Domestic life, if it may still be termed domestic, will seek its separate corners, and never gather itself into groups. The easy gossip; the merry yet unambitious jest; the lifelike, practical discussion of real matters in a casual way; the soul of truth which is so often incarnated in a simple fireside word, — will disappear from earth. Conversation will contract the air of debate and all mortal intercourse be chilled with a fatal frost.

In classic times, the exhortation to fight "pro aris et focis," for the altars and the hearths, was considered the strongest appeal that could be made to patriotism. And it seemed an immortal utterance; for all subsequent ages and people have acknowledged its force and responded to it with the full portion of manhood that Nature had assigned to each. Wisely were the altar and the hearth conjoined in one mighty sentence; for the hearth, too, had its kindred sanctity. Religion sat down beside it, not in the priestly robes which decorated and perhaps disguised her at the altar, but arrayed in a simple matron's garb, and uttering her lessons with the tenderness of a mother's voice and heart. The holy hearth! If any earthly and material thing, or rather a divine idea embodied in brick and mortar, might be supposed to possess the permanence of moral truth, it was this. All revered it. The man who did not put off his shoes upon this holy ground would have deemed it pastime to trample upon the altar. It has been our task to uproot the hearth. What further reform is left for our children to achieve, unless they overthrow the altar too? And by what appeal hereafter, when the breath of hostile armies may mingle with the poor, cold breezes of ou country, shall we attempt to rouse up native valor?

Fight for your hearths? There will be none throughout the land. FIGHT FOR YOUR STOVES! Not I, in faith. If in such a cause I strike a blow, it shall be on the invader's part; and Heaven grant that it may shatter the abomination all to pieces.

BUDS AND BIRD VOICES.

BALMY Spring— weeks later than we expected and months later than we longed for her comes at last

As

to revive the moss on the roof and walls of our old
mansion. She peeps brightly into my study window,
inviting me to throw it open and create a summer at-
mosphere by the intermixture of her genial breath
with the black and cheerless comfort of the stove.
the casement ascends, forth into infinite space fly the
innumerable forms of thought or fancy that have kept
me company in the retirement of this little chamber
during the sluggish lapse of wintry weather; visions,
gay, grotesque, and sad; pictures of real life, tinted
with Nature's homely gray and russet; scenes in dream-
land bedizened with rainbow hues which faded before

they were well laid on, all these may vanish now, and
leave me to mould a fresh existence out of sunshine.
Brooding Meditation may flap her dusky wings and
take her owl-like flight, blinking amid the cheerful-
ness of noontide. Such companions befit the season
of frosted window panes and crackling fires, when the
blast howls through the black ash-trees of our avenue
and the drifting snow-storm chokes up the woodpaths
and fills the highway from stone-wall to stone-wall.
In the spring and summer time all sombre thoughts
should follow the winter northward with the sombre
and thoughtful crows. The old paradisiacal economy
of life is again in force; we live, not to think or to
labor, but for the simple end of being happy. Noth

ing for the present hour is worthy of man's infinite capacity save to imbibe the warm smile of heaven and sympathize with the reviving earth.

The present Spring comes onward with fleeter footsteps, because Winter lingered so unconscionably long that with her best diligence she can hardly retrieve half the allotted period of her reign. It is but a fortnight since I stood on the brink of our swollen river and beheld the accumulated ice of four frozen months go down the stream. Except in streaks here and

there upon the hill-sides, the whole visible universe was then covered with deep snow, the nethermost layer of which had been deposited by an early December storm. It was a sight to make the beholder torpid, in the impossibility of imagining how this vast white napkin was to be removed from the face of the corpse-like world in less time than had been required to spread it there. But who can estimate the power of gentle influences, whether amid material desolation or the moral winter of man's heart? There have been no tempestuous rains, even no sultry days, but a constant breath of southern winds, with now a day of kindly sunshine and now a no less kindly mist, or a soft descent of showers, in which a smile and a blessing seemed to have been steeped. The snow has vanished as if by magic; whatever heaps may be hidden in the woods and deep gorges of the hills, only two solitary specks remain in the landscape; and those I shall almost regret to miss when to-morrow I look for them in vain. Never before, methinks, has spring pressed so closely on the footsteps of retreating winter. Along the roadside the green blades of grass have sprouted on the very edge of the snow-drifts. The pastures and mowing fields have not yet assumed a general aspect of verdure; but

neither have they the cheerless brown tint which they wear in latter autumn when vegetation has entirely ceased; there is now a faint shadow of life, gradually brightening into the warm reality. Some tracts in a happy exposure, as, for instance, yonder southwestern slope of an orchard, in front of that old red farm-house beyond the river, already wear a beautiful and tender future luxuriance can add a charm.

such patches of land green, to which no It looks unreal;

a prophecy, a hope, a transitory effect of some peculiar light, which will vanish with the slightest motion of the eye. But beauty is never a delusion; not these verdant tracts, but the dark and barren landscape all around them, is a shadow and a dream. Each moment wins some portion of the earth from death to life; a sudden gleam of verdure brightens along the sunny slope of a bank which an instant ago was brown and bare. You look again, and behold an apparition of green grass!

The trees in our orchard and elsewhere are as yet naked, but already appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if by one magic touch they might instantaneously burst into full foliage, and that the wind which now sighs through their naked branches might make sudden music amid innumerable leaves. The mossgrown willow-tree, which for forty years past has overshadowed these western windows, will be among the first to put on its green attire. There are some objections to the willow; it is not a dry and cleanly tree, and impresses the beholder with an association of sliminess. No trees, I think, are perfectly agreeable as companions unless they have glossy leaves, dry bark, and a firm and hard texture of trunk and branches. But the willow is almost the earliest to