Only his own thrift and gain. These and far more than these The Poet sees! He can behold Aquarius old Walking the fenceless fields of air: And from each ample fold Of the clouds about him rolled The showery rain, As the farmer scatters his grain. He can behold That have not yet been wholly told, Down to the graves of the dead, Down through chasms and gulfs profound To the dreary fountain head Of lakes and rivers under ground; And sees them, when the rain is done, On the bridge of colors seven Climbing up once more to heaven, Opposite the setting sun. Thus the Seer, With vision clear, Sees forms appear and disappear, In the perpetual round of strange From birth to death, from death to birth, From earth to heaven, from heaven to earth; Of things, unseen before, Unto his wondering eyes reveal The Universe, as an immeasurable wheel Turning forevermore In the rapid and rushing river of Time. BACKLOG STUDIES CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER NOTE TO THE PUPIL. Charles Dudley Warner was born at Plain field, Mass., in 1829. He graduated from Hamilton College in 1851 and was admitted to the bar in 1856. He practiced four years in Chicago, then removed to Hartford, Conn., and became editor of the Press, and of the Courant upon its consolidation with the Press in 1867. He has been connected with Harper's Magazine since 1884. He has written a great amount. His "My Summer in a Garden" is very interesting to every one who has had any experience with a garden. “Being a Boy” will please the old boys as well as the young ones. "Saunterings," "Backlog Studies," many works on travel, such as "On Horseback," "My Winter on the Nile," ,"" In the Levant," "Our Italy," and others, may be read with both profit and pleasure. He has written several novels, "A Little Journey in the World," and "The Golden House," being most noted. Mr. Warner's latest work has been the editing of "A Library of the World's Best Literature." HE fire on the hearth has almost gone out in New Eng THE land; the hearth has gone out; the family has lost its center; age ceases to be respected; sex is only distinguished by the difference between millinery bills and tailors' bills; there is no more toast-and-cider; the young are not allowed to eat mince pie at ten o'clock at night; half a cheese is no longer set to toast before the fire; you scarcely ever see, in front of the coals, a row of roasting apples, which a bright little girl, with many a dive and start, shielding her sunny face from the fire with one hand, turns from time to time; scarce are the gray-haired sires who strop their razors on the family Bible, and doze in the chimney corner. A good many things have gone out with the fire on the hearth. I do not mean to say that public and private morality have vanished with the hearth. A good degree of purity and considerable happiness are possible with grates and blowers; it is a day of trial, when we are all passing through a fiery furnace, and very likely we shall be purified as we are dried up and wasted away. Of course the family is gone, as an institution, though there still are attempts to bring up a family round a "register." But you might just as well try to bring it up by hand, as without the rallying point of a hearthstone. Are there any homesteads nowadays? Do people hesitate to change houses any more than they do to change their clothes? People hire houses as they would a masquerade costume, liking, sometimes, to appear for a year in a little fictitious stonefront splendor above their means. Thus it happens that so many people live in houses that do not fit them. I should almost as soon think of wearing another person's clothes as his house; unless I could let it out and take it in until it fitted, and somehow expressed my own character and taste. But we have fallen into the days of conformity. It is no wonder that people constantly go into their neighbors' houses by mistake, just as, in spite of the Maine law, they wear away each other's hats from an evening party. It has almost come to this, that you might as well be anybody else as yourself. Am I mistaken in supposing that this is owing to the discontinuance of big chimneys, with wide fireplaces in them? How can a person be attached to a house that has no center attraction, no soul in it, in the visible form of a glowing fire and a warm chimney, like the heart in the body? When you think of the old homestead, if you ever do, your thoughts go straight to the wide chimney and its burning logs. No wonder that you are ready to move from one fireplaceless house into another. But you have something just as good, you say. Yes, I have heard of it. This age, which imitates everything, even to the virtues of our ancestors, has invented a fireplace, with artificial, iron, or composition logs in it, hacked and painted, in which gas is burned, so that it has the appearance of a wood fire. This seems to me blasphemy. Do you think a cat would lie down before it? Can you poke it? If you cannot poke it, it is a fraud. To poke a wood fire is more solid enjoyment than almost anything else in the world. The crowning human virtue in a man is to let his wife poke the fire. I do not know how any virtue whatever is possible over an imitation gas log. What a sense of insincerity the family must have, if they indulge in the hypocrisy of gathering about it. With this center of untruthfulness, what must the life in the family be? Perhaps the father will be living at the rate of ten thousand a year on a salary of four thousand; perhaps the mother, more beautiful and younger than her beautified daughters, will rouge; perhaps the young ladies will make wax work. A cynic might suggest as the motto of modern life this simple legend, "Just as good as the real." But I am not a cynic, and I hope for the rekindling of wood fires, and a return of the beautiful home light from them. If a wood fire is a luxury, it is cheaper than many in which we indulge without thought, and cheaper than the visits of a doctor, made necessary by the want of ventilation of the house. Not that I have anything against doctors; I only wish, after they have been to see us in a way that seems so friendly, they had nothing against us. I should like to know what heroism a boy in an old New England farmhouse-rough-nursed by nature, and fed on the traditions of the old wars did not aspire to. "John," says the mother, "you'll burn your head to a crisp in that heat." But John does not hear; he is storming the Plains of Abraham just now. "Johnny, dear, bring in a stick of wood." How can Johnny bring in wood when he is in that defile with Braddock, and the Indians are popping at him from behind every tree? There is something about a boy that I like, after all. The fire rests upon the broad hearth; the hearth rests upon a great substruction of stone, and the substruction rests upon the cellar. What supports the cellar I never knew, but the cellar supports the family. The cellar is the foundation of domestic comfort. Into its dark, cavernous recesses the child's imagination fearfully goes. Bogies guard the bins of choicest apples. I know not what comical sprites sit astride the cider barrels ranged along the walls. The feeble flicker of the tallow candle does not at all dispel, but creates illusions and magnifies all the rich possibilities of this underground treasure house. When the cellar door is opened, and the boy begins to descend into the thick darkness, it is always with a heartbeat as of one started upon some adventure. Who can forget the smell that comes through the opened door, a mingling of fresh earth, fruit, exhaling delicious aroma, kitchen vegetables, the moldy odor of barrels, a sort of ancestral air, as if a door had been opened into an old romance. * It is a temptation to a temperate man to become a sot, to hear what talent, what versatility, what genius is almost always attributed to a moderately bright man who is habitually drunk. Such a mechanic, such a mathematician, such a poet, he would be if he were only sober; and then he is sure to be the most generous, magnanimous, friendly soul, conscien |