eal air when they have dropped the dust. And how
may they make for themselves a heaven on earth? By building up a happy
HOME FOR THE HEART. Much, but not all--oh! not nearly all--is in the
site. But it must be within the precincts of the holy ground--and within
hearing of the waters of life.

Pleasures of Imagination! Pleasures of Memory! Pleasures of Hope! All
three most delightful poems; yet all the thoughts and all the feelings
that inspired them--etherealised--will not make--FAITH! "The day-spring
from on high hath visited us!" Blessed is he who feels that line--nor
need his heart die within him, were a voice to be heard at midnight
saying--"This New-Year's day shall be thy last!"

One voice--one young voice--all by its sweet, sad, solitary self,
singing to us a Christmas Hymn! Listening to that music is like looking
at the sky with all its stars.

Was it a spirit?

"Millions of spiritual creatures walk unseen,
Sole or responsive to each other's voice,
Hymning their great Creator."

No, the singer, like ourselves, is mortal; and in that thought, to our
hearts, lies the pathos of her prayers. The angels, veiling their faces
with their wings, sing in their bliss hallelujahs round the throne of
heaven; but she--a poor child of clay, with her face veiled but with the
shades of humility and contrition, while

"Some natural tears she drops, but wipes them soon,"--

sings, in her sorrow, supplications to be suffered to see afar-off its
everlasting gates--opening not surely for her own sake--for all of woman
born are sinful--and even she in what love calls her innocence feels
that her fallen being does of itself deserve but to die. The hymn is
fading away, liker and liker an echo, and our spirit having lost it in
the distance, returns back holier to the heart-hush of home.

The million hunger and thirst after the stronger and darker passions;
nothing will go down with them but _the intense_. They are
intolerant--or careless--or even ashamed of those emotions and
affections that compose the blessing of our daily life, and give its
lustre to the fire on the hearth of every Christian household. Yet, for
all that, they are inexperienced in those same stronger and darker
passions of which they prate, and know nothing of the import of those
pictures of them painted, with background of gloom and foreground of
fire, in the works of the truly great masters. The disturbed spirit of
such delineations is far b