Still with no cares our days were laden, And I did love you very dearly, How dearly, words want power to show; Then other lovers came around you; And I lived on to wed another; No cause she gave me to repine; You grew a matron, plump and comely, No merrier eyes have ever glistened Time passed. My oldest girl was married, One pet of four years old I carried Among the wild-flowered meads to play,― In those same fields of childish pleasure, But though first love's impassioned blindness I still have thought of you with kindness, The ever-rolling, silent hours Will bring a time we shall not know, When our young days of gathering flowers Will be--a hundred years ago. SUBLIMITY OF THE BIBLE.-L. J. HALSEY. The Bible is not only the revealer of the unknown God to man, but His grand interpreter as the God of nature. In revealing God, it has given us the key that unlocks the profoundest mysteries of creation, the clew by which to thread the labyrinth of the universe, the glass through which to look "from nature up to nature's God." It is only when we stand and gaze upon nature, with the Bible in our hands, and its idea of God in our understandings, that nature is capable of rising to her highest majesty, and kindling in our souls the highest emotions of moral beauty and sublimity. Without the all-pervading spiritual God of the Bible in our thoughts, nature's sweetest music would lose its charm, the universe its highest significance and glory. Go, and stand with your open Bible upon the Areopagus of Athens, where Paul stood so long ago! In thoughtful silence, look around upon the site of all that ancient greatness; look upward to those still glorious skies of Greece, and what conceptions of wisdom and power will all those memorable scenes of nature and art convey to your mind, now, more than they did to an ancient worshipper of Jupiter or Apollo? They will tell of Him who made the worlds, "by whom, and through whom, and for whom, are all things." To you, that landscape of exceeding beauty, so rich in the monuments of departed genius, with its distant classic mountains, its deep blue sea, and its bright bending skies, will be telling a tale of glory the Grecian never learned; for it will speak to you no more of its thirty thousand petty contending deities, but of the one living and everlasting God. Go, stand with David and Isaiah under the star-spangled canopy of the night; and, as you look away to the "range of planets, suns, and adamantine spheres wheeling unshaken through the void immense," take up the mighty questionings of inspiration! Go, stand upon the heights at Niagara, and listen in awestruck silence to that boldest, most earnest, and eloquent of all nature's orators! And what is Niagara, with its plunging waters and its mighty roar, but the oracle of God, the whis per of His voice who is revealed in the Bible as sitting above the water-floods forever? Go, once more, and stand with Coleridge, at sunrise, in the Alpine Valley of Chamouni; join with him in that magnificent invocation to the hoary mount, "sole sovereign of the vale," to rise, "and tell the silent sky, And tell the stars, and tell yon rising sun, Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God." Who can stand amid scenes like these, with the Bible in his hand, and not feel that if there is moral sublimity to be found on earth, it is in the Book of God, it is in the thought of God? For what are all these outward, visible forms of grandeur but the expression and the utterance of that conception of Deity which the Bible has created in our minus, and which has now become the leading and largest thought of all civilized nations? A ROMANCE IN VERSE. When first I met Louisa Ann No obstacles were in the way. She did not hesitate-not she! She owned that we might married be. From my adored Louisa Ann. She did not all too early die, Nor-if it comes to that-did I ; Unchecked the course of true love ran: I married my Louisa Ann. There the romance however ends. Dear reader, you and I are friends! You don't like my Louisa Ann? No more do I-I never can. A CHARMING WOMAN.-JOHN G. SAXE. A charming woman, I've heard it said To find wherein the charm may be. And her form is quite as good as the best, Intelligent? Yes-in a certain way: Whenever the theme transcends her reach. But turn the topic on things to wear, Hats, basques, or bonnets-'twill make you stare Her laugh is hardly a thing to please; A muscular motion inade to show What nature designed to lie beneath The finer mouth; but what can she do, If that is ruined to show the teeth? To her seat in church-a good half mile- La mode de Paris has got to show; Ah! what shall we say of one who walks But all in vain I puzzle my head 888 -Harper's Magazine. MARY, THE MAID OF THE INN.-ROBERT SOUTHEY, Who is yonder poor maniac, whose wildly-fixed eyes She weeps not, yet often and deeply she sighs: No aid, no compassion the maniac will seek ; Through her rags do the winds of the winter blow bleak Yet cheerful and happy, nor distant the day, Poor Mary the maniac has been ; The traveler remembers, who journeyed this way, As Mary, the maid of the inn. Her cheerful address filled the guests with delight, She loved; and young Richard had settled the day, But Richard was idle and worthless, and they "Twas in autumn, and stormy and dark was the night, Two guests sat enjoying the fire that burnt bright, ""Tis pleasant," cried one," seated by the fireside "A fine night for the abbey!" his comrade replied; "Methinks a man's courage would now be well tried Who should wander the ruins about. "I myself, like a school-boy, would tremble to hear And could fancy I saw, half persuaded by fear, |