shadow of Thy grace:
Blest to me were any spot
Where temptation whispers not.
If there be some weaker one,
Give me strength to help him on;
If a blinder soul there be,
Grant that I his guide may be.
Make my mortal dreams come true
With the work I fain would do;
Clothe with life the weak intent,
Let me be the thing I meant;
Let me find in Thy employ
Peace that dearer is than joy;
Out of self to love be led
And to heaven acclimated,
Until all things sweet and good
Seem my natural habitude.

* * * * *

So we read the prayer of him
Who, with John of Labadie,
Trod, of old, the oozy rim
Of the Zuyder Zee.

Thus did Andrew Rykman pray.
Are we wiser, better grown,
That we may not, in our day,
Make his prayer our own?

THE STRATHSAYS.

Mrs. Strathsay sat in her broad bower-window, looking down the harbor. A
brave great window it was, and I mind me how many a dark summer's night,
we two leaned over its edge and watched the soft flow of the River
of the Cross, where its shadowy tide came up and lapped the stone
foundations of that old house by the water-side,--I and Angus. Under us
the rowers slipped the wherries and the yawls; in the channel the rafts
floated down a slow freight from the sweet and savage pine-forests,
and the fire they carried on their breasts, and the flames of their
pitch-knots, threw out strange shadows of the steering raftsmen, and
a wild bandrol of smoke flaring and streaming on the night behind
them;--and yet away far up on the yonder side, beneath the hanging
alders and the cedar-trees, the gundalows dropped down, great laden
barges; and perhaps a lantern, hung high in the stern of some huge
East-Indiaman at the wharves of the other town quite across the stream,
showed us all its tracery and spires, dim webs of shadow stretched and
woven against the solemn ground of the starlit sky, and taught us the
limit of the shores. Ah, all things were sweet to us then! we were
little but children,--Angus and I. And it's not children we are now,
small's the pity! The joys of childhood are good, I trow; but who would
exchange for them the proud, glad pulse of full womanhood?--not I. I
mind me, too, that in those days the great world of which I used to hear
them speak always seemed to me lying across the river, and over the
fields and the hills, and away down and out by the skirts of the
mystical sea; and o