BEST SELECTIONS THE OLD YEAR AND THE NEW. ING out, wild bells, to the wild sky, RING The flying cloud, the frosty light; The year is dying in the night; Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring out the grief that saps the mind Ring out a slowly dying cause, And ancient forms of party strife; Ring out false pride in place and blood Ring in the valiant and the free, Ring in the Christ that is to be.-TENNYSON. HAMLET'S INSTRUCTION TO THE PLAYERS SPEAK PEAK the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you,-trippingly on the tongue; but if you mouth it, as many of our players do, I had as lief the town-crier spake my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, whirlwind of your passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. Oh! it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags,-to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb show and noise. I would have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant: it out-herods Herod. Pray you, avoid it. Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor. Suit the action to the word; the word to the action; with this special observance-that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing; whose end, both at the first and now, was, and is to hold, as 't were, the mirror up to nature;-to show vi.tue her own feature; scorn her own image; and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure. Now this, overdone or come tardy off, though it make the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of which one, must, in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theater of others. Oh! there be players, that I have seen play, and heard others praise, and that highly, not to speak it profanely, that, neither having the accent of Christians, nor the gait of Christian, pagan, or man, have so strutted and bellowed, that I have thought some of nature's journeymen had made men, and not made them well,-they imitated humanity so abominably!—SHAKSPEARE THE BOYS. This selection is a poem addressed to the class of 1829, in Harvard College, some thirty years after their graduation. The author, who retains, in a high degree, the freshness and joyousness of youth, addresses his classmates as "boys." AS there any old fellow got mixed with the boys? HAS If there has, take him out, without making a noise. Hang the almanac's cheat and the catalogue's spite! Old Time is a liar! we're twenty to-night! We're twenty! We're twenty! Who says we are more? He's tipsy, young jackanapes!-show him the door! Gray temples at twenty ?"-Yes! white if we please; Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's nothing can freeze! Was it snowing I spoke of? Excuse the mistake! We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told That fellow's the "Speaker," the one on the right, That boy with the grave mathematical look There's a boy, we pretend, with a three-decker brain, And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith; You hear that boy laughing? You think he's all fun; Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray! MARL SCROOGE AND MARLEY. ARLEY was dead to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail. Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail. Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnized it with an undoubted bargain. Scrooge never painted out old Marley's name. There it stood, years afterward, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names: it was all the same to him. Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping,scraping,clutch |