THE WIFE'S BOUDOIR.

Ah, to their hearts that place seem'd sweet.
Rich to the eyes

It show'd, with couch and tapestries
Wrought all of precious stuffs and new,
From conquer'd East,-rich with a hue
Of changeful purples; and therein
Gleam'd many an ornament of thin
And precious filigree of gold,
And marble things fair to behold
Through the dim shadows of noontide:
There, too, the casement, open wide
To many a pleasant singing breeze
And moving shadow of fair trees,
Let in the balmy breath all day,
From many a lovely garden way.

Arthur W. E. O'Shaughnessy.

PARTNERS IN JOY AND SORROW.

Every man rejoices twice, when he has a partner of his joy. A wife shares my sorrow, and makes it but a moiety; but she swells my joy and makes it double. For so two channels divide the river and lessen it into rivulets, and make it fordable and apt to be drunk up by the first revels of the Sirian star; but two torches do not divide, but increase the flame; and though my tears are sooner dried up when they run on my wife's check, yet when my flame hath kindled her lamp we unite the glories, and make them radiant, like the golden candlesticks that burn before the Throne of God, because they shine by numbers, by unions, and confederations of light and joy.

Jeremy Taylor.

I ONLY CAN LOVE THEE.

There is no one beside thee and no one above thee;

Thou standest alone as the nightingale sings ;

And my words that would praise thee are impotent things.

For none can express thee though all should approve thee,

I love thee so, dear, that I only can love thee.

Mrs. E. B. Browning.

THE UNSELFISH LOVE OF WOMAN.

Oh, the love of woman-the love of woman! how high will it not rise! and to what lowly depths will it not stoop! How many injuries will it not forgive! what obstacle will it not overcome, and what sacrifices will it not make, rather than give up the being upon which it has been once wholly and truthfully fixed! Perennial of life, which grows up under every climate, how small would the sum of man's happiness be without thee! Like the fabled lamp in the sepulchre, thou sheddest thy pure light in the human heart, when everything around thee there is dead for ever. Carleton.

Let grace and goodness be the principal lodestone of thy affections. Dryden.

A WORD AT THE RIGHT TIME.

I try to make myself and all around me agreeable. It will not do to leave a man to himself till he comes to you-to take no pains to attract him, or to appear before him with a long face. It is not so difficult as you think, dear child, to behave to a husband so that he shall remain for ever in some measure a lover. I am an old woman, but you can still do what you like: a word from you at the right time will not fail of its effect; what need have you to play the suffering virtue?"The tear of a loving girl," says an old book, "is like a dewdrop on the rose; but that on the cheek of a wife is a drop of poison to her husband." Try to appear cheerful and contented, and your husband will be so, and when you have made him happy you will become so, not in appearance but reality. The skill required is not so great. Nothing flatters a man so much as the happiness of his wife; he is always proud of himself as the source of it. As soon as you are cheerful, you will be lively and alert, and every moment will afford you an opportunity of letting fall an agreeable word. Your education, which gives you an immense advantage, will greatly assist you and your sensibility will become the noblest gift that nature has bestowed on you, when it shows itself in affectionate assiduity, and stamps on every action a soft, kind, and tender character, instead of wasting itself in secret repinings. Justus Moser.

ENDURANCE OF PURE love.

Say not that love grows cold:
First say the sun looks old,
And that the planets die!
Then, if thou art so bold,
When the untruth is told,
Let Echo answer---“ Lie !”

Love always shall endure,
If first the flame was pure,
It glows in truth for ever!
Its hold on life is sure,
In death it has no cure-

List! Echo answers "Never!"

What stronger grows with age?
Ask of the thought-worn sage,
Ask of the saints above,
Ask Nature's varied page,
Ask man in every stage,
And Echo answers- "Love!"

Andrew Park.

LOVE ME, SWEET, WITH ALL THOU ART.

Love me, sweet, with all thou art,
Feeling, thinking, seeing;
Love me in the lightest part,
Love me in full being.

Love me with thine open youth
In its frank surrender;
With the vowing of thy mouth,
With its silence tender.

Love me with thine azure eyes,
Made for earnest granting ;
Taking colour from the skies,
Can Heaven's truth be wanting?

Love me with their lids, that fell

Snow-like at first meeting: Love me with thine heart, that all Neighbours then saw beating.

Love me with thine hand stretch'd out
Freely-open-minded;

Love me with thy loitering foot,
Hearing one behind it.

Love me with thy voice that turns
Sudden faint above me;
Love me with thy blush that burns
When I murmur, "Love me!"

Love me with thy thinking soul,
Break it to love-sighing;
Love me with thy thoughts that roll
On through living-dying.

Love me in thy gorgeous airs,

When the world has crown'd thee; Love me, kneeling at thy prayers,

With the angels round thee.

Love me pure, as musers do,

Up the woodlands shady;

Love me gaily, fast and true,
As a winsome lady.

Through all hopes that keep us brave,

Further off or nigher,

Love me for the house and grave,

And for something higher.

Mrs. E. B. Browning.

TRUE FONDNESS.

Earth holds no other like to thee, Or if it doth, in vain for me.

Byron.

THE VERY MODEL OF FRIENDSHIP.

No man, not utterly degraded, can listen without delight to the accents of a guileless heart. Beauty, too, has a natural power over the mind; and it is right that this should be. All that overcomes selfishness, the besetting sin of the world, is an instrument of good. Beauty is but melody of a higher kind, and both alike soften the troubled and hard nature of man. Even if we looked on lovely woman but as on a rose, an exquisite production of the summer hours of life, it would be idle to deny her influence in making even those summer hours sweeter. But, as the companion of the mind, as the very model of a friendship that no chance can shake, as the pleasant sharer of the heart of hearts, the being to whom man returns after the tumult of the day, like the worshipper to a secret shrine, to revive his nobler tastes and virtues at a source pure from the evil of the external world, and glowing with a perpetual light of sanctity and love; where shall we find her equal? Or what must be our feeling towards the Mighty Disposer of earth, and all that it inhabits, but of admiration and gratitude to that disposal which thus combines our highest happiness with our purest virtue. Dr. Croly.

