AN UNACCOUNTABLE MYSTERY.
BY PAUL DENTON.
Intemperance is the strangest and most unaccountable mystery with which we have to deal. Why, as a rule, the human soul is passionately jealous of its own happiness, and tirelessly selfish as to its own interest. It delights to seek the sunshine and the flowers this side the grave: ardently hopes for heaven in the life to come. It flashes its penetrating thought through the dark chambers of the earth; or lighted by the lurid flames of smouldering, volcanic fires, wings them through buried ovens. It lights up the ocean's bed, melting its mysteries into solution, detecting its coral richness, and causing its buried pearls, which have rested for long centuries beneath the black waves, to glow with their long-hoarded beauty. It holds converse with the glittering planets of the skies and compels them to tell it of their mountain ranges, their landscapes, and their utility. It toys with the mad lightnings which break from the darkness, and guides death and destruction through the earth, until it allures the impetuous element into docility and subserviency. It bids the panting waters breathe their hot, heavy breath upon the piston-rod and make the locomotive a beautiful thing of life, majestically thundering its way over continents, screaming forth the music of civilization in the midst of wild forests and the heat of burning deserts, beneath scorching, torrid suns. It leaps over burning plains and scalding streams; restless and daring, it lights its casket over arctic zones and seas; and perhaps tiring of such incumbrance, deserts it in the cold shade of the ice mountain and speeds on untrammeled and alone. Franklin followed the beckonings of his tireless spirit until worn out and weary, his body laid down on the cold ice and slept. Kane coaxed himself home to the old churchyard, and then bade his spirit drop the machine it had so sadly wrenched and fly through earth or the eternities, as God might will. Livingstone marched through the jungles and cheerless forests of uninviting Africa, but his limbs were too feeble to keep up with his hungry soul, which tore itself from its burden and left it to crumble beneath the burning sun. And thus the soul flies from zone to zone and from world to world, sipping the sweets of wisdom, as the bee sucks honey from the flowers; reading lessons from the leaflet on the tree, studying the language of the soft whispering zephyr, and of the hurricane which springs from nothing into devastating power; and it is ever restless in its researches, for it seeks its own happiness and improvement in its new discoveries, and in a better knowledge of God's creation. Speak to the human soul of liberty, and swell it with gratitude, and, beaming with smiles, it will follow whereever you lead. Speak to it of its immortality and of the divine grandeur of its faculties, and, warmed by your appreciation, it will strive harder for a fuller development and brighter existence. Lead it among the roses, and it will seldom fail to light your pathway with smiles and to remind you of its gratitude. It loves to be noticed; loves to be assisted; loves to be made happy; loves to be warned of danger, and yet, with reference to that which pierces it with the most bleeding wounds, which more than anything else bars from it the sunlight and robs it of happiness—Intemperance—it is as heedless as the stone.
IMPERFECTUS.
BY JAMES CLARENCE HARVEY.
I wonder if ever a song was sung,
But the singer's heart sang sweeter!
I wonder if ever a rhyme was rung,
But the thought surpassed the meter!
I wonder if ever a sculptor wrought,
Till the cold stone echoed his ardent thought!
Or if ever a painter, with light and shade,
The dream of his inmost heart portrayed!
I wonder if ever a rose was found,
And there might not be a fairer!
Or if ever a glittering gem was ground,
And we dreamed not of a rarer!
Ah! never on earth do we find the best,
But it waits for us in a Land of Rest,
And a perfect thing we shall never behold,
Till we pass the portals of shining gold.