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liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Thoreau.

"That in which men differ from brute beasts," says Mencius, "is a thing very inconsiderable; the common herd lose it very soon; superior men preserve it carefully."

He is blessed who is assured that the animal is dying out in him day by day, and the divine being established. Perhaps there is none but has cause for shame on account of the inferior and brutish nature to which he is allied. Ib.

The principality which the angels kept not was their lordly power and dominion over their worse and inferior part, they having also a certain duplicity in their nature, of a better and worser principle, of a superior part which ought to rule and govern, and of an inferior which ought to be governed; nor is it indeed otherwise easily conceivable, how they should be capable of sinning.

Cudworth.

It is said no man ever did anything from a single motive. Low motives rush in, and pass themselves off for higher ones.

As for the shadow which hung over Hartley Coleridge's life, we will only say that every man who feels in himself (and who does not?) the truth of the ancient confession,

"Video meliora, &c.". has in himself the germ of an infirmity which may explain to him the nature of it, and enable him to sympathize with the strain of passionate contrition which runs through so many of the finest and most touching poems in these volumes. It is an infirmity which takes many different directions, and meets with much variety of treatment from society-not so much according to the amount of criminality in each case, as according to the degree in which it interferes with social arrangements. In its highest degree it is called madness, and exempted from moral censure as a disease in humanity; in its lowest degree it is almost universal, and acquiesced in as a characteristic of humanity; in its middle degrees it is denounced as a vice. But the difference is in degree not in kind; and any one who lies in bed after he has distinctly felt that he ought to get up, or who eats of a dish which he knows he had better not eat of, or who feels that he will be too late for an appointment if he does not go at once, and yet remains sitting where he is— any such man can understand how he might have come to be incapable of keeping an engagement, or of resisting the temptation of a glass beyond Nature's allowance, and yet retained a strong religious sense of duty, a deep feeling of shame, and a devout hope of redemption.

Tait's Magazine.

Hartley Coleridge yielded as it were to slight temptations, slight in themselves, and slight to him, as if swayed by a mechanical impulse apart from his own volition.

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There are poets whose writings indicate rather a human than an individual interest in themselves, as though self had been but the specimen in which they found imaged the psychological history of their kind. In Hartley Coleridge's volumes self is presented in colors so delicate and forbearing, and in union with such a generous regard for others, as well as for abstract things, that self-pity seems but the sadness of one who could look down upon himself with the same feelings which he would bestow on a horse over-driven or a wounded bird.

His muse interpreted between him and his neighbors; she freshened and brightened the daily face of Nature; she sweetened the draught of an impoverished life, and made atonement to a defrauded heart.

His nature was one, which, alike from generosity of heart and versatility of mind, had a large power of appreciating the most opposite gifts. We have little doubt. that he cordially admired many, who in him would have remarked little except his defects. Edinburgh Review.

When you find an unwillingness to rise early in the morning, make this short speech to yourself: I'm getting up now to do the Business of a Man; and am I out of humour for going about that I was made for; and for the sake of which I was sent into the world. Was I then designed for nothing but to doze and batten beneath the counterpane? Well, but this is a comfortable way of living. Granting that wast thou born only for Pleasure; were you never to do anything? I thought Action had

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been the End of your Being. Pray look upon the Plants and Birds, the Pismires, Spiders, and Bees, and you'll see them all regular and industrious, exerting their Nature and busy in their Station. For shame! Shall a Spider act like a Spider, and make the most of her Matters, and shan't a Man Act like a Man? Why don't you rouse your Faculties, and manage up to your Kind? For all that, there's no Living without Rest. True; but then let's follow Nature's directions, and not take too much of it.

Providence does not grant Force and Faculties at Random, but every thing is made for some end. The Sun, as high as 'tis, has its business assigned, and so have the Celestial Deities. And where 's the wonder of all this? But pray what were you made for? For your pleasure? Common Sense won't bear so scandalous an Answer. Antoninus.

The foundation stone of all religion is a sentiment in the breast of man of disproportion or disunion between him and God, between him and the Infinite. This sentiment underlies the entire religious life of the world. It has given shape to all man's distinctive hope, to all his aspiration, to all his best activity. He has the idea or inward sense of infinitude, of perfection, of a life which is not derived from without, and which is above all vicissitude and perturbation, and he feels that this is not the life which nature gives him. Hence the beginnings of his religious life, or of his attempts to conciliate the Infinite,

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involve a conflict between him and nature. Nature gives him a life underived from within, derived from past ancestry, a life depending on a myriad external things, and hence subject to a myriad pains, disquiets, and disappointments. His soul whispers to him of a higher life than this, the life of God, a life which flows wholly from within the subject, depending upon no outward circumstances whatever, controlling all outward circumstances in fact, and subject therefore to no pain, no disquiet, and no meanness forever. By all the attraction of the latter life over the former, he aspires to placate it, to draw it nearer to him, to win its blessedness. And he knows no way so direct, so full of influence towards this end, as the denial of the natural life, or the persistent mortification of its desires, ambitions and splendors. This life, he says practically, which I derive from nature, shall not be my life. I hate it, I abhor it, I banish it. I know of a serener, of a freer, of a higher life than this, and all my instincts bid me crave it. Hence I will kill this mortal natural life within me. It may for long years yet invest my body, but my soul shall have no participation in it. My soul shall mourn in its joys and rejoice in its sorrows, if so be that I may thus get deliverance from it.

Hence it is that you see the religious life, under whatever skies it may flower, involve more or less of asceticism. Hence the universal attitude of the church has been an attitude of aversion towards the joys of the merely natural life; and its constituent principle the conviction of the inadequacy of the merely natural life of man to attract the divine complacency. Henry James.