case of an impressionable boy. A little later, when he passed from the educational care of his mother to that of a tutor, his relations to literature changed, as the following passage from his autobiography will show: "My tutor thought it almost a sin to open a profane play or poem; and my mother had no longer the opportunity to hear me read poetry as formerly. I found, however, in her dressing-room, where I slept at one time, some odd volumes of Shakespeare; nor can I easily forget the rapture with which I sate up in my shirt reading them by the light of a fire in her apartment, until the bustle of the family rising from supper warned me that it was time to creep back to my bed, where I was supposed to have been safely deposited since nine o'clock." This is a suggestive, as well as a frank, story. Supposing for a moment that instead of Shakespeare, the room had contained some of the volumes of verse and romance which, though denying alike the natural and the supernatural virtues, are to be found in many a Christian home, how easily might he have suffered a contamination of mind! It has been proudly said of Sir Walter as an author that he never forgot the sanctities of domestic love and social duty in all that he wrote; and considering how much he did write, and how vast has been the influence of his work on mankind, we can hardly over-estimate the importance of the fact. Yet it might have been all wrecked by one little parental imprudence in this matter of books. And what excuse is there, after all, for running the terrible risk? Authors who are not fit to be read by the sons and daughters are rarely read without injury by the fathers and mothers; and it would be better by far, Savonarola-like, to make a bonfire of all the literature of folly, wickedness, and infidelity, than run the risk of injuring a child simply for the sake of having a few volumes more on one's shelves. In the balance of heaven there is no parity between a complete library and a lost soul. But this story has another lesson. It indicates once more the injury which may be done to character by undue limitations. Under the ill-considered restrictions of his tutor, which ran counter to the good sense of his mother, whose wisdom was justified by the event, Walter Scott might easily have fallen into tricks of conceal ment and forfeited his candor - that candor which developed into the noble probity which marked his conduct to the last. Without candor there cannot be

truth, and, as he himself has said, there can be no other virtue without truth. Fortunately for him, by the wise sanction his mother had given to his perusal of imaginative writings, she had robbed them of a mystery unhealthy in itself; and he came through these stolen readings substantially unharmed, because he knew that his fault was only the lighter one of sitting up when he was supposed to be lying down.

Luckily this tutor's stern rule did not last long; and when a severe illness attacked the youth (then advanced to be a student at Edinburgh College) and brought him under his mother's charge once more, the bed on which he lay was piled with a constant succession of works of imagination, and he was allowed to find consolation in poetry and romance, those fountains which flow forever for the ardent and the young. It was in relation to Mrs. Scott's control of her son's reading that he wrote with gratitude late in life," My mother had good natural taste and great feeling." And, after her death, in a letter to a friend, he paid her this tribute: "She had a mind peculiarly well stored. If I have been able to do anything in the way of painting the past times, it is very much from the studies with which she presented me. She was a strict economist, which, she said, enabled her to be liberal; out of her little income of about £300 a year she bestowed at least a third in charities; yet I could never prevail on her to accept of any assistance." Her charity, as well as her love for genealogy and her aptitude for story-telling was transmitted to her son. It found expression in him, not only in material gifts to the poor, but in a conscientious care and consideration for the feelings of others. This trait is beautifully exhibited by many of the facts recorded by Lockhart in his famous me moir, and also by a little incident, not included there, which I have heard Sir Henry Taylor tell, and which, besides illustrating the subject, deserves for its own sake a place in print. The great and now venerable author of " Philip Van Artevelde" dined at Abbotsford only a year or two before the close of its owner's life. Sir Walter had then lost his old vivacity, though not his simple dignity; but for one moment during the course of the evening he rose into animation, and it happened thus. There was a talk among the party of an excursion which was to be made on the following day, and during the discussion of the plans Miss

instantly aroused. "I cannot call that good breeding," he said in an earnest and dignified tone a rebuke which echoed the old-fashioned teaching on the duties of true politeness he had heard from his mother half a century before.

We would gladly know more than we do of Mrs. Scott's attitude towards her son when first his penchant for authorship was shown. That she smiled on his early evidences of talent, and fostered them, we may well imagine; and the tenderness with which she regarded his early compositions is indicated by the fact that a copy of verses, written in a boyish scrawl, was carefully preserved by her, and found, after her death, folded in a paper on which was inscribed, "My Walter's first lines, 1782." That she gloried in his successes when they came we gather; for when speaking late in life to Dr. Davy about his brother Sir Humphry's distinction, Sir Walter, doubtless drawing on his own home memories, remarked, "I hope, Dr. Davy, that your mother lived to see it; there must have been great pleasure in that to her." But with whatever zeal Mrs. Scott may have unfolded Sir Walter's mind by her training, by her praise, by her motherly enthusiasm, it is certain that, from first to last, she loved his soul and sought its interest, in and above all. Her final present to him before she died was not a Shakespeare or a Milton, but an old Bible the book she loved best, and for her sake Sir Walter loved it too.

Happy was Mrs. Scott in having a son who in all things reciprocated the affec. tion of his mother. With the first fiveguinea fee he earned at the bar he bought a present for her a silver taper-stand, which stood on her mantel-piece many a year; when he became enamored of Miss Carpenter he filially wrote to consult his mother about the attachment, and to beg her blessing upon it; when, in 1819, she died at an advanced age, he was in attendance at her side, and, full of occupations though he was, we find him busying himself to obtain for her body a beautifully situated grave. Thirteen years later he also rested from his labors. During the last hours of his lingering life he desired to be read to from the New Testament, and when his memory for secular poetry had entirely failed him, the words

So passed the great author of "Waverley" away. And when, in due course, his executors came to search for his testament, and lifted up his desk, “we found," says one of them, "arranged in careful order a series of little objects, which had obviously been so placed there that his eye might rest on them every morning before he began his tasks." There were the old-fashioned boxes that had garnished his mother's toilet-table when he, a sickly child, slept in her dressing-room; the silver taper-stand which the young advocate bought for her with his first fee; a row of small packets inscribed by her hand, and containing the hair of such of her children as had died before her; and more odds and ends of a like sort - pathetic tokens of a love which bound together for a little while here on earth, and binds together forevermore in heaven, Christian mother and son. JOHN OLDCAstle.

you;

By some, I think, was loved. I loved him well; And bear upon my body to this hour

The print of Argive spears, which, meant for him,

Prone lying, headlong from his saddle thrown,
I took for mine on one disastrous day.
Well pleased I saw him step by step advance
From high to higher, till our common weal
Owned none that owned a greater name than
his.

