Ye are better than all the ballads
That ever were sung or said;

For ye are living poems,

And all the rest are dead.

-HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

5. ROCK ME TO SLEEP.

Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again, just for to-night!
Mother, come back from the echoless shore,
Take me again to your heart, as of yore;
Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care,
Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair;
Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;—
Rock me to sleep, mother, -rock me to sleep!

Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!
I am so weary of toil and of tears,

Toil without recompense, tears all in vain;
Take them, and give me my childhood again!
I have grown weary of dust and decay,
Weary of flinging my soul-wealth away;
Weary of sowing for others to reap; -
Rock me to sleep, mother, — rock me to sleep!

Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue,

Mother, O mother, my heart calls for you!

Many a summer the grass has grown green,
Blossomed and faded,, our faces between;
Yet, with strong yearning and passionate pain,
Long I to-night for your presence again.
Come from the silence, so long and so deep;
Rock me to sleep, mother, rock me to sleep!

Over my heart, in the days that are flown,
No love like mother-love ever has shone;
No other worship abides and endures —
Faithful, unselfish, and patient like yours;
None like a mother can charm away pain
From the sick soul and the world-weary brain.
Slumber's soft calms o'er my heavy lids creep; -
Rock me to sleep, mother, -rock me to sleep!

Come, let your brown hair, just lighted with gold,
Fall on your shoulders again, as of old;
Let it drop over my forehead to-night,
Shading my faint eyes away from the light;
For, with its sunny-edged shadows, once more
Haply will throng the sweet visions of yore;
Lovingly, softly, its bright billows sweep; -
Rock me to sleep, mother, -rock me to sleep!

Mother, dear mother, the years have been long
Since I last listened your lullaby song;
Sing, then, and unto my soul it shall seem
Womanhood's years have been only a dream.

Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace,
With your light lashes just sweeping my face,
Never, hereafter, to wake or to weep;

Rock me to sleep, mother, -rock me to sleep!

6. LEARNING BY OBSERVING.

The great use of a school education is not so much to teach you things, as to teach you how to learn, to give you the noble art of learning, which you can use for yourselves in after life on any matter to which you choose to turn your mind. And what does the art of learning consist in? First and foremost, in the art of observing. That is, the boy who uses his eyes best on his book, and observes the words and letters of his lesson most accurately and carefully, that is the boy who learns his lesson best.

You know as well as I how one boy will sit staring at his book for an hour, without knowing a word about it, while another will learn the thing in a quarter of an hour; and why? Because one has actually not seen the words. He has been thinking of something else, looking out of the window, repeating the words to himself like a parrot. The other has simply, as we say, "looked sharp." He has looked at the lesson with his whole mind,

seen it, and seen into it, and therefore knows all about it.

Therefore I say that everything which helps a boy's power of observation helps his power of learning; and I know from experience that nothing helps that so much as the study of the world about us, and especially of natural history: to be accustomed to watch for curious objects, to know in a moment when you have come upon anything new, -which is observation; to be quick at seeing when things are like and when unlike, which is classification. All that must, and I well know does, help to make a boy shrewd, earnest, accurate, ready for whatever may happen.

When we were little and good, a long time ago, we used to have a jolly old book, called "Evenings at Home," in which was a great story, called “Eyes and No Eyes"; and that story was of more use to me than any dozen other stories I ever read.

A regular old-fashioned story it is, but a right good one, and thus it begins:

66

Well, Robert, where have you been walking this afternoon?" said Mr. Andrews, to one of his pupils, at the close of a holiday. Oh, Robert had been to Broom Heath, and round to Campmount, and home through the meadows. But it was very dull; he hardly saw a single person. He would rather by half have gone by the turnpike road. "But where is William ?

Oh, William started with him, but he was so tedious, always stopping to look at this thing and that, that Robert would rather walk alone, and so went on.

Presently in comes Master William, dressed, no doubt, as we wretched boys used to be forty years ago, frill collar, and tight skeleton monkeyjacket, and tight trousers buttoned over it, a pair of low shoes which always came off if stepped into heavy ground; and terribly dirty and wet he is, but he never had such a pleasant walk in his life, and he has brought home a handkerchief full of curiosities.

He has got a piece of mistletoe, and wants to know what it is, and seen a woodpecker and a wheat-ear, and got strange flowers off the heath, and hunted a pewit, because he thought its wing was broken, till of course it led him into a bog, and wet he got; but he did not mind, for in the bog he fell in with an old man cutting turf, who told him all about turf-cutting; and then he went up a hill, and saw a grand prospect, and because the place was called Campmount he looked for a Roman camp, and found the ruins of one; and then he went on and saw twenty things more; and so on, and so on, till he had brought home curiosities enough and thoughts enough to last him a week.

Mr. Andrews, who seems a sensible old gentleman, tells him all about his curiosities; and then it