great souls of the present and of past ages? Was his eye trained to see the beauty that greets us with all its freshness on each succeeding day? Did he rightly appreciate and enjoy

"The glory of the sunset skies,

The tenderer beauty of the dawn?"

In his relations to the Great Maker of all was he "all right?" Was his whole soul permeated with a deep feeling of reverence and adoration as he looked up to the Giver of all good? Had he learned to "look through Nature up to Nature's God?" Did he

"Love all virtue, like the light,

Dear to the soul as sunshine to the eye?"

In fact, was he, as he jocularly assured us, “all right?" And, thinking of him, we naturally inquired if with ourself it was "all right.”

GRAVES AND GRAVEYARDS.

There is no way in which a refined and cultivated taste more appropriately shows itself than in adorning and beautifying the dwellings of the dead. The ancient Egyptians gave but little care to their earthly houses, but they spent years of toil and employed the highest artistic skill upon their tombs. There is a philosophy in this. We love to think of the dead as crowned with immortal beauty, as wearing the bloom and possessing the vigor of eternal youth. We forget the foibles and faults which might have been theirs, but the remembrance of their virtues and kindnesses dwells ever with us. And the spot where they are laid should be beautiful to the eye, be adorned by the hand of affection, that all our thoughts of the dead may be elevating, pure and pleasant. Then, too, a graveyard, if tastily kept, is always a place of resort, not only for those who have heart-treasures buried in its bosom, but for the stranger who may be "within our gates." Is it not fitting, then, that the graveyard should be made attractive, that its location should be pleasant, that it' should be adorned by art, that flowers and beautiful shrubbery should spring from the soil where lie the "dear departed"--so that to one gazing upon the scene, death should be robbed of some of its asperities, and, as he thinks of the time when his cheek shall be colorless and his eyes closed forever, he will

be enabled to look with quiet resignation, with subdued and chastened pleasure,

"Into the great Unknown,
Into the silent land?"

Notwithstanding the sneers of the skeptic, the heartless philosophy of the stoic, and the faith of the Christian, death is an event almost universally dreaded. It is not the agony of dissolving nature which we fear, but it is the sense of that mystery which shrouds our exit from this world and entrance upon another. Even he who trustingly confides in the Scriptural revelations of a future world, is awed and startled by the very grandeur of those revelations, and he passes into the portal of death with that trembling hesitation with which a peasant would enter the palace of a king.

But it is in our power to rob death of many of its unnatural terrors. The graveyard should be made so attractive as to become a pleasant place of resort, and so gradually the idea of death will become domesticated in our minds, the "better land" will become more familiar to our thought, and the conviction will live more constantly within us that we

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are passing through nature to eternity." We have passed many pleasant hours in graveyards. As we now write there are touching and beautiful scenes — and some sad and sorrowful ones - which memory brings vividly to mind. But it would protract our article too far to relate them.

Yet we cannot close without enriching our page

with a passage from Shakspeare, a passage which has elicited the admiration and touched the feelings of thousands, a passage which will command the praise and call forth the sympathy of men and women as long as genius shall be prized, and the heart be moved by the tear of sorrow and the sob of grief — the burial of Ophelia.

Ophelia needs no eulogy. To know that Hamlet loved her is a sufficient guaranty that she possessed all sweet and maidenly qualities. Yet, thinking of her burial, we love to think of her life, of her filial obedience, of her maidenly love, of her sweet praise of the loved one, of her touching lament over his supposed madness, of the last sad scene when, "chanting snatches of old tunes," she sank to "muddy death." We think of Hamlet too—of the thoughts and emotions which must have crowded upon him as he talked with the grave-diggers, soliloquized over the skull of "poor Yorick," and watched that form laid in the grave in which had been garnered up all his youthful loves.

The reluctant priest has performed the obsequies. She has had

To sing a requiem, and such rest to her
As to peace-parted souls.

Laer. Lay her i' the earth;

And from her fair and unpolluted flesh

May violets spring! I tell thee, churlish priest,

A minist'ring angel shall my sister be

When thou liest howling.

Ham. What, the fair Ophelia !

Queen. (Scattering flowers.)

Sweets to the sweet:

Farewell!

I hoped thou shouldst have been my Hamlet's wife;
I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid,
And not have strewed thy grave."

THE HOLIDAYS.

The week intervening between Christmas and New Year's is the week of gladness, joy and fruitage. The blessings which the year has borne, the good it has wrought, finds expression in Christmas gifts and New Year's presents, and the love which proffers these, and the thankfulness which accepts them, is more to be valued than the gifts themselves.

Love is to the life of the soul what electricity is to the world of matter an unseen, all-pervading and almost almighty force. With it life blossoms into beauty, and is fragrant with mystic meanings and rich in noble uses. Without it life is dead as a sapless trunk, cold as a corpse.

But love cannot always run on its sweet errands. Daily duties, stern necessities, the imperative de