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A MAN'S VOCATION.

hardest problem were ever this first: To find, by study of yourself, and of the ground you stand on, what your combined inward and outward capability specially is. For, alas, our young soul is all budding with capabilities, and we see not yet which is the main and true one. Always, too, the new man is in a new time, under new conditions; his course can be the fac-simile of no prior one, but is by its nature original. And then how seldom will the outward capability fit the inward! though talented wonderfully enough, we are poor, unfriended, dyspeptical, bashful; nay, what is worse, foolish. Thus, in a whole imbroglio of capabilities, we go stupidly groping about, to grope which is ours, and often clutch the wrong one. In this mad work must several years of our small term be spent, till the purblind youth, by practice, acquire notions of distance, and become a seeing man.

Carlyle.

Our life is compassed round with necessity: yet is the meaning of life itself no other than freedom, than voluntary force; thus have we a warfare; in the beginning especially a hard-fought battle. For the God-given. mandate, Work thou in well doing, is mysteriously written, in Promethean, prophetic characters, in our hearts; and leaves us no rest, night or day, till it be deciphered and obeyed. And as the clay-given mandate, Eat thou and be filled, at the same time persuasively proclaims itself through every nerve, must there not be a confusion, a contest, before the better influence can become the upper. Ib.

DIFFERENT ERAS OF LIFE.

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Necessity is cruel, but it is the only test of inward strength. Every fool may live according to his own likings. Goethe.

In truth it is given to no man to estimate the quantities of his nature; only into its qualities does God permit him to have insight. Prospective Review.

The accidents of our position in life change their aspects according to the station from which they happen to be surveyed; in prospect they are simply great blessings to be enjoyed; in retrospect great pledges to be redeemed. Viewed in front they form a golden dowery of hope; viewed in the rear, a burden of responsibility from which an apprehensive conscience will have reason too often to shrink in sadness. De Quincy.

It seems as if each marked era of human life were preceded by a season of thoughtfulness; often, indeed, diverted by cares, follies, passions, or eager interests: but indicating itself wherever the mind is sufficiently sedate, and its position sufficiently settled to allow a tranquil interior change to become perceptible on the surface. At these moments, and in connection, no doubt, with physical changes, a tinge of melancholy pervades the mind, and the balanced good and ill of existence is surveyed. The mind, too, at such seasons, tries its strength upon those insoluble problems, which sages have so often professed to have disposed of, but which still continue to torment

human reason, even from its earliest dawn. It is at these moments that the soul comes to a stand for an instant, and asks, - Whither am I going.

Isaac Taylor.

It is the wayward development of the various elements of intelligence which determines the imperfections and varieties of individual character. Hamilton.

"The hour of Preparation for a better order of things is not a time of favorable appearances; but the reverse."

He whose youth is over-fastidious and exclusive, will never be a person of wide and generous culture.

(Lying in the grass.) In all reanimations, all new existence, are obstacles mingled. If one looks closely into the meadow green of spring, much dried up last year's grass lies among and under the fresh green, it must moulder and give sap for the new life. Then cry the foolish ones, "There is no Spring, there can be none see these dry stalks!" Is it not so in the whole life of the spirit? Feldweisheit. Adolph Lederer.

If in childhood, or, as was more frequently the case, in the turbulent period of transition betwixt boyhood and adolescence, I sometimes felt in haste to be a man, no anticipated delight, no definite purpose, or indefinite yearning mingled with my angry impatience. The idle wish

arose merely from a horror of restraint, a sore antipathy to counsel. I believe that obstinacy, or the dread of control and discipline, arises not so much from self-willedness, as from a conscious defect of voluntary power, as foolhardiness is not seldom the self-disguise of conscious timidity. Hartley Coleridge.

Arnold speaks of "earning genuine manhood by steadily serving out the period of boyhood."

Oakfield.

Gebet ihm kein Antwort mehr, der hat heute wieder seinen gottlosen Tag, er ist aber nicht so schlecht wie er sich stellt. Auerbach.

The first early years of his adolescent youth, were chiefly marked by that sharp recoil upon himself, of energies that could not find vent; the thirst for positive and material activity, that which is slaked by bodily exertion put at the service of a great cause, and consequently carries with it dreams of glory-that was naturally quite unquenched. Falkenberg.

When a man is on the point of some great concession, he makes it up to himself, as it were, by some outrageous piece of brutality. Ib.

From the beginning of days man hath been so cross to the divine commandments, that in many cases there can be no reason given why a man should choose some ways,

or do some actions, but only because they were forbidden. Jeremy Taylor.

Oakfield was dissatisfied with himself and knew not why; he was dimly conscious of a state of truthfulness, from which his ordinary conversation with the world kept him apart. At times he had flashes of conviction in which the truth seemed to stand out to him clear even to a truism. In these seasons the insincerity of ordinary society and ordinary life became intolerable to him.

At Oxford his outward life was one of rare and awful happiness. But he was not a man who could eat and drink, rise up to play and be satisfied. In those changing years, from nineteen to twenty-one, his mind hitherto quiescent or satisfied by the claims of school and college duty, began to work; and he soon found that under whatever name concealed, religion must still be the one matter of interest for an immortal being. And the one great difficulty with him was to acquire an equable impression of this truth. . . .

Deeply impressed with the conviction that his first business in life was to deliver his own soul, he still fell into the natural error of looking round for those circumstances which might make this most easy. He had not learnt yet that it is a work far beyond the aid, happily equally beyond the control of circumstances.

Oakfield led the others, they hardly knew why. It was indeed nothing but the force of earnestness. He had been from his childhood, - - rare blessing! accustomed to find those around him in earnest; and this influence had made