the truth of those beautiful words of Jesus, It is more blessed to give than to receive. There If you want to make human animals, impoverish the race. is no surer way to develop animalism. Men will prize that of which they are deprived. A hungry man will ever over eat himself. A man crushed with want will so feel the pressure, that the cravings of the body will exclude all the nobler aspirations of the soul. The experiment has been tried, and, in the language of another, "who has not blushed for his race, when he has beheld one of these regular-built working bipeds, the product of several generations of growing animalism and receding intellect, with bull neck, low, thick head, forehead lost in a twist of fleshy folds, with small, twinkling eyes, almost lost in an environment of protuberant fat, with a motley nose, sitting 'squat like a toad' upon the broad field of the face, and with a great wide mouth eloquent of provender?" Here is a faithful picture of developed animalism! "I'd rather be a dog and bay the moon, Than such a"- thing! No! let me starve upon the lean fare of my own thoughts, rather than nurture the body to the detriment of the spark of Deity enshrined within this human temple! It may be said that it is not necessary that man should degenerate into such a being as this. True, it may not be a necessary result, but is it not a natural one? If a man be compelled, by poverty, to bestow his chief attention upon his body, how much time, think you, will he give to the culture of his mind? Crime is ever to be deprecated, never to be sympathized withnever to be apologized for. But if the errors of humanity should ever be aught extenuated, it is when they are committed for the purpose of favoring the growth of intellect. If we blame a man for crime committed for such an end, we can scarcely bring ourselves to regard the fault as all his own. The influence of poverty in retarding the growth of mind, explains the otherwise anomalous fact, that for so long a time it was held as almost self-evident that a great man could not, by any possibility, arise from among the common people—that with the nobility and clergy alone had nature deposited the germs of intellect. "If you would keep men in servitude, they must not be permitted to think, and that they may not think, you must keep from them the key to the sources of thought-you must keep money from their hands." Thus reasons Despotism, and most rightly does she reason. Poverty ever crushes Genius ever prevents its development! There is a foul thing, half beast and half bird, called the vampyre, which comes in secretly, at night, to the beds of the sleeping, and sucks the crimson current from their veins to glut its own insatiate maw! It leaves no marks of violence- it does its work stealthily and silently! The sleeper feels no pain, but passes unconsciously from the realm of sleep to the realm of death! Poverty is the vampyre of Genius! When Genius is thus deprived of its life blood, when the last struggle is over, when the death-damp lies upon the brow of intellectual greatness blighted in its blooming, then may you see the monster, standing on tiptoe, with outstretched wings, gloating over the bloodless body of its murdered victim! List to its hideous chuckle of exultation as it flaps its dusky pinions in fiendish triumph over the corpse of the fallen! Thus perishes Genius in poverty! Affection dons no weeds at his funeral, and Sympathy reserves her tears for the rich! Posterity may erect him no monument, and the recipients of the blessings which he confers may forget his name; but men will yet blush for the neglect of his powers, and more than seven cities will claim the honor of being his birth-place! MEN spend their lives in anticipations—in determining to be vastly happy at some period or other, when they have time. But the present time has one advantage over every other it is our own. Past opportunities are gone, future are not come. We may lay in a stock of pleasures, as we would lay in a stock of wine; but if we defer tasting them too long, we shall find that both are soured by age. THE BARD'S LAST SONG. Original. BY JAMES A. MARTLING. O, IT was mine, when Hope was young, To call forth sweet and touching strains; That blithely, skillfully could play ; I am not what I was. My brow Is withered by the touch of Time; My brain is dull, and seldom now Feel I the gush of thought sublime; All things assume, and Fancy's beam, To bide, uncheered, the ruthless storm! And now, whene'er I touch the chords, Pierce through my anguished soul like swords: My trembling fingers to the string, A horror, like some creeping thing, When Hope, sweet Hope, thy sister died, Yet stay-I will not ask thee why. THE drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest, in the end. Milton's expressions, on his right to this remuneration, constitute some of the finest efforts of his mind. He never alludes to these high pretensions, but he appears to be animated by an eloquence, which is at once both the plea and the proof of their justice; an eloquence, so much above all present and all perishable things, that, like the beam of the sun, it warms, while it enlightens, and as it descends from heaven to earth, raises our thoughts from earth to heaven. When the great Kepler had at length discovered the harmonic laws that regulate the motions of the heavenly bodies, he exclaimed, "Whether my discoveries will be read by posterity, or by my contemporaries, is a matter that concerns them, more than me. I may well be contented to wait one century for a reader, when God himself during so many thousand years, has waited for an observer like myself." THE CASTLE BUILDERS. BY MRS. H. M. TRACY. Original. CHAPTER V. Great God, thy will is done, Down the pale cheek; Done when the righteous bleed : When the wronged vainly plead : When the heart breaks.- ELLIOTT. Thou didst not sink by slow decay, Like some who live the longest ; But every tie was wrenched away, Just when those ties were strongest.- BERNARD Barton. "No longer a child." How this conviction strikes upon the sensitive, refined, elevated soul, that has just passed the rose-entwined boundary of childhood, to enter upon the stern duties of manhood. Often the spirit lingers long upon the doubtful boundary, half impelled to believe itself called upon to take up the guerdon of life, and be strong in its own strength, yet still, too fond of the rainbowtinted fancies of its first existence, to pass resolutely without the charmed circle. How frequently is the enchanting illusion, that we are to enjoy the rich discipline of maturity without rendering the world an equivalent for its maternal instruction, broken by the very regard that is spontaneously manifested toward us, in the deference shown to our opinions, and the care not to suffer our tastes or our inclinations to meet with infringement. Our three friends hardly realized that they had irrevocably passed the frontiers of manhood, till they met again under the roof of Sir Arthur. There was something almost painful in the impression their own changed outward appearance seemed to make upon all whom they greeted. The low bow of the footman as he handed |