to his business he replied: "I have lost my mother, and as this place used to be her home, and my father lies here, we have come to lay her beside him!"

Our heart rose in sympathy, and we said, "You have met with a great loss."

"Well-yes," replied the strong man, with hesitancy; "a mother is a great loss in general; but our mother has outlived her usefulness; she was in her second childhood, and her mind was grown as weak as her body, so that she was no comfort to herself, and was a burden to everybody. Thêre were seven of us, sons and daughters; and as we could not find any body who was willing to board her, we agreed to keep her among us a year about. But I have had more than my share of her, for she was too feeble to be moved when my time was out; and that was more than three months before her death. But then she was a good mother in her day, and toiled very hard to bring us all up."

Without looking at the face of the heartless man, we directed him to the house of a neighboring pastor, and returned to our nursery. We gazed on the merry little faces which smiled or grew sad in imitation of ours-those little ones to whose ear no word in our language is half so sweet as 'Mother;" and we wondered if that day could ever come when they would say of us, "She has outlived her usefulness-she is no comfort to herself and a burden to everybody else!" and we hoped that before such a day should dawn, we might be taken to our rest. God forbid that we should outlive the love of our children! Rather let us die while our hearts are a part of their own, that our grave may be watered with their tears, and our love linked with their hopes of heaven.

When the bell tolled for the mother's burial, we went to the sanctuary to pay our only token of respect for the aged stranger; for we felt that we could give her memory a tear, even though her own children had none to shed.

She was a good mother in her day, and toiled hard to bring us all up-she was no comfort to herself and a burden to everybody else." The cruel, heartless words rang in our ears as we saw the coffin bōrne up the aisle. The bell tolled long and loud, until its iron tongue had chronicled the years of the toil-worn mother. One, -two, three,-four,-five. How clearly and almost merrily each stroke told of her once peaceful slumber in her mother's bosom, and of her seat at nightfall on her weary father's knee. Six,-seven,eight,-nine,―ten,-rang out the tale of her sports on the green-sward, in the meadow, and by the brook. Eleven,-twelve,-thirteen,— fourteen,-fifteen,-spoke more gravely of school days and little household joys and cares. Sixteen,-seventeen,-eighteen,―sounded

--

on the enraptured visions of maidenhood, and the dream of early love. Nineteen-brought before us the happy bride.

Twenty-spoke of the young mother whose heart was full to bursting with the new strong love which God had awakened in her bösom. And then stroke after stroke told of her early womanhood—of the love and cares, and hopes and fears, and toils through which she passed during these long years, till fifty rang out harsh and loud. From that to sixty each stroke told of the warm-hearted mother and grandmother, living over again her joys and sorrows in those of her children and children's children. Every family of all the group wanted grandmother then, and the only strife was who should secure the prize; but hark! the bell tolls on! Seventy-seventy-one, -two, three,-four. She begins to grow feeble, requires some care, is not always perfectly patient or satisfied; she goes from one child's house to another, so that no one place seems like home. She murmurs in plaintive tones, that after all her toil and weariness, it is hard she cannot be allowed a home to die in; that she must be sent, rather than invited, from house to house.

Eighty, eighty-one, two, three,-four-ah! she is now a second child-now "she has outlived her usefulness; she has now ceased to be a comfort to herself or anybody;" that is, she has ceased to be profitable to her earth-craving and money-grasping children. Now sounds out, reverberating through our lovely forest, and echoing back from our "hill of the dead," Eighty-nine! There she now lies in the coffin cold and still-she makes no trouble now; demands no love, no soft words, no tender little offices. A look of patient endurance, we fancied also an expression of grief for unrequited love, sat on her marble features. Her children were there clad in weeds of woe, and in an irony we remembered the strong man's words, "She was good mother in her day."

When the bell ceased tolling, the strange minister rose in the pulpit. His form was very erect, and his voice strong, but his hâir was silvery white. He read several passages of Scripture expressive of God's compassion to feeble man, and especially of his tenderness when gray hairs are on him, and his strength faileth. He then made some touching remarks on human frailty, and of dependence on God, urging all present to make their peace with their Master while in health, that they might claim his promises when heart and flesh should fail them. Then," he said, "the eternal God shall be thy refuge, and beneath thee shall be the everlasting arms." Leaning over the desk, and gazing intently on the coffined form before him, he then said reverently: "From a little child I have honored the agèd; but never till gray hairs covered my own head did I know truly how much love and sympathy this class have a right to demand of their fellow creatures. Now I feel it.

