ety, peeping at you around a corner, and won't come out. Humor has been defined as suppressed wit, but rather should be regarded as suppressed wit striking through. It was an exudation which gems the sides of thought, as in summer the sides of water vases are gemmed with drops of water.

Cheerfulness is the manifestation of hope, and constitutes the sunshine of virtue.

For virtue requires the sun as much as do the flowers. Mirthfulness, raised into the catalogue of moral feelings, becomes a handmaiden of Love, and love is the central idea of religion: Veneration is not fit to go alone; it is dim and downcast. It should always walk, leaning upon the two angels of Hope and Love.

Care is a human demon; it is like a dried, wrinkled apparition in the house of fear. Sorrows are noble and ennobling, but care is an evil hag. It has neither faith, nor hope, nor love. It touches the path of misfortune with blight, and rests upon the sensitive soul like mildew upon flowers. It curses poverty with weariness, and it stands forth mildewed and blasted. Sorrow hath slain its thousands, and care its tens of thousands. It is the rust that has tarnished and eaten the blade.

A man should be something else than a chisel, and

even were he only a cutting instrument he might cut better if he were to indulge in a more generous mental diet. Our people have no time to cultivate the flowers of sensibility. They pull up all the weeds, and every thing else. If we cultivate buoyancy and cheerfulness, it does not need that we should also adopt buffoonery, allow quips and quirks to usurp the place of vigilance and industry. Mirthfulness will be found to be a good investment, or, in plain terms, it would pay.

It is no valid objection to mirthfulness, that it has been found with the vicious. There is no part of man God took the trouble to put into him in order to make man take the trouble to put it out. The same musical tones which soothed Cleopatra in her barge were employed by the bard of Israel in singing praises to God.

Mirthfulness is said to be the devil's weapon; but it has exorcised the devil a hundred times where he has made use of it once.

God's angels hardly find the way to the doors of men through the clouds of anxiety with which they have surrounded themselves, and so they lose many visits; but they love to come to the homes of mirth, and coming often they bear the heavier loads.

The sobriety of holy writ was not the keeping

of the tongue in a minor key; it was a sobriety against revels revels of wine-a temperate so

briety. If mirthfulness will destroy the monkish sobriety of the present day, then throw wide open the doors of the soul, and drive sobriety to the coverts of despair. The surest road to levity is unwise parental checks. Happiness is wholesome and medicinal, and children reared to mirthfulness are less liable to temptation. A faculty shut up is like a closed room; it grows mildewed and miasmatic. It is one of the avocations of mirthfulness to keep the soul open to God's sunlight. There is danger in all methods, but there is nothing so good for the young as cheerful occupation, and the utmost liberty possible. All wrongs are to be checked, yet ever these restraints of wrong should be restrained. Life and buoyancy are less dangerous when not confined among bones and sepulchral dust.

TO AN ABSENT HUSBAND.

"No place for you in this wide world!"
Ah, say not thus, my dear;
There is one place which you can fill,
One niche in this wide sphere.

Here is a chain, of which you make
One bright, connecting link;
No adverse fortune e'er can break
That golden chain, I think.

'Tis something that a human soul
Has found its counterpart,
And something that a kindred mind

Can share a genial heart.

"Tis something that the hand of love Is thrown around us here,

Emblem of unity above,

And bliss in yon bright sphere.

'Tis something, when death lays us low, That we can part in peace,

That we have shared each other's woe,
Each other's joy increased.

'Tis something when in realms above

We shall again unite,

To share for aye this mutual love,
Where sin can no more blight.

Then say not, "In this wide, wide world

FEW hearts have never loved; but fewer still
Have felt a second passion; none a third:
The first was living fire; the next a thrill;
The weary heart can never more be stirred;
Rely on it, the song has left the bird.

All's for the best. The fever and the flame,
The pulse that was a pang, the glance, a word,

The tone that shot like lightning through the frame, Can shatter us no more - the rest is but a name.