It may be observed, that people who keep their friends, and live in a state of harmony with the world, systematically deny themselves the luxury of explanations. Things go a little wrong, but they wait patiently until they right themselves. They trust to time, to patience, to the weight of a composed and forbearing attitude, to the powerful influences of reticence and self-respect. While people are much and variously involved in the world's business and pleasures, they hardly recognize the temptation to this undignified form of exculpatory vindication and self-assertion. Indeed, a fundness for explanations can scarcely possess persons in the brisk intercourse of life. It demands time to brood. It belongs to pauses in the hurry of existence-to the byways of life. Women are more given to it than men; dwellers in small towns than in great. Even the same people take to explanations in the country which they would never think of making in London. Apart from any sense of neglect or grievance, there is a constant tendency in some minds to explain themselves and right themselves in the eyes of the world. All people who do not come up to their own idea of themselves, and are afflicted with morbid misgivings that they do not do themselves justice have this habit. A person of this sort will plunge into any depth of new blunder in explaining away his last solecism. It is, in fact the way conceit works where it has rare occasions for display and wants a field. Most people's consciousness will tell them that, if ever a fit of explaining themselves has been upon them, it has been in some flutter of selflove, self-consciousness, or self-interest. This at once differs from, and is more pardonable than, that solemn sense of importance which impels some men to explain every step in their course of action-to give a reason for everything they do, under the notion that they are examples.

There are dull prosers whose lips are engaged all their lives in a running comment on their actions-who, like Mr. Collins, cannot take a hand at whist without detaining their hostess to explain why they think such a step justifiable and becoming to their position. Poor people are very prone to obtrude tedious apologetic explanations on their betters, sometimes to the suspension of all rational talk-not from conceit, but from an inevitable ignorance of the small hold which their chance ceremonial intercourse has on persons remote from their ways of thought, and full of other things. Nor does all their desire to be civil preserve them from the

spect to a stranger at the Hall, opens his apology, on next meeting the distinguished visitor, with, "I'm sure, sir, if I'd had the least notion as you was a gentleman." But, indeed, in less clumsy bands, it needs the greatest tact to enter on an affair of this kind without making worse of it; and, generally, to explain the why and because of a failure in respect or appreciation is only to commit a fresh and more offensive blunder, and is not seldom taken for deliberate impertinence. It may be noted that persons who have the art of managing others never explain themselves. To give reasons for a course of conduct is at once to expose it to criticism, and to deprive it of the weight which belongs to action as the result of character. The Times, for instance, is as careful never to explain itself as it is never to apologize. Indeed it may be doubted whether the most powerful and influential wills ever explain reasons or probe into motives, even to themselves. They have an instinct of working their way and effecting their purposes, which is the exact contrary of the bore's state of mind-the man who influences nobody-whom we have represented as always employed in explaining to himself and other people why he does things.

We started with the admission that some explanations are both innocent and necessary. Children are entrapped, as it were, by their trick of questioning, into the trial of listening to formal explanations in answer. Some things must be learned by this method, however little "sympathy it has with the will of man." Not seldom we have seen a careless talker betray himself into the same snare, and writhe under the penance which, through nobody's fault but his own, he has brought upon himself.

But we maintain that orators, teachers, conversers, should, one and all, be chary of the explanatory form, as being apt in its nature not only to induce tedium in the listener, but a dogged resistance. Thus between two preachers of equal power, the question of popularity will be decided by the mode in which their teaching is administered. The man who explains tires his hearers. The man who makes statements interests them. The demand on the attention in his case is less arbitrary, and it is given with less effort. In the one case, a man seems full of his subject-in the other, of his own way of putting it; and while there may not seem much in common between the "explanations" of social life and the didactic explanation of the teacher, there is this likeness

that the person engaged upon either of them is putting his case in his own point of view, and requiring us to see with his eyes.

THE COUNTESS.

BY JOHN G. WHITTIER.

OVER the wooded northern ridge,
Between its houses brown,
To the dark tunnel of the bridge

The street comes straggling down.

You catch a glimpse through birch and pine
Of gable, roof, and porch,
The tavern with its swinging sign,
The sharp horn of the church.

The river's steel-blue crescent curves
To meet, in ebb and flow,
The single broken wharf that serves
For sloop and gundalow.

With salt sea-scents along its shores
The heavy hayboats crawl,
The long antennæ of their oars
In lazy rise and fall.

Along the gray abutment's wall

The idle shad-net dries;

The toll-man in his cobbler's stall
Sits smoking with closed eyes.

You hear the pier's low undertone

Of waves that chafe and gnaw;
You start-a skipper's horn is blown
To raise the creaking draw.

At times a blacksmith's anvil sounds
With slow and sluggard beat,
Or stage-coach on its dusty rounds
Wakes up the staring street.

A place for idle eyes and ears

A cobwebbed nook of dreams;

Left by the stream whose waves are years
The stranded village seems.

And there, like other moss and rust,
The native dweller clings,

And keeps, in uninquiring trust,
The old, dull round of things.

The fisher drops his patient lines,
The former sows his grain,
Content to hear the murmuring pines
Instead of railroad train.

