Secure on God's all-tender heart
Alike rest great and small;
Why fear to lose our little part,
When He is pledged for all?
O fearful heart and troubled brain!
Take hope and strength from this,—
That Nature never hints in vain,
Nor prophesies amiss.
Her wild birds sing the same sweet stave,
Her lights and airs are given,
Alike, to playground and the grave,—
And over both is Heaven.
* * * * *
THE AUTOCRAT OF THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.
EVERY MAN HIS OWN BOSWELL.
[I am so well pleased with my boarding-house that I intend to remain there, perhaps for years. Of course I shall have a great many conversations to report, and they will necessarily be of different tone and on different subjects. The talks are like the breakfasts,—sometimes dipped toast, and sometimes dry. You must take them as they come. How can I do what all these letters ask me to? No. 1. wants serious and earnest thought. No. 2. (letter smells of bad cigars) must have more jokes; wants me to tell a "good storey" that he has copied out for me. (I suppose two letters before the word "good" refer to some Doctor of Divinity who told the story.) No. 3. (in female hand)—more poetry. No. 4. wants something that would be of use to a practical man. (Prahctical mahn he probably pronounces it.) No. 5. (gilt-edged, sweet-scented)—"more sentiment,"—"heart's outpourings."——
My dear friends, one and all, I can do nothing but report such remarks as I happen to have made at our breakfast-table. Their character will depend on many accidents,—a good deal on the particular persons in the company to whom they were addressed. It so happens that those which follow were mainly intended for the divinity-student and the school-mistress; though others, whom I need not mention, saw fit to interfere, with more or less propriety, in the conversation. This is one of my privileges as a talker; and of course, if I was not talking for our whole company, I don't expect all the readers of this periodical to be interested in my notes of what was said. Still, I think there may be a few that will rather like this vein,—possibly prefer it to a livelier one,—serious young men, and young women generally, in life's roseate parenthesis from —— years of age to —— inclusive.
Another privilege of talking is to misquote.—Of course it wasn't Proserpina that actually cut the yellow hair,—but Iris. It was the former lady's regular business, but Dido had used herself ungenteelly, and Madame d'Enfer stood firm on the point of etiquette. So the bathycolpian Here—Juno, in Latin—sent down Iris instead. But I was mightily pleased to see that one of the gentlemen that do the heavy articles for this magazine misquoted Campbell's line without any excuse. "Waft us home the message" of course it ought to be. Will he be duly grateful for the correction?]
——The more we study the body and the mind, the more we find both to be governed, not by, but according to laws, such as we observe in the larger universe.—You think you know all about walking,—don't you, now? Well, how do you suppose your lower limbs are held to your body? They are sucked up by two cupping vessels, ("cotyloid"—cup-like-cavities,) and held there as long as you live, and longer. At any rate, you think you move them backward and forward at such a rate as your will determines, don't you? On the contrary, they swing just as any other pendulums swing, at a fixed rate, determined by their length. You can alter this by muscular power, as you can take hold of the pendulum of a clock and make it move faster or slower; but your ordinary gait is timed by the same mechanism as the movements of the solar system.