was worthy to have been one of the time-honored parsonages of England, in which, through many generations, a succession of by occupants pass from youth to age, and bequeath each an inheritance of sanctity to pervade the house and hover over it, as with an atmosphere.

Nor, in truth, had the Old Manse ever been profaned by a lay occupant, until that memorable summer-afternoon when I entered it as my home. A priest had built it; a priest had succeeded to it; other priestly men, from time to time, had dwelt in it; and children, born in its chambers, had grown up to assume the priestly character. It was awful to reflect how many sermons must have been written there. The latest inhabitant alone-he, by whose translation to Paradise the dwelling was left vacanthad penned nearly three thousand discourses, besides the better, if not the greater number, that gushed living from his lips. How fen, no doubt, had he paced to and fro along the avenue, attuning has meditations, to the sighs and gentle murmurs, and deep and

ma peals of the wind, among the lofty tops of the trees! In that variety of natural utterances, he could find something accor dant with every passage of his sermon, were it of tenderness or reverential fear. The boughs over my head seemed shadowy with solemn thoughts, as well as with rustling leaves. I took

ane to myself for having been so long a writer of idle stories, and ventured to hope that wisdom would descend upon me with the falling leaves of the avenue; and that I should light upon an actual treasure in the Old Manse, well worth those hoards at i ang hidden gold, which people seek for in moss-grown houses. Pround treatises of morality-a layman's unprofessional, and therefore unprejudiced views of religion;-histories (such as Bancroft might have written, had he taken up his abode here, as be once purposed), bright with picture, gleaming over a depth of pophic thought;-these were the works that might fitly have flowed from such a retirement. In the humblest event, I resolved

at least to achieve a novel, that should evolve some deep lesson, and should possess physical substance enough to stand alone.

In furtherance of my design, and as if to leave me no pretext for not fulfilling it, there was, in the rear of the house, the most delightful little nook of a study that ever offered its snug seclusion to a scholar. It was here that Emerson wrote "Nature;" for he was then an inhabitant of the Manse, and used to watch the Assyrian dawn and the Paphian sunset and moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill. When I first saw the room, its walls were blackened with the smoke of unnumbered years, and made still blacker by the grim prints of puritan ministers that hung around. These worthies looked strangely like bad angels, or, at least, like men who had wrestled so continually and so sternly with the devil, that somewhat of his sooty fierceness had been imparted to their own visages. They had all vanished now; a cheerful coat of paint, and golden tinted paper hangings, lighted up the small apartment; while the shadow of a willow-tree, that swept against the overhanging eves, attempered the cheery western sunshine. In place of the grim prints, there was the sweet and lovely head of one of Raphael's Madonnas, and two pleasant little pictures of the Lake of Como. The only other decorations were a purple vase of flowers, always fresh, and a bronze one containing graceful ferns. My books (few, and by no means choice; for they were chiefly such waifs as chance had thrown in my way) stood in order about the room, seldom to be dis turbed.

The study had three windows, set with little old fashioned panes of glass, each with a crack across it. The two on the western side looked, or rather peeped, between the willow branches, down into the orchard, with glimpses of the river through the trees. The third, facing northward, commanded a broader view of the river, at a spot where its hitherto obscure waters gleam forth into the light of history. It was at this window that

the clergyman, who then dwelt in 'he Manse, stood watching the outbreak of a long and deadly struggle between two nations; he w the irregular array of his parishioners on the farther side of the river, and the glittering line of the British, on the hither back; he awaited, in an agony of suspense, the rattle of the masketry. It came and there needed but a gentle wind to sweep the battle smoke around this quiet house.

