ist--yet our egotism, so far from being a detraction from our
attraction, seems to be the very soul of it, making it impossible in
nature for any reasonable being to come within its sphere, without being
drawn by sweet compulsion to the old wizard's heart. He is so _humane_!
Only look at him for a few minutes, and liking becomes love--love
becomes veneration. And all this even before he has opened his lips--by
the mere power of his ogles and his temples. In his large mild blue
eyes is written not only his nature, but miraculously, in German text,
his very name, #Christopher North#. Mrs Gentle was the first to discover
it; though we remember having been asked more than once in our youth, by
an alarmed virgin on whom we happened at the time to be looking tender,
"If we were aware that there was something preternatural in our eyes?"
#Christopher# is conspicuous in our right eye--#North# in our left; and
when we wish to be incog., we either draw their fringed curtains, or,
nun-like, keep the tell-tale orbs fixed on the ground. Candour whispers
us to confess, that some years ago a child was exhibited at sixpence
with WILLIAM WOOD legible in its optics--having been affiliated, by
ocular evidence, on a gentleman of that name, who, with his dying
breath, disowned the soft impeachment. But in that case nature had
written a vile scrawl--in ours her hand is firm, and goes off with a
flourish.

Have you ever entered, all alone, the shadows of some dilapidated old
burial-place, and in a nook made beautiful by wild-briers and a
flowering thorn, beheld the stone image of some long-forgotten worthy
lying on his grave? Some knight who perhaps had fought in Palestine,--or
some holy man, who in the Abbey--now almost gone--had led a long still
life of prayer? The moment you knew that you were standing among the
dwellings of the dead, how impressive became the ruins! Did not that
stone image wax more and more lifelike in its repose? And as you kept
your eyes fixed on the features Time had not had the heart to
obliterate, seemed not your soul to hear the echoes of the Miserere sung
by the brethren?

So looks Christopher--on his couch--in his ALCOVE. He is taking his
siesta--and the faint shadows you see coming and going across his face
are dreams. 'Tis a pensive dormitory, and hangs undisturbed in its
spiritual region as a cloud on the sky of the Longest Day when it falls
on the Sabbath.

What think you of OUR FATHER, alongside of the Ped