Tweed over its pebbles distinctly audible in his room, he passed away. He was buried amid the ruins of Dryburgh Abbey. Measures were taken immediately after his death to pay off the still remaining balance of £54,000, and by his literary works and other property, in a few years, every penny was paid, and the house and estate of Abbotsford was handed over free from all burden to his family, of whom only one great-granddaughter now survives. 13. In the days of prosperity and sunshine Scott was a great and an honoured man, loved by all who knew him, and by none more than his own servants. But his true greatness of character, his wonderful power of will to overcome difficulties and disasters, would never have been known, had it not been revealed by his adversity. He has left behind a treasure far more valuable than his own loved Abbotsford, or his literary works-an honoured name and a noble example. The story of his life gives a new charm to his numerous and varied works, for besides his poems and romances, he has left us his charming Tales of a Grandfather, The Life of Napoleon, and other productions. 14. As we read that story, we shall all be ready to adopt the touching words of Sir W. Stirling-Maxwell— "For myself, I can say, that I never take down a volume of Scott's writings, published in or after 1826, without thinking of the circumstances in which they were composed, and remembering that they, like the water from the Well of Bethlehem which David refused to drink, represent the heart's blood of a brave man's life.”—Chiefly abridged from R. H. Hutton's Sir Walter Scott, in “English Men of Letters." SOLDIER, REST! 1. Soldier, rest! thy warfare o'er, Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking! Days of danger, nights of waking. In our isle's enchanted hall Hands unseen thy couch are strewing, Fairy streams of music fall, Every sense in slumber dewing. Soldier, rest! thy warfare o'er, Dream of fighting fields no more; Sleep the sleep that knows not breaking, 2. No rude sound shall reach thine ear, Armour's clang, nor war-steed champing, 1 2 Samuel xxiii. 15 and 16. Yet the lark's shrill fife may come, Booming from the sedgy shallow. 3. Huntsman, rest! thy chase is done, Sleep! thy hounds are by thee lying; -Sir Walter Scott. THE SOLAR SYSTEM. 1. There is, perhaps, no sight in the material world more magnificent than that of the starry firmament. Seen from our earliest years, it may have ceased to excite our wonder; but no sooner has science taught us its true nature than it reappears in all its glory, like the gloomy landscape whose varied beauties a burst of sunlight has revealed. In the stillness of night, when the moral world is asleep, when the aspen leaf has ceased to flutter, and no sound is heard save that of the remote waterfall, or the restless ocean, or the zephyr breath among the distant foliage, the silver moon, the brilliant planet, and the twinkling star are the beacon-lights, which guide the eye through the brilliant expanse above. 2. The orbs of heaven seem at first fixed and motionless like the scene around, but ere long, before our survey or our reverie is over, we perceive that they have all been in motion. The moon has neared the horizon: one planet has descended in the west, another has risen from the eastern sea, and every star in the sky has shared in the general movement. When the observer has discovered that he alone has moved, that night after night the moon and planets have alone changed their place among the stars, and that the earth on which he stands, and the planets whose motion he has observed, form a system of their own, while the thousands of stars, among which they moved, are fixed at distances invariable, he has arrived at the leading truths in astronomy. 3. But to the contemplative mind, the firmament of stars and planets has a deeper interest. Everything around us, save it, is in a state of transition. Beside the fleeting changes which the return of the seasons brings, the landscape around us is every year changing its aspect. The heath is robbed of its purple, and the yellow harvest waves over its once russet breast. The forests of our youth have ceased to give us shelter-now the roof-trees of our homes-now the floating bulwarks on the deep. The very places of our birth have been removed or effaced, and the lichen has incrusted the record on the tombstones of our fathers. All around is change; but the gorgeous creations in the sky are still there, undimmed in brightness, unchanged in grandeur, performing with unflagging pace and unvarying precision their daily, their annual, and their secular rounds. They are truly the only objects in the universe which all nations have witnessed, and all people admired. They presided at the horoscope of our birth, and they will throw their pale radiance over the green mounds beneath which we are destined to lie. Such are the associations with which we look at the firmament above, and deep must be the interest with which we contemplate the history and purpose of its mysterious forms. 4. In surveying the material universe thus shadowed forth in the firmament, the first and the grandest object which arrests our attention is the glorious sun, the centre and soul of the solar system, the lamp that lights it, the fire that heats it, the magnet that guides and controls it, the fountain of colour which gives its azure to the sky, its verdure to the fields, its rainbow hues to the gay world of flowers, and the "purple light of love" to the marble cheek of youth and beauty. 5. This globe, probably of burning gas, enveloping a rolid nucleus, is 880,000 miles in diameter, above a hundred times that of our globe, and five hundred times larger in bulk than all the planets put together! It revolves upon its axis in twenty-five days, and throws off its light with the velocity of 192,000 miles in a second. Sometimes by the naked eye, but frequently even by small telescopes, large black spots, many thousand miles in diameter, are seen upon its surface, and are evidently openings in the luminous atmosphere, through which we see the opaque solid nucleus, or the real body of the sun. 6. Adjoining the sun, we find Mercury and Venus with days and seasons like ours. Upon reaching our own planet we recognize in it the same general features, but we find it larger in magnitude, and possessing the additional distinction of a satellite, and a race of living beings to rejoice in the pre-eminence. In contrast with Mars our earth still maintains its superiority both in size and equipments; but, upon advancing a little farther into space, our pride is rebuked, and our fears evoked, when we reach the part of our system where thirty asteroids, relics of a once mighty planet, are revolving in dissevered orbits, and warning the vain astronomer of another world that a similar fate may await his own. Dejected, but not despairing, we pass onward, and as if in bright contrast with the confusion and desolation we have witnessed, there bursts upon our sight the splendid orb of Jupiter, proudly enthroned amid his four attendant satellites. When compared with so glorious a creation, our own earth dwindles into insignificance. It is no longer the monarch of the planetary throng, and we blush at the |