flatteringly in our ear of the time when we should no longer have frowns or flagellations to fear, but become our own masters, and go whithersoever we would.” It was then, too, that we began to hold strange converse with the outer world, the calm, the storm, the quiet eve, the sunshine, and the pleasant noon; the song of birds, the hum of bees, the soft-lipped zephyr floating in flutelike music over the twilight sea; the rippling streamlet gliding along between its thickly-wooded banks, in the hot silence of a July noon, and seeming by its perennial freshness the only thing capable of exertion; the solemn mountains and the autumn woods seem at this season of life to be peopled with spirits and voices visible and audible to youth alone. A popular writer has remarked that nine times out of ten it is over the “bridge of sighs" that we pass the narrow gulf from youth to manhood. That interval is generally occupied by an ill-placed or disappointed affection, and though the intellect may come out hardened by the trial, the moral nature-the trusting faithof youth has undergone an irreparable shock. We have advanced farther into the turbid torrent of life, and we no longer find it a bright heaven-reflecting lake. Our companions, too, are gradually dropping away from our side; life in its manifold businesses has deprived us of some, while the grave has closed on others. By the time we reach the age of thirty the Æolian music of life is gone, the burden begins to weigh heavily upon the shoulders, the dirge steals in upon the dance, and the revel is disturbed by the requiem. For the first time we begin to treasure up the "wasted dews of thought,” and pausing on this first gentle upland of life, we turn a longing, lingering look upon the path which we have trodden and the scenes we are leaving behind us for ever. Memory prepares to decorate the niches in her solemn temple with the forms so dearly loved, yet now for ever lost. That "ancient school-house which we once thought a dungeon, what a pleasant place it looks now! And the old pedagogue, with his monstrous spectacles, whom we once thought an apt representative of all ogres and giants, and whom we so sadly provoked with our mischievous games, what a kind, good old man he was! how much more sinned against than sinning! Peace to his gentle shade! The whole group of our school-fellows, too, we see them all again as if it were but yesterday. Not one is missing. We could arrange them all in their classes and at their desks, from that merry, mischievous, laughterloving rogue who was always annoying-yet always amusing us with his "quips and cranks and wanton wiles," down to that grave and melancholy boy who never fought a battle, nor took part in a mischievous trick, but told us strange and wondrous tales which would often beguile us of our ears.' But as early manhood ripens into maturity these dreams and memories of the past come less frequently upon the mind. As the distance which divides us from the past widens, the gathering mist of years settles down upon its landscapes, and the faint light which streams upon the crumbling homes of youth and childhood, though beautiful as an autumn sunset in an Alpine solitude, is mournful as moonlight upon graves. We dream most at the beginning and close of life; middle age is too deeply engaged in the world to give Eclipse of Faith. * much time to dreams, however beautiful. The chain and the yoke bind us too closely to the stern realities of existence; the "iron has entered into our soul,” and a feverish anxiety for wealth and fame has enthroned itself in our hearts. The extent of our wandering shows us but the limit of our chain, and our attempts to soar only reveal to us the lowness of our dungeon. We may not be idle amid the busy throng which is hemming us in on every hand, and panting to outstrip us in the race, till at last, with energies exhausted and the "shadow of hope departing," old age, pitying our unavailing strife, leads us back in meditation to the home of our childhood to spend the evening of our day in peace. Such is the dream of life, such the round of fate to one, to all of us: "a buoyant, imaginative youth, a vigorous manhood, a restless maturity, a decrepit old age, a deathbed made beautiful by the abiding love of some few true-hearted friends, and a quiet grave in the old church where we breathed our first prayer. Yes; however widely men may wander in life, they come home to die, and to lay themselves down to rest in their father's sepulchre. Like those cunning Indian arrows which, when they have described the intended arc, return to the spot from whence they were projected, so the spent lifetravellers carry back their bodies to the starting-point of home! The dying eagle drags its feeble flight to its own eyrie, and the passage birds come back to die in the woods where they first tried their infant wings; and so men, worn and weary men, gather back from commerce, mart, and battle field, to resign their consciousness where it first broke into being, when a “man child was born into the world." 149 CHAPTER XIII. 6 Twilight Musings. OD," says Solomon, "has made everything beautiful in its season. And with what infinite tenderness and wisdom has He cut up our life into short periods of labour and short periods of rest. He has given us six days for toil, and then one for rest and worship. He has given us the day for labour, the twilight for meditation, and the night for repose, when He curtains us round with the darkness and calls "Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep," to settle down upon our eyelids; and He has thus provided for us at the end of every twelve hours a resting place in the weary march of life, where we may recruit our exhausted energies and go forth with renewed strength to the burden and the battle. Twilight is, and ever has been, the favorite time for meditation. It is said of the patriarch of the early world, "And Isaac went out in the fields at eventide to meditate." When the waves break upon the distant shore with a wild, solemn, melancholy, yet delightful murmur; when the sun has quitted the world with reluctance, and the glow of heaven sits as it were upon the mountains, and the whole concave is robed in purple majesty and splendour, how soft, how lulling and serene are all the objects of the vast creation! Then while the eye and the imagination are indulging in the contemplation of the quietly advancing twilight, and the fair moon rising in the east is about to gather the starry hosts of heaven in her train, and fling over creation her soft mantle of light, the heart vibrates with many a gentle impulse, the passions are modulated to a divine repose, and the soul, partaking of the general hush of Nature and awed by its solemn imagery, exalts its meditation far beyond the orbit of the visible creation, and appearing susceptible of an earthly immortality, anticipates the sacred character of that golden age which is to be introduced by the advent of Messiah; for then the serene faculties of the soul are awake, and feed on thoughts worthy of paradise. Time seems to be our own, we meditate with satisfaction on the evening of life, of which the scene is an emblem : "As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night, O'er heaven's clear azure spreads her sacred light; HOMER. And when the mind is enriched and diversified with religion and science every object has its beauty, and |