"Our mother," he added most tenderly, "who now lies in death before us, was a stranger to me, as are all these, her descendants. All I know of her is what her son has told me to-day-that she was brought to this town from afar, sixty-nine years ago, a happy bride— that here she has passed most of her life, toiling as only mothers ever have strength to toil, until she had reared a large family of sons and daughters-that she left her home clad in the weeds of widowhood, to dwell among her children, and that till health and vigor left her she lived for you, her descendants.

"You, who together have shared her love and her care, know how well you have requited her. God forbid that conscience should accuse any of you of ingratitude or murmuring; on account of the câre she has been to you of late. When you go back to your homes be careful of your words and your example before your own children, for the fruit of your own doings you will surely reap from them when you yourselves totter on the brink of the grave. I entreat you as a friend, as one who has himself entered the 'everring of life,' that you may never say, in the presence of your families nor of heaven, Our mother has outlived her usefulness-she was a burden to us.' Never, never; a mother cannot live so long as that! No; when she can no longer labor for her children, nor yet care for herself, she can fall like a precious weight on their bosoms, and call forth by her helplessness all the noble, generous feelings of their natures.

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Adieu, then, poor toil-worn mother; there are no more sleepless nights, no more days of pain, for the undying vigor and everlasting usefulness are part of the inheritance of the redeemed. Feeble as thou wert on earth, thou wilt be no burden on the bosom of Infinite Love, but there shalt thou find thy longed-for rest, and receive glorious sympathy from Jesus and his ransomed folds."

EXAMINER.

1

CXXIV. THE OCEAN.

OH! that the Desert were my dwelling-place,

With one fair spirit for my minister,

That I might all forget the human race,

And, hating no one, love but only her!
Ye Elements !-in whose ennobling stir
I feel myself exalted--can ye not
Accord me such a being? Do I err

In deeming such inhabit many a spot?
Though with them to converse can rarely be our lot.

Thêre is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean-roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;
Man marks the earth with ruin-his control
Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths, with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknelled, uncoffined, and unknown.

His steps are not upon thy paths,―thy fields
Are not a spoil for him,-thou dost arise

And shake him from thee, the vile strength he wields
For earth's destruction, thou dost all despise,
Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
And send'st him, shivering, in thy playful spray,
And howling, to his gods, whêre haply lies
His petty hope in some near port or bay,
And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay.

The armaments, which thunder-strike the walls
Of rock-built cities, bidding nations quake,
And monarchs tremble in their capitals;
The oak leviathans, whose huge ribs make
Their clay creator the vain title take
Of lord of thee, and arbiter of war;
These are thy toys, and as the snowy flake,
They melt into thy yeast of waves, which mar
Alike the Armada's pride, or spoils of Trafalgar.

Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee-
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, what are they?
Thy waters wasted them while they were free,
And many a tyrant since; their shores obey
The stranger, slave, or savage; their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts:-not so thou,

Unchangeable save to thy wild waves' play-
Time writes no wrinkle on thy azure brow-
Such as creation's dawn beheld, thou rollest now.

Thou glorious mirror, where the Almighty's form
Glasses itself in tempests; in all time,

Calm or convulsed-in breeze, or gale, or storm,
Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime

Dark-heaving; boundless, endless, and sublime-
The image of eternity-the throne

Of the Invisible; even from out thy slime

The monsters of the deep are made; each zone
Obeys thee; thou goest forth, dread, fathomless, alone.

And I have loved thee, ocean! and my joy
Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be
Borne, like thy bubbles, onward: from a boy
I wantoned with thy breakers-they to me
Were a delight; and if the freshening sea
Made them a terror, 'twas a pleasing fear,
For I was as it were a child of thee,
And trusted to thy billows far and near,
And laid my hand upon thy mane—as I do here.

LORD BYRON.

CXXV.-THE PRINCIPAL HEATHEN GODS.

BEFORE the birth of our Saviour, the Jews were the only nation of the world who worshiped the true God. All the other nations worshiped different imaginary beings which existed only in their uninstructed fancies. Most of these false gods have now become forgotten, together with the nations that believed in them; yet it is necessary to preserve a knowledge of the imaginary gods and goddesses worshiped by the Greeks and Romans, as they are much spoken of in the finest writings of antiquity, and are still occasionally mentioned both in poetry and prose.

The most ancient of these their oideal gods, were Chaʼos, and his son Ere'bus; or, confusion and darkness. Săturn, one of their descendants, is the same as Time: his reign is called the Golden Age; and it is said, that the earth then produced corn and fruits without labor, and justice prevailed among all mankind. Saturn was deposed by his son Jupiter, called also Jove; who then divided his father's power between himself and his two brothers, Neptune and Pluto.