heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven and earth should have passed away. 6. Events which short-sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes had been ordained on his account. For his sake empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed his will by the pen of the evangelist and the harp of the prophet. He had been wrested by no common deliverer MONUMENT TO HAMPDEN, IN HAMPDEN CHURCH. (Slain in a skirmish with the King's troops, June 18, 1643.) from the grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been darkened, that the rocks had been rent, that the dead had arisen, that all nature had shuddered at the sufferings of her expiring God! 7. Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men, the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other, proud, calm, inflexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker; but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement he prayed with convulsions, and groans, and tears. He was half maddened by glorious or terrible illusions, He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision,' or woke screaming from dreams of everlasting fire. 8. Like Vane, he thought himself intrusted with the sceptre of the millennial year. Like Fleetwood,' he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid his face from him. But, when he took his seat in the council, or girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them. People who saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who encountered them in the hall of debate, or in the field of battle. These fanatics brought to civil and military affairs a coolness of judgment and an immutability of purpose which some writers have thought inconsistent with their religious zeal, but which were, in fact, the necessary effects of it. 9. The intensity of their feelings on one subject made them tranquil on every other. One overpowering sentiment had subjected to itself pity and hatred, ambition and fear. Death had lost its terrors, and pleasure its charms. They had their smiles and their tears, their raptures and their sorrows, but not for the things of this world. Enthusiasm had made them Stoics,10 had cleared their minds from every vulgar passion and prejudice, and raised them above the influence of danger and of corruption. It sometimes might lead them to pursue unwise ends, but never to choose unwise means. They went through the world like Sir Artegale's iron man Talus11 with his flail, crushing and trampling down oppressors, mingling with human beings, but having neither part nor lot in human infirmities; insensible to fatigue, to pleasure, and to pain; not to be pierced by any weapon, nor to be withstood by any barrier. 11 10. Such we believe to have been the character of the Puritans. We perceive the absurdity of their manners. We dislike the sullen gloom of their domestic habits. We acknowledge that the tone of their minds was often injured by straining after things too high for mortal reach; and we know that, in spite of their hatred of popery, they too often fell into the worst vices of that bad system, intolerance and extravagant austerity-that they had their anchorites and their crusades, their Dunstans,12 and their De Montforts,13 their Dominics 14 and their Escobars.15 Yet, when all circumstances are taken into consideration, we do not hesitate to pronounce them a brave, a wise, an honest, and a useful body. NOTES. be a major-general under Cromwell, one of whose daughters he married. 10 A sect of antiquity, founded by Zeno, B.C. 340-260. He taught in the Painted Stoa or Porch, in Athens, whence the name given his followers. Calm submission to fate was one of their doctrines, and to this allusion is made here. 11 Sir Artegale is the hero of the fifth book of "The Fairie Queene." Talus is a personage introduced. The former represents Justice; the latter, with an iron flail, represents Power. 12 A Saxon monk, who zealously reformed the English Church, according to his own views, which were stern and ascetic. He died in 968. 13 Simon, fourth Count de Montfort, Earl of Leicester in England, and Count of Toulouse in France, was the leader of the crusade against the Albigenses, a Protestant sect, in the south of France. He was born about A.D. 1150. 14 A Spanish monk, founder of the Inquisition. Born in A.D. 1170. 15 A Spanish Jesuit, noted for the doubtful morality of his writings. It was said of him and of his school that they excused every crime under some pretext. SPELL AND PRONOUNCE. immutability, un changeableness. an'chorite, a hermit. plays. me'nials, servants. myste'rious, wonderful OFT IN THE STILLY NIGHT.-Moore. THOMAS MOORE, the son of a small tradesman, was born in Dublin in 1779, and died in London in 1852. His longest poem is called "Lalla Rookh," and consists of a series of tales in sparkling verse on Oriental subjects. His songs, however, are now the best known of all his writings. The melody of the words, the beauty of the imagery, and the perfect finish of the composition, give them a lasting charm. OFT in the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain has bound me, Of other days around me: The smiles, the tears Of boyhood's years, The words of love then spoken; The eyes that shone, Now dimm'd and gone, The cheerful hearts now broken! 'Thus in the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain has bound me, Sad memory brings the light Of other days around me. When I remember all The friends so link'd together, I've seen around me fall, Like leaves in wintry weather; I feel like one Who treads alone Some banquet-hall deserted, Whose lights are fled, Whose garlands dead, And all but he departed! Oft in the stilly night, Ere slumber's chain has bound me, Sad memory brings the light Of other days around me. EXTRACTS FROM RUSKIN. I. LA RICCIA-SUNLIGHT AFTER STORM. JOHN RUSKIN, the greatest art critic of the age, was born in London, in 1819. His first work," Modern Painters," at once brought him into prominent notice, and his fame was even widened by his "Stones of Venice" and "Seven Lamps of Architecture." Besides these, he has written many smaller works. 4 1. It had been wild weather when I left Rome, and all across the Campagna1 the clouds were sweeping in sulphurous blue, with a clap of thunder or two, and breaking gleams of sun along the Claudian aqueduct,2 lighting up the infinity of its arches like the bridge of chaos. But as I climbed the long slope of the Alban Mount, the storm swept finally to the north, and the noble outline of the domes of Albano," and the graceful darkness of its ilex grove, rose against pure streaks of alternate blue and amber; the upper sky gradually flushing through the last fragments of raincloud in deep palpitating azure, half æther and half dew. The noonday sun came slanting down the rocky slopes of La Riccia," and their masses of entangled and tall foliage, whose autumnal tints were mixed with the wet verdure of a thousand evergreens, were penetrated with it as with rain. I cannot call it colour, it was conflagration. Purple, and crimson, and scarlet, like the curtains of God's tabernacle, the rejoicing trees sank into the valley in showers of light, every separate leaf quivering with buoyant and burning life; each, as it turned to reflect or to transmit the sunbeam, first a torch and then an emerald. 2. Far up into the recesses of the valley, the green vistas arched like the hollows of mighty waves of some crystalline sea, with the arbutus flowers dashed along their flanks for foam, and silver flakes of orange spray tossed into the air around them, breaking over the grey walls of rock into a thousand separate stars, fading and kindling alternately as the weak wind lifted and let them fall. Every glade of grass burned like the golden floor of heaven, opening in sudden gleams as the foliage broke and closed above it, as sheet-lightning opens in a cloud at sunset; the motionless flashes of dark rock-dark though flushed with scarlet lichen, casting their quiet shadows across its restless radiance, the fountain underneath them filling its marble hollow with blue mist and fitful sound; and over all, the multitudinous bars of amber and rose, the sacred clouds that have no darkness, and only exist to illumine, were seen in fathomless intervals, |