berries, carefully distilled, is a remedy and cordial in the panting and beating of the heart." It were almost worth having this trouble to be cured by his strawberry cordials. He describes the raspberry, also called thimbleberry, and ascribes to it similar medical virtues. Of bilberries, he says there are two sorts common in England, -the black and red. The red bilberry he calls "whortleberry," and says: "The black groweth in forests, on the heath, and such like barren places. The red grows in the north parts of this land, as Lancashire, Yorkshire, etc., flowers in March and April, the fruit ripening in July and August." "Both are under the dominion of Jupiter," and, if we may believe him, are very virtuous, it being "a pity they are used no more in physic than they are." In August we gather as good in OUR BLUEBERRY SWAMP. "Orange groves mid-tropic lie, "Here in thickets bending low, Choose which path, the fruitage hangs, – Fear no more the griping fangs Of the garden's spaded stuff, This is healthy, done enough. Pull away! the afternoon Dies beyond the meadow soon. Art thou a good citizen? Here are leisure, wealth, and ease, "Rich is he that asks no more Than of blueberries a store, Who can snatch the clusters off, Pleased with himself and them enough. Fame? Love? the fat pine cones are falling; Heaven? - the berries in the air, Eternity their juice so rare. And if thy sorrows will not fly, Then get thee down and softly die. In the eddy of the breeze, Leave the world beneath those trees, W. E. CHANNING. LETTERS. THURSDAY, 3. "Love is the life of friendship; letters are The life of love, the loadstones that by rare Attractions make souls meet and melt, and mix, UT for letters the best of our life would hardly BUT survive the mood and the moment Prompted by so lively a sentiment as friendship, we commit to our leaves what we should not have spoken. To begin with "Dear Friend" is in itself an address which clothes our epistle in a rhetoric the most select and choice. We cannot write it without considering its fitness and taxing our conscience in the matter. 'Tis coming to the confessional, leaving nothing in reserve that falls gracefully into words. A life-long correspondence were a biography of the correspondents. Preserve your letters till time define their value. Some secret charm forbids committing them to the flames; the dews of the morning may sparkle there still, and remind one of his earlier Eden. "Deeds are masculine, words feminine; letters are neither," wrote Howel. Rather say, letters are both, and better represent life than any form in literature. Women have added the better part, the most celebrated letters having been written by women. If your morning's letter is not answered and dispatched forthwith, 't is doubtful if it will ever be written. Then there are those to whom one never writes, much as he may wish to cultivate correspondence. He reserves them for personal intercourse. I hardly know which I most enjoy, the letter I send after my visitor, or the visit itself: the presence, the conversation, the recollection. Memory idealizes anticipation; our visit is made before we make it, made afterwards, as if love were a reminiscence of pleasures once partaken in overflowing fulness. The visit that is not all we anticipated is not made; we meet as idealists, if we meet at all. My moments are not mine, thou art in sight By days' engagements and the dreams of night, The popular superstition favors long visits. I confess my experience has not borne out the current creed. Compliment, of course, is of the other opinion, if we must take her fine accents of "stay, stay longer." But a week's stay with an angel would hardly bear the epithet angelic after it was over. Fewer and farther between. Good things are good to keep long by temperate use. "T is true a visitor who comes seldom should not fly away forthwith. And 't is a comfort in these fast times to catch one who has a little leisure on hand, deaf the while to the engine's whistle. Stay is a charming word in a friend's vocabulary. But if one does not stay while staying, better let him go where he is gone the while. One enjoys a visitor who has much leisure in him, in her especially, likes to take his friends by sips sweetly, not at hasty draughts, as they were froth and would effervesce forthwith and subside. Who has not come from an interview as from a marriage feast, feeling "the good wine had been kept for him till now"? Does it imply a refinement in delicacy that nuptial verses have no place with us in marriage ceremonies; that the service has lost the mystic associations wont to be thrown around it by our ancestors down almost to our time? Once epithalamium verses were esteemed the fairest flowers, the ornament of the occasion. If the poet sometimes overstepped modern notions of reserve, the sentiments expressed were not the less natural if more freely dealt with. Spenser, for instance, suggests the loveliest images, and with all his wealth of fancy ventures never a glimpse that a bride can blame; while Donne delights in every posture of fancy, as if he were love's attorney putting in his plea for all delights, yet delicately, oftentimes, and on other occasions, as in these lines entitled "Love Tokens": "Send me some token that my hope may live, Or that my ceaseless thoughts may sleep and rest; |