"No girl is pleased with what is taught
But has the teacher in her thought."
"Young gentlemen," said Harvey Hall, (Judge Hall then,) when some years afterward two or three of his law students were spending the evening at his hospitable mansion, "young gentlemen, never regret the necessity of exerting yourself in order to obtain your profession; for beside the habit of self-help thus formed, which is invaluable, you may," he added, glancing archly at the face, fair as ever, of her who sat with muslin stitchery by the centre-table, "meet with a wayside rose as precious as Annie."
THE SUNBEAM.
(FROM THE FRENCH OF LAMARTINE.)
Come! watch with me this sunbeam, as o'er the moss bank green
It glides, and enters swiftly the foliage dark between;
Resting its golden lever, of mystic length and line,
Upon the dewy herbage, in an oblique decline:
Toward its moving column the stamen of the flowers
Whirl, as by strong attraction; and through the daylight hours
Gay insects, azure atoms, with every-colored wing,
Swim 'mid the light, still lending fresh sparkles as they spring.
See! how in cadenced measure they gravitate below,
Now linking, then unlinking, in quick, harmonious flow;
Of Plato's worlds ideal the semblance here appears,
Those worlds that danced in circles to the music of the spheres:
So small is every atom, amid yon countless band,
That hosts of them were needful to make a grain of sand;
They form the lowest step of that brilliant ladder trod,
Ascending from the light mote to the all-present God.
And yet a separate being exists in every part,
Within each airy globule there dwells a beating heart;
One world, perchance, presiding o'er worlds unnumbered, free,
To which the lightning's passage is an eternity;
Yet, doubtless, each enjoying, within their drop of space,
Days, nights, in all fulfilling their order and their place;
And while in wondrous ecstasy, man's throbbing eye looks on,
A thousand worlds are ended, their destinies are won!
O God! how vast the sources which feed such life and death,
How piercing is that vision which marks out every breath;
How infinite that Spirit which cherishes each grade;
And more than all, how boundless that love, free, unrepaid,
Which nurtures into being each particle that floats,
Descending from far sun-worlds to microscopic motes;
O God! so grand and awful in yonder little ray,
What thought dare seek to fathom the blaze of thy full day?
MARY E. LEE.