FOR THOU, MY LOVE, ART STILL THE SAME.

THY cheek is pale with many cares,

Thy brow is overcast,

And thy fair face a shadow wears
That tells of sorrows past;
But music hath thy tongue for me:
How dark soe'er my lot may be,
I turn for comfort, love, to thee,
My beautiful, my wife!

Thy gentle eyes are not so bright
As when I wooed thee first;
Yet still they have the same sweet light
Which long my heart has nursed;
They have the same enchanting beam
Which charmed me in love's early dream,
And still with joy on me they stream,
My beautiful, my wife!

When all without looks dark and cold,
Nor voices change their tone,
Nor greet me as they did of old,
I feel I am not lone;

For thou, my love, art still the same,

And looks and deeds thy faith proclaim;

Though all should scorn, thou wouldst not blame, My beautiful, my wife!

A BLEST RELIEF IN TEARS.

WHEN the sad heart is wrung with grief,
Or pressed with gloomy fears,

It often finds a solace sweet,

A blest relief in tears.

As when denied the showers of heaven
Beneath a summer sky,

The little tender floweret droops

Upon the ground to die,

So droops the heart denied these tears

In its dark sorrow low;

Or in its silent anguish breaks
Beneath the heavy blow.

As when upon the dry, parched earth

Falls the refreshing rain,

The little drooping flower looks up,
And smiles in joy again.

OUR OLD GRANDMOTHER.

"I FIND the marks of my shortest steps beside those of my beloved mother, which were measured by my own," says Alexandre Dumas, and so conjures up one of the sweetest images in the world. He was revisiting the home of his infancy; he was retracing the little paths around it in which he had once walked; and strange flowers could not efface, and rank grass could not conceal, and cruel ploughs could not obliterate, "his shortest footsteps," and his mother's beside them, measured by his own.

And who needs to be told whose footsteps they were that thus kept time with the feeble pattering of childhood's little feet? It was no mother behind whom Ascanius walked "with unequal steps" in Virgil's line, but a stern, strong man, who could have borne him and not been burdened; folded him in his arms from all danger, and not been wearied; every thing, indeed, he could have done for him, but just what he needed most- he could not sympathize

with him; he could not be a child again. Ah, a

rare art is that, for indeed it is an art,—to set back the great old clock of time, and be a boy once more. Man's imagination can easily see the child a man; but how hard it is for it to see the man a child! And he who had learned to glide back into that rosy time, when he did not know that thorns were under the roses, or that clouds would ever return after the rain; when he thought a tear could stain a cheek no more than a drop of rain a flower; when he fancied that life had no disguise, and hope no blight at all, has come as near as any body can to discovering the north-west passage to paradise.

And it is perhaps for this reason that it is so much easier for a mother to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for the rest of the world. She fancies she is leading the children, when, after all, the children are leading her; and they keep her indeed where the river is the narrowest and the air is the clearest; and the beckoning of a radiant hand is so plainly seen from the other side, that it is no wonder she so often lets go her clasp upon the little fingers she is holding, and goes over to the neighbors, and the children follow, like lambs to the fold; for we think it ought somewhere to be written," Where the mother is, there will the children be also."

But it was not of the mother we began to think, but of the dear, old-fashioned grandmother, whose thread of love, spun "by hand" on life's little wheel, was longer and stronger than they make it now, was wound about and about the children she saw playing in the children's arms, in a true love-knot that nothing but the shears of Atropos could sever; for do we not recognize the lambs sometimes, when summer days are over, and autumn winds are blowing, and they come bleating from the yellow fields, by the crimson thread we wound about their necks in April or May, and so undo the gate and let the wanderers in ?

Blessed be the children who have an old-fashioned grandmother. As they hope for length of days, let them love and honor her, for we can tell them they will never find another.

There is a large, old kitchen somewhere in the past, and an old-fashioned fireplace therein, with its smooth old jambs of stone; smooth with many knives that had been sharpened there; smooth with many little fingers that have clung there. There are andirons, too; the old andirons, with rings in the top, wherein many temples of flame have been builded, with spires and turrets of crimson. There is a broad, worn hearth; broad enough for three