YOKED IN ALL EXERCISE OF NOBLE END.

Approach and fear not, breathe upon my brows;

In that fine air I tremble; all the past
Melts mist-like into this bright hour, and this
Is morn to more, and all the rich to come
Reels, as the golden autumn woodland reels
Athwart the smoke of burning weeds. For-
give me ;

I waste my heart in signs: let be. My bride,
My wife! my life! Oh, we will walk this world
Yoked in all exercise of noble end,

And so through those dark gates across the wild

THE INTUITIVE JUDGMENTS OF WOMEN. The intuitive judgments of women are often more to be relied upon than the conclusions which we reach by an elaborate process of reasoning. No man that has an intelligent wife, or who is accustomed to the society of educated women, will dispute this. Times without number you must have known them decide questions on the instant, and with unerring accuracy, which you had been poring over for hours, perhaps, with no other result than to find yourself getting deeper and deeper into the tangled maze of doubts and difficulties.

It were hardly generous to allege that they achieve these feats less by reasoning than by a sort of sagacity which approximates to the sure instinct of the animal races; and yet there seems to be some ground for the remark of a witty French writer, that, "when a man has toiled, step by step, up a flight of stairs, he will be sure to find a woman at the top; but she will not be able to tell how she got there." How she got there, however, is of little moment. If the conclusions a woman has reached are sound, that is all that concerns us. And that they are very apt to be sound on the practical matters of domestic and secular life, nothing but prejudice or selfconceit can prevent us from acknowledging. The inference, therefore, is unavoidable, that the man who thinks it beneath his dignity to take counsel with an intelligent wife, stands in his own light, and betrays that lack of judgment which he tacitly attributes to her. Boardman.

LINK'D IN ONE HEAVENLY TIE.

There's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,

When two that are link'd in one heavenly tie,

With heart never changing, and brow never

A HUSBAND'S LOVE.

The touching incident recorded in this sonnet recently occurred within the knowledge of my friend and neighbour, the Rev. J. M. Williams, Rector of Burnby, who communicated it to me The young wife of a barrister, in the extremity of weakness, was only saved from death by the "transfusion" of her husband's blood into her veins. He

fainted twice, but she recovered. Instances of recovery by this extreme remedy are not unknown in medical annals, but this incident, with its peculiar attendant circumstances, is worthy of record.

Lower and lower he beholds her sink

In mortal weakness, till life's dragging wheels

Refuse to move; and in despair he feels Her all but lost-on danger's utmost brink. From love's forlornest hope he does not shrink;

Out of his own warm veins the blood he steals,

Pouring it into hers, while his brain reels: 'Twixt wife and husband, oh, how dear a link! He gave his blood, and saved his darling wife:

Great was the love, the self-devotion rare; Dim shadow of His love beyond compare, Who not for friends poured forth the purple life,

But enemies, and made of them His Bride,
To walk in white for ever at His side!
Rev. Richard Wilton, M.A.

A PERFECT WOMANHOOD.

Then, oh, young wife! fresh from the fount of all life and being, in your form let grace and freedom be incarnated. Let love, sweetness, and purity sanctify the home of flesh and blood and bone in which you dwell. In your organic nature you embody a higher possibility than is found in any other form. To you it is given to be a perpetuator of immortals! You need all the brain and heart you can get, to work out the unsolved problem of a perfect womanhood. You must express self-regulated freedom, in a purity that shall shame to tingling silence all base desires, and in a lovely, sisterly nature that reaches alike to the physically and the spiritually diseased, baptizing them with the love that seeketh to bless and to save. The quenchless aspiration, the lofty endeavour, cannot contain itself in a pinched conventional form. The world, today, is suffering for women broad, largehearted, and wise. Rev. H. W. Beecher.

Calm pleasures there abide.

Wordsworth.

WHEN I BEHELD THY BLUE EYE

SHINE.

When I beheld thy blue eye shine
Through the bright drop that pity drew,
I saw beneath those tears of thine
A blue-eyed violet bathed in dew.

And thus thy charms in brightness rise When wit and pleasure round thee play; When mirth sits smiling in thine eyes,

Who but admires their sprightly ray? And when through pity's flood they gleam, Who but must love their soften'd beam? Eben Alrumi (translated from the Arabic by Professor Carlyle).

ALL HUMAN BEAUTY PERFECTED IN THEE.

On thee I gaze, blest goddess of the morning! In whose sweet smile these stars shall ever melt,

All human beauty perfected in thee,

Divine with human blending. In my heart Bared full before thee, to the essence fine Wherewith, by whisperings of my Maker's breath,

These stars of my new life are now inspired-

In this pure essence shall thy treasured love
Receive my adoration; and the thoughts
Of thee shall open ever in my mind,
Like the bland meads in flower, when thou
appearest.
R. H. Horne.

MY TRUE LOVE HATH MY HEART, AND
I HAVE HIS.

My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for another given;
I hold his dear, and mine he cannot miss :
There never was a better bargain driven;
My true love hath my heart, and I have his.

His heart in me keeps him and me in one,

My heart in him his thoughts and senses guides:

He loves my heart, for once it was his own,
I cherish his, because in me it bides;
My true love hath my heart, and I have his.
Sir Philip Sydney.

Heaven's harmony is universal love.

Cowper.