Perhaps the reader-whom I cannot help considering as my gest in the Old Manse, and entitled to all courtesy, in the way of sight-showing-perhaps he will choose to take a nearer view of the memorable spot. We stand now on the river's brink. It may well be called the Concord-the river of peace and quietDess-for it is certainly the most unexcitable and sluggish stream that ever loitered, imperceptibly, towards its eternity, the sea. Pavely, I had lived three weeks beside it, before it grew quite car to my perception which way the current flowed. It never has a vivacious aspect, except when a northwestern breeze is

ng its surface, on a sunshiny day. From the incurable. dance of its nature, the stream is happily incapable of becom ng the slave of human ingenuity, as is the fate of so many a wild fre mountain torrent. While all things else are compelled to

serve some useful purpose, it idles its sluggish life away, in azy berty, without turning a solitary spindle, or affording even ver power enough to grind the corn that grows upon its banks. The torpor of its movement allows it nowhere a bright pebbly sare, nor so much as a narrow strip of glistening sand, in any part of its course. It slumbers between broad prairies, kissing se long meadow grass, and bathes the overhanging boughs of sider bushes and willows, or the roots of elms and ash trees, and clumps of maples. Flags and rushes grow along its plashy shore Se yellow water-lily spreads.its broad flat leaves on the margin, and the fragrant white pond-lily abounds, generally selecting a

position just no far from the river's brink, that it cannot be grasped, save at the hazard of plunging in.

It is a marvel whence this perfect flower derives its loveliness and perfume, springing, as it does, from the black mud over which the river sleeps, and where lurk the slimy cel, and speckled frog, and the mud turtle, whom continual washing cannot cleanse. It is the very same black mud out of which the yellow lily sucks its obscene life and noisome odor. Thus we see, too, in the world, that some persons assimilate only what is ugly and evil from the same moral circumstances which supply good and beau. tified results-the fragrance of celestial flowers-to the daily life of others.

The reader must not, from any testimony of mine, contract a dislike towards our slumberous stream. In the light of a calin and golden sunset, it becomes lovely beyond expression; the more lovely for the quietude that so well accords with the hour, when even the wind, after blustering all day long, usually hushes itself to rest. Each tree and rock, and every blade of grass, is distinctly imaged, and, however unsightly in reality, assumes ideal beauty in the reflection. The minutest things of carth, and the broad aspect of the firmament, are pictured equally with out effort, and with the same felicity of success. All the sky glows downward at our feet; the rich clouds float through the unruilled bosom of the stream, like heavenly thoughts through a peaceful heart. We will not, then, malign our river as gross and impure, while it can glorify itself with so adequate a picture of the Heaven that broods above it; or, if we remember its tawny hue and the muddiness of its bed, let it be a symbol that the earthliest human soul has an infinite spiritual capacity, and may contain the better world within its depths. But, indeed, the same lesson might be drawn out of any mud-puddle in the streets of a city-and, being taught us everywhere, it must be true.

Come; we have pursued a somewhat devious track, in our

walk to the battle-ground. Here we are, at the point where the Ever was crossed by the old bridge, the possession of which was the immediate object of the contest. On the hither side, grow two or three elms, throwing a wide circumference of shade, but Vich must have been planted at some period within the threeKore years and ten that have passed since the battle-day. On the farther shore, overhung by a clump of elder-bushes, we scern the stone abutment of the bridge. Looking down into le river, I once discovered some heavy fragment of the timbers, Li green with half a century's growth of water-moss; for, during bength of time, the tramp of horses and human footsteps have trased, along this ancient highway. The stream has here about the breadth of twenty strokes of a swimmer's arm; a space not

we, when the bullets were whistling across. Old people, vio dwell hereabouts, will point out the very spots, on the Vestera bank, where our countrymen fell down and died; and,

side of the river, an obelisk of granite has grown up from de sol that was fertilized with British blood. The monument, more than twenty feet in height, is such as it befitted the |istants of a village to erect, in illustration of a matter of local merest, rather than what was suitable to commemorate an epoch anal history. Still, by the fathers of the village this famous Gerd was done; and their descendants might rightfully claim the ege of building a memorial.

As bumbler token of the fight, yet a more interesting one than the granite obelisk, may be seen close under the stone-wall, which arates the battle-ground from the precincts of the parsonage. ka the grave-marked by a small, moss-grown fragment of

e at the head, and another at the foot-the grave of two Brah soldiers, who were slain in the skirmish, and have ever sace slept peacefully where Zechariah Brown and Thomas Davis red them. Soon was their warfare ended;—a weary night.

from Boston-a rattling volley of musketry across the