hem all to tread softly, for that sleep
had fallen upon her, and her fever in its blessed balm might abate--then
with groans too affecting to be borne by those who heard them, he would
ask why, since she was dead, God had the cruelty to keep him, her
husband, in life; and finally, and last of all, he imagined himself in
Grassmere Churchyard, and clasping a little mound on the green, which it
was evident he thought was her grave, he wept over it for hours and
hours, and kissed it, and placed a stone at its head, and sometimes all
at once broke out into fits of laughter, till the hideous fainting-fits
returned, and after long convulsions left him lying as if stone-dead. As
for his bodily frame, when Lucy's father lifted it up in his arms,
little heavier was it than a bundle of withered fern. Nobody supposed
that one so miserably attenuated and ghost-like could for many days be
alive--yet not till the earth had thrice revolved round the sun did that
body die, and then it was buried far away from the Fold, the banks of
Rydal-water, and the sweet mountains of Westmoreland; for after passing
like a shadow through many foreign lands, he ceased his pilgrimage in
Palestine, even beneath the shadow of Mount Sion, and was laid, with a
lock of hair--which, from the place it held, strangers knew to have
belonged to one dearly beloved--close to his heart, on which it had lain
so long, and was to moulder away in darkness together, by Christian
hands and in a Christian sepulchre.

L'ENVOY.

Periodical literature is a type of many of the most beautiful things and
interesting events in nature; or say, rather, that _they_ are types of
_it_--the Flowers and the Stars. As to Flowers, they are the prettiest
periodicals ever published in folio--the leaves are wire-wove and
hot-pressed by Nature's self; their circulation is wide over all the
land; from castle to cottage they are regularly taken in; as old age
bends over them, his youth is renewed; and you see childhood poring upon
them pressed close to its very bosom. Some of them are ephemeral--their
contents are exhaled between the rising and setting sun. Once a-week
others break through their green, pink, or crimson cover; and how
delightful, on the seventh day, smiles in the sunshine the Sabbath
Flower--a Sunday publication perused without blame by the most
religious--even before morning prayer! Each month, indeed, throughout
the whole year, has its own Flower periodical. Some are