But ah! the pang, when to be great among us
Seemed not to him enough: he must be all;
And so, misusing power too lightly lent,
He changed our laws at will, and citizens
Sent uncondemned, untried, to bloody dooms.
In vain I warned him there was wrath abroad,
That this proud city of the double sea
Had never unto tyrants bowed the neck,
And would not now; and more than this I did.
Two taking with me of our chief of men,
A suppliant at his feet I knelt, I fell;
Only to find, too often found before,
Derision and a fierce resolve that bad

Dear to the pale queen of the underworld; Which now, as daughter unto mother fleeing, Bemoaned her sad fate, wrecked and shorn and torn,

Scorched and consumed in Moloch's furnace fires,

A solitude of hate, till now the grass
Grew rank in her untrodden streets, and worse
Than wild beasts harbored in her marble halls.

aside,

And in my mantle, weeping, hid my face, While the dread deed that should make Corinth free

Was acted.

When the rumor of it spread,

Some said it was well done, and some said ill; Some called me fratricide, and some were fain To honor, as men honor saviour gods.

I could have borne the praise, or borne the blame,

And lived my own life, little heeding either; But presently thick darkness fell on me,

But this or that, all hailed it as the thought
And inspiration of the holy gods:
And one whose word went far, bespake me thus:
'Do well, and we shall count thee tyrant-slayer:
Do ill, and name we name not shall be thine.'

"The end proves all; and that is still to come;

And yet sometimes I nigh persuade myself
I have drunk out the bitter of my life;
And if I only keep the truth, you few,
My few, shall scatter Africk's alien hordes,

both,

Stern mother, took the part of her dead son
Against the living; me saw never more,
Refused to look upon my face again,
And, granting no forgiveness, lived and died.

"I meanwhile, laden with a mother's curse,
By those avenging goddesses pursued,
That fright the doers of strange deeds of blood,
In solitary places far astray,

On the wild hills, beside the lone seashore,
Wandered, a man forbidden and forlorn:
The glory and the gladness of my youth,
Its unreturning opportunities,

All gone; how then I hated streets and schools,
And all the faces that one met in them;
And hated most of all myself, until

It little lacked but that with hands profane
I had laid waste the temple of my life,
And ended all.

"While thus it fared with me,
The slow years dragging on their sullen length,
A cry of anguish travelled o'er the deep
From that fair island of the western wave,

treacherous lairs;

The stars shall in their courses fight for us ;
And all the elements shall work for us ;
And the sweet gods of Hellas, by the shrieks
Of immolated children scared away,
These, girt already for their glad return,
Shall show how easy all things prove for them
That have immortal helpers on their side.
And there shall wait on me, on me who seemed
Estranged forever from the tenderness
Of human hearts, from all things good and
fair,

The golden tribute of a people's love.
And when my work is ended, multitudes
Apparelled all in white, and crowned with
flowers,

As on a great day of high festival,
Shall with large tears of sorrow and of joy
Bear me, a victor, to my funeral pyre:
So limns itself the future to my sight.

"But lo! enough. The day is breaking fast, And we are called. Hyperion's eager steeds Are straining up the slope of eastern heaven, And from their fiery nostrils blow the morn.' R. C. DUBLIN.

A SUNFLOWER.

EARTH hides her secrets deep
Down where the small seed lies,
Hid from the air and skies
Where first it sank to sleep.
To grow, to blossom, and to die-

Ah, who shall know her hidden alchemy?

Quick stirs the inner strife,
Strong grow the powers of life,
Forth from earth's mother breast,
From her dark homes of rest,
Forth as an essence rare
Eager to meet the air,
Growth's very being, seen
Here, in this tenderest green.

Drawn by the light above,
Upward the life must move;
Touched by the outward life
Kindles anew the strife,

Light seeks the dark's domain,

Draws thence with quickening pain
New store of substance rare,
Back through each tingling vein
Thrusts the new life again-
Beauty unfolds in air.

So grows earth's changeling child,
By light and air beguiled
Out of her dreamless rest
Safe in the mother breast.
Impulses come to her,
New hopes without a name
Touch every leaf, and stir
Colorless sap to flame;
Quick through her pulses run
Love's hidden mystic powers,
She wakes in golden flowers
Trembling to greet the sun.
What means this being new,
Sweet pain she never knew
Down in the quiet earth
Ere hope had come to birth?
Golden he shines above,
Love wakes, and born of love
All her sweet flowers unfold,
In rays of burning gold.
Life then means nought but this
Trembling to wait his kiss,
Wake to emotion?

There where he glows she turns
All her gold flowers and burns
With her devotion.

Ah, but when day is done?
When he is gone, her sun,
King of her world and lover?
Low droops the faithful head
Where the brown earth is spread
Waiting once more to cover
Dead hopes and blossoms over.

Earthborn to earth must pass-
Spirits of leaf and grass
Touched by the sun and air
Break into colors rare,
Blossom in love and flowers.
Theirs are the golden fruits -
Earth clings around the roots,