Go where, along the tangled steep
That slopes against the West,
The hamlet's buried idlers sleep
In stil profounder rest.

Throw back the locust's flowery plume,
The Lirch's pale-green scarf,
And break the web of brier and bloom
From name and epitaph.

A simple muster-roll of death,

Of pomp and romance shorn, The dry, old names that common breath Has cheapened and outworn.

Yet pause by one low mound and part The wild vines o'er it laced,

And read the words by rustic art
Upon its headstone traced.

Haply yon white-haired villager
Of fourscore years can say
What means the noble name of her
Who sleeps with common clay.

An exile from the Gascon land
Found refuge here and rest,
And loved, of all the village band,
Its fairest and its best.

He knelt with her on Sabbath morns,
He worshipped through her eyes,
And on the pride that doubts and scorns
Stole in her faith's surprise.

Her simple daily life he saw

By homeliest duties tried,
In all things by an untaught law
Of fitness justified.

For her his rank aside he laid:
He took the hue and tone
Of lowly life and toil, and made
Her simple ways his own.

Yet still, in gay and careless ease,
To harvest-field or dance
He brought the gentle courtesies,
The nameless grace of France.

And she who taught him love not less
From him she loved in turn
Caught in her sweet unconsciousness
What love is quick to learn.

Each grew to each in pleased accord,
Nor knew the gazing town

If she looked upward to her lord,
Or he to her looked down.

How sweet, when summer's day was o'er,
His violin's mirth and wail,

The walk on pleasant Newbury's shore, The river's moonlit sail!

Ah! life is brief, though love be long;
The altar and the bier,

The burial hymn and bridal song,
Were both in one short year!

Her rest is quiet on the hill

Beneath the locust's bloom; Far off her lover sleeps as still Within his scutcheoned tomb.

The Gascon lord, the village maid,

In death still clasp their hands;
The love that levels rank and grade
Unites their severed lands.

What matter whose the hill-side grave,
Or whose the blazoned stone?
Forever to her western wave
Shall whisper blue Garonne !

O Love!-so hallowing every soil
That gives thy sweet flower room,

Wherever, nursed by ease or toil,

The human heart takes bloom!

Plant of lost Eden, from the sod
Of sinful earth unriven,
White blossom of the trees of God

Dropped down to us from heaven!

This tangled waste of mound and stone
Is holy for thy sake;
A sweetness which is all thy own

Breathes out from fern and brake!

And while ancestral pride shall twine
The Gascon's tomb with flowers,
Fall sweetly here, O song of mine,
With summer's bloom and showers!

And let the lines that severed seem
Unite again in thee,

As western wave and Gallic stream
Are mingled in one sea!

-Atlantic Monthly.

THE LITTLE SLEEPER.

INNOCENT being, sleep, thy silken lashes
Now fringe thy peach-like cheek in soft repose;
And the blue eyes, where joy so often flashes,
Slowly, unwillingly their portals close.

The dimpled hands unclasp their tiny fingers, And on the shoulder droops the little head; On pouting lips the last smile faintly lingers, That o'er thy happy brow its sunshine spread.

So, gentle slumberer, from earth's cares and trials To peace celestial may you turn away, Forgetful of the griefs and self-denials,

That crowd this weary life's unequal day!

Still, may bright visions, like a fair dream gather
Around thy spirit, and around thy home;
"Till benedictions, from thy heavenly Father,
Fold thee forever, with " My blessed, come!"
N. J. BISHOP.

-Transcript.

LOST DAYS.

THE lost days of my life until to-day,
What were they, could I see them on the street
Lie as they fell? Would they be ears of wheat
Sown once for food, but trodden into clay?
Or golden coins squandered and still to pay?
Or drops of blood dabbling the guilty feet?
Or such spilt water as in dreams must cheat
The throats of men in hell who thirst alway?
I do not see them here; but after death
God knows I know the faces I shall see,
Each one a murdered self with low last breath :-
"I am thyself, what has thou done to me?"
"And I-and I-thyself" (lo! each one saith)
"And thou thyself to all eternity."
-Rosetti.

A NURSERY SONG.

As I walked over the hills one day

I listened and heard a mother-sheep say:
"In all the green world there is nothing so sweet
As my little lammie with his nimble feet,
With his eye so bright

And his wool so white,
Oh, he is my darling, my heart's delight.
The robin, he

That sings in the tree,
Dearly may doat on his darlings four,
But I love my one little lambkin more.”
And the mother-sheep and her little one,
Side by side lay down in the sun,

And they went to sleep on the hill-side warm
While my little lammie lies here on my arm.

come so soon,

wrapped his cloak around him, and we bore him

And

out to-night,

laid him by a clump of trees, where the moon was shining bright,

And we carved him out a head-board as skilful as we could

If you

I send

should wish to find it, I can tell you where

it stood.

you back his hymn book, and the cap he used to wear,

And a lock I cut the night before of his bright curling hair.

I send you back his Bible: the night before he died,

We turned its leaves together, as I read it by his side.

I've kept the belt he always wore, he told me so to do, a hole upon the side, 'tis where the ball went through.

It has

more to tell,

But I shall always mourn with you, the boy we loved so well.

MARY C. HOVEY.

-Evangelist. April, 1863.