swayed by a mechanical impulse apart from his own volition.