e dew of the morning, as well as the summons to honorable and
peaceful toil.

JOHN RUSKIN.

* * * * *

LIFE AND SONG.

[This poem is taken from "The Poems of Sidney Lanier," copyrighted 1891,
and published by Charles Scribner's Sons.]

If life were caught by a clarionet,
And a wild heart, throbbing in the reed,
Should thrill its joy and trill its fret,
And utter its heart in every deed,

"Then would this breathing clarionet
Type what the poet fain would be;
For none o' the singers ever yet
Has wholly lived his minstrelsy,

"Or clearly sung his true, true thought,
Or utterly bodied forth his life,
Or out of life and song has wrought
The perfect one of man and wife;

"Or lived and sung, that Life and Song
Might each express the other's all,
Careless if life or art were long
Since both were one, to stand or fall:

"So that the wonder struck the crowd,
Who shouted it about the land:
_His song was only living aloud,
His work, a singing with his hand_!"

SIDNEY LANIER.

* * * * *

ELOQUENCE.

1. When public bodies are to be addressed on momentous occasions, when
great interests are at stake, and strong passions excited, nothing is
valuable in speech farther than as it is connected with high intellectual
and moral endowments. Clearness, force, and earnestness are the qualities
which produce conviction. True eloquence, indeed, does not consist in
speech. It cannot be brought from far. Labor and learning may toil for it,
but they will toil in vain. Words and phrases may be marshalled in every
way, but they cannot compass it. It must exist in the man, in the subject,
and in the occasion.

2. Affected passion, intense expression, the pomp of declamation, all may
aspire to it; they cannot reach it. It comes, if it come at all, like the
outbreaking of volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, native force.
The graces taught in the schools, the costly ornaments and studied
contrivances of speech, shock and disgust men, when their own lives, and
the fate of their wives, their children, and their country, hang on the
decision of the hour. Then words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain,
and all elaborate oratory contemptible. Even genius itself then feels
rebuked and subdued, as in the presence of higher qualities.

3. Then patriotism is eloquent; then self-devotion is eloquent. The clear
conception, outrunnin