e raptures of the lonely student, for his brief experience of
publicity.

Let us bid farewell to Emerson, who has bidden farewell to the world in
the words of his own _Good-bye_:

'Good-bye to flattery's fawning face,
To grandeur with his wise grimace,
To upstart wealth's averted eye,
To supple office low and high,
To crowded halls, to court and street,
To frozen hearts and hasting feet,
To those who go and those who come,--
Good-bye, proud world, I'm going home,
I am going to my own hearth-stone
Bosomed in yon green hills, alone,
A secret nook in a pleasant land,
Whose groves the frolic fairies planned;
Where arches green the livelong day
Echo the blackbird's roundelay,
And vulgar feet have never trod,
A spot that is sacred to thought and God.'

THE OFFICE OF LITERATURE.

Dr. John Brown's pleasant story has become well known, of the countryman
who, being asked to account for the gravity of his dog, replied, 'Oh,
sir! life is full of sairiousness to him--he can just never get eneugh o'
fechtin'.' Something of the spirit of this saddened dog seems lately to
have entered into the very people who ought to be freest from it--our men
of letters. They are all very serious and very quarrelsome. To some of
them it is dangerous even to allude. Many are wedded to a theory or
period, and are the most uxorious of husbands--ever ready to resent an
affront to their lady. This devotion makes them very grave, and possibly
very happy after a pedantic fashion. One remembers what Hazlitt, who was
neither happy nor pedantic, has said about pedantry:

'The power of attaching an interest to the most trifling or painful
pursuits is one of the greatest happinesses of our nature. The common
soldier mounts the breach with joy, the miser deliberately starves
himself to death, the mathematician sets about extracting the cube-
root with a feeling of enthusiasm, and the lawyer sheds tears of
delight over _Coke upon Lyttleton_. He who is not in some measure a
pedant, though he may be a wise, cannot be a very happy man.'

Possibly not; but then we are surely not content that our authors should
be pedants in order that they may be happy and devoted. As one of the
great class for whose sole use and behalf literature exists--the class of
readers--I protest that it is to me a matter of indifference whether an
author is happy or not. I want him to make me hap