plish the will and command of my God. I draw not my purse for his sake that demands it, but his that enjoined it. Ib.

Be substantially great in thyself, and more than thou appearest to others; and let the world be deceived in thee, as they are in the lights of heaven. Hang early plummets upon the heels of pride, and let ambition have but an epicycle or narrow circuit in thee. Measure not thyself by thy morning shadow, but by the extent of thy grave; and reckon thyself above the earth, by the line thou must be contented with under it. Spread not into boundless expansions, either to designs or desires. Think not that mankind liveth but for a few, and that the rest are born but to serve the ambition of those who make but flies of men, and wildernesses of whole nations. Swell not into actions which embroil and confound the earth; but be one of those violent ones who force the kingdom of heaven.

While thou so hotly disclaimeth the devil, be not guilty of diabolism; fall not into one name with that unclean spirit, nor act his nature whom thou so much abhorrest; that is, to accuse, calumniate, backbite, whisper, detract, or sinistrously interpret others.

Give no quarter unto those vices which are of thine inward family, and having a root in thy temper, plead a right and property in thee. Examine well thy complexional inclinations. Raise early batteries against those

strongholds, built upon the rock of nature, and make this a great part of the militia of thy life.

Sir Thomas Browne.

Let him learn a prudence of a higher strain. Let him learn that every thing in nature, even motes and feathers, go by law, and not by luck, and that what he sows he reaps. By diligence and self-command, let him put the bread he eats at his own disposal, and not at that of others, that he may not stand in bitter and false relations to other men; for the best good of wealth is freedom. Let him practise the minor virtues. How much of human life is lost in waiting! Let him not make his fellow-creatures wait. How many words and promises are promises of conversation! Let his be words of fate. When he sees a folded and sealed scrap of paper float round the globe in a pine ship, and come safe to the eye for which it was written, amidst a swarming population; let him likewise feel the admonition to integrate his being across all those distracting forces, and keep a slender human word among the storms, distances, and accidents, that drive us hither and thither, and by persistency make the paltry force of one man reappear to redeem its pledge, after months and years, in the most distant climates.

Emerson.

The situation that has not its duty, its Ideal, was never yet occupied by man. Yes, here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now

standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal; work it out therefrom; and working, believe, live, be free. Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment, too, is in thyself; thy condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of; what matters whether such stuff be of this sort or of that; so the form thou give it be heroic, be poetic? O thou that pinest in the imprisonment of the Actual, and criest bitterly to the Gods for a kingdom, wherein to rule and create, know this of a truth: the thing thou seekest is already with thee, "here or nowhere," couldst thou only see!

Let him who gropes painfully in darkness or uncertain light, and prays vehemently that the dawn may ripen into day, lay this precept well to heart: "Do the duty which lies nearest thee," which thou knowest to be a duty! Thy second duty will already have become clearer.

Carlyle.

All lives have their prose translation as well as their ideal meaning. Chas. Auchester.

Every human feeling is greater and larger than the exciting cause. Coleridge.

It is curious to note how young men, when educated to think at all, hunger after some theory of life, some view of the one purpose of existence. The source of this moral and intellectual restlessness is often an uneasy presentiment of a great but as yet unascertained degree of moral

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dependence on the accidents of their future lot, dents over which their own wills can have very little control, and yet which are known to exercise a very painful control over the will. Hence arises a passion for trying to forestall, as it were, the power of change, by previously rehearsing how, in all conceivable combinations of moral circumstances, it would be right and possible to steer through difficulty, and overpower resistance, from a vague hope of preëxhausting in imagination the emergencies of human existence, and laying down a clear course in every case.

There is a painful though partial sense of helplessness, in every untried mind, and especially in untried minds of power really great enough to rise above circumstances, until they have actually measured their strength against the contingencies of life, sounded their own courage, and tested the power of calamity, of temptation, and of the world's disgrace, to move or to wound them. And it is this secret and often unconscious jealousy of the possible and as yet untried power of circumstances to unbend man's purposes and relax his affections, which makes young men so anxiously discuss all aspects of life, that they may not have to encounter any in practice without a previous encounter in thought. In the majority of instances of this nature, it is self-distrust, a vague, painful fear of the crushing strength of that mighty antagonistthe world which induces those who are preparing to fit out their voyage of discovery into its various provinces, so anxiously to multiply the minutest instructions for

their own self-guidance, to take in theoretic stores for all imaginable accidents and combinations of weather, climate, war or peace. Almost every cast of mind originally contains within it the sense of this possibly undue and weak dependence on its external lot, and issues commands to itself, which are angry and arbitrary just in proportion to the extent of its conscious feebleness to be independent.

It is only when the crisis of trial is come or past, when the strain has fallen on the shrinking nerve, and either the danger of failure has been vanquished, or its pain survived, that a man can gather himself up in strength for purely concrete action. A mind that knows itself to have once pierced to the very centre of its greatest peril, ceases to delight in theorizing upon life, because there can no longer be any fascination in attempts to shadow forth by dim intellectual outlines, that which experience has vividly embodied. The point once reached to which secret anxieties had hitherto involuntarily converged, there is nothing further to attract conceptions of life, into the future (or theorizing) tense; they will busy themselves to more purpose with the realities now woven into the past and present.

The main character in the book, Oakfield, is apparently pursued throughout by a desire to devote himself to some final purpose of life, and by a feeling of deep dissatisfaction with those mere preliminaries of existence which mainly absorb human efforts, and which threatened to engulf him too in their idle stationary whirlpool. To