'But"--some one may say--"I too, like them, must rest from my labors." Oh! this is the sublimest thought of all! If I assume this noble task, I can never reach its end; and so surely as it is my vocation to assume it, I can never cease to act, and hence can never cease to be. That which men call Death cannot interrupt my activity; for my work must go on to its completion, and it cannot be completed in Time;--hence my existence is limited by no Time, and I am Eternal:--with the assumption of this great task, I have also laid hold of Eternity. I raise my head boldly towards the threatening rock, the raging flood, or the fiery tempest, and say--"I am Eternal, and I defy your might! Break all upon me and thou Earth, and thou Heaven, mingle in the wild tumult, and all ye elements, foam and fret yourselves, and crush in your conflict the last atom of the body which I call mine!--my WILL, secure in its own firm purpose, shall soar undisturbed and bold over the wreck of the universe: for I have entered upon my vocation, and it is more enduring than ye are: it is ETERNAL, and I am ETERNAL like it."-Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

DEATH OF ARTHUR HENRY HALLAM.

Ir is needless to tell what was the promise of his son Arthur, whose qualities and honors were the joy and pride of his life. The young man was advanced in his professional studies, was engaged to a sister of Alfred Tennyson, and had the prospect of the brightest of lives, when he went on the Continent with his father, for a tour of recreation. At a German town he was slightly unwell with a cold; and Mr. Hallam went alone for his afternoon walk, leaving Authur on the sofa. Finding him sleeping on his return, he took a book and read for an hour; and then he became impressed with the extreme stillness of the sleeper. The sleeper was cold, and must have been dead from almost the moment when he had last spoken. In like manner died the eldest daughter; and in like manner the cherished wife-an admirable woman. *There was still a son, Henry, but he died too in opening manhood; and then there was but one daughter, and she married, to cheer his old age. Yet he seemed always cheerful. His social disposition, and his love of literature, and his generosity of spirit, and his kindly sympathies, kept him fresh and bright for many a long year after the sunshine of his life seemed to be gone.-Harriet Martineau.

GRANDFATHER'S REVERIE.

BY THEODORE PARKER.

(FROM HIS SERMON ON OLD AGE.")

GRANDFATHER is old. His back is bent. In the street he sees crowds of men looking dreadfully young, and walking fearfully swift. He wonders where all the old folks are. Once when a boy, he could not find people young enough for him, and sidled up to any young stranger he met on Sundays, wondering why God made the world so old. Now he goes to Commencement to see his grandson take his degree, and is astonished at the youth, of the audience. "This is new," he says; "it did not use to be so fifty years ago." At meeting, the minister seems surprisingly young, and the audience young. He looks round, and is astonished that there are so few venerable heads. The audience seem not decorous. They come in late, and hurry off early, clapping the doors after them with irreverent bang. But grandfather is decorous, well mannered, early in his seat; if jostled, he jostles not again; elbowed, he returns it not; crowded, he thinks no evil. He is gentlemanly to the rude, obliging to the insolent and vulgar; for grandfather is a gentleman; not puffed up with mere money, but edified with well-grown manliness. Time has dignified his good manners.

It is night. The family are all abed. Grandfather sits by his old-fashioned fire. He draws his old-fashioned chair nearer to the hearth. On the stand which his mother gave him are the candlesticks, also of old time. The candles are three quarters burnt down; the fire on the hearth also is low. He has been thoughtful all day, talking half to himself, chanting a bit of verse, humming a snatch of an old tune. He kissed his pet granddaughters more tenderly than common, before she went to bed. He takes out of his bosom a little locket; nobody ever sees it. Therein are two little twists of hair. As Grandfather looks at them, the outer twist of hair becomes a whole head of ambrosial curls. He remembers stolen interviews, meetings by moonlight. He remembers how sweet the evening star looked, and how he laid his hand on another's shoulder, and said, "You are my evening star."

I

The church-clock strikes the midnight hour. He looks in his locket again. The other twist is the hair of his first-born son. At this same hour of midnight, once, many years ago, he knelt and prayed, when the long agony was over-" My God, thank thee that, though I am a father, I am still a husband, too! What am I, that unto me a life should be given and another spared!" Now he has children, and children's children, the joy of his old age. But for many a year his wife has looked to him from beyond the evening star. She is still the evening star herself, yet more beautiful; a star that never sets; not mortal wife now, but angel.

The last stick on his andirons snaps asunder, and falls outward. Two faintly-smoking brands stand there. Grandfather lays them together, and they flame up; the two smokes are united in one flame. "Even so let it be in heaven," says Grandfather.

INTERPRETATION OF SCRIPTURE.

PUT the matter thus. For more than a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilization, science, law-in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting, and often leading the way. Its very presence, as a believed Book, has rendered the nations emphatically a chosen race, and this too in exact proportion as it is more or less generally known and studied. Of those nations, which in the highest degree enjoy its influences, it is not too much to affirm, that the differences public and private, physical, moral and intellectual, are only less than what might be expected from a diversity in species. Good and holy men, and the best and wisest of mankind, the kingly spirits of history, enthroned in the hearts of mighty nations, have borne witness to its influences, have declared it to be beyond compare the most perfect instrument, the only adequate organ of Humanity;-the organ and instrument of all the gifts, powers, and tendencies, by which the individual is privileged to rise above himself to leave behind, and lose his dividual phantom self, in order to find his true Self in that Distinctness where no division can be-in the Eternal I AM, the Ever-living WORD, of whom all the elect, from the archangel before the throne to the poor wrestler with the Spirit until the breaking of day, are but the fainter and still fainter echoes. And are all these testimonies and lights of experience to lose their value and efficiency, because I feel no warrant of history, or Holy Writ, or of my own heart for denying, that in the framework and outward case of this instrument a few parts may be discovered of less costly materials and of meaner workmanship? Is it not a fact that the Books of the New Testament were tried by their consonance with the rule, and according to the analogy of Faith? Does not the universally admitted canon-that each part of Scripture must be interpreted by the spirit of the whole-lead to the same practical conclusion as that for which I am now contending;-namely, that it is the spirit of the Bible, and not the detached words and sentences, that is infallible and absolute? Practical, I say, and spiritual too;-and what knowledge not practical or spiritual are we entitled to seek in our Bibles? Is the grace of God so confined-are the evidences of the present and