And leisure for good deeds, thoughtfully planned.
Farewell, thou garish world! thou Italy,
False widow of departed Liberty!

I scorn thy base caresses.

Welcome the roll

Between us of my own bright Adrian Sea!

Welcome these wilds, from whose bold heights my soul Looks down on your degenerate Capitol !

TIME MISSPENT.

There is no remedy for time misspent ;
No healing for the waste of idleness
Whose very languor is a punishment

Heavier than active souls can feel or guess:
O hours of idleness and discontent,

Not now to be redeemed! ye sting not less
Because I know this span of life was lent
For lofty duties, not for selfishness;
Not to be wiled away in aimless dreams,
But to improve ourselves, and serve mankind,
Life and its choicest faculties were given.
Man should be better than he seems,

And shape his acts, and discipline his mind,
To walk adorning earth with hope of heaven.

SAD IS OUR YOUTH, FOR IT IS EVER GOING.

Sad is our youth, for it is ever going,
Crumbling away beneath our very feet;
Sad is our life, for onward it is flowing

In current unperceived, because so fleet;
Sad are our hopes, for they are sweet in sowing,—
But tares, self-sown, have overtopped the wheat;
Sad are our joys, for they are sweet in blowing,-
And still, o still, their dying breath is sweet;
And sweet is youth, although it hath bereft us

Of that which made our childhood sweeter still;
And sweet is middle life, for it hath left us

A nearer good to cure an older ill;

And sweet are all things, when we learn to prize them, Not for their sake, but His, who grants them or denies

them!

DE VERE, MAXIMILIAN SCHELE, an American teacher and writer, born near Wexio, Sweden, in 1820. After some time spent in military and diplomatic service in Prussia, he emigrated to the United States, and in 1844 was appointed Professor of Modern Languages in the University of Virginia. Besides several text-books for the study of the French language, he is the author of Outlines of Comparative Philology (1853); Stray Leaves from the Book of Nature (1856); Studies of our English (1867); The Great Empress, a novel, and Wonders of the Deep (1869); Americanisms (1871); and The English of the New World (1873). He has translated into English Spielhagen's Problematic Characters, Through Night to Light, and The Hohensteins.

Upon the publication of Professor De Vere's novel of ancient life entitled The Great Empress, the following appreciative words appeared in The Nation: "The author seems bitten with the desire to ensnare youthful devotees of light literature' into the acquisition of historical knowledge by keeping carefully out of sight such dry and prosaic matters as dates and precise references, and setting before them instead a highly colored picture of the times and people whom he is describing."

Professor Hart, in his Manual, says that the

publications of Professor De Vere, “mostly in the department of linguistics, have been of a scholarly, and at the same time of a popular, character."

THE MOORS.

On many a plain, on lofty table-lands, or close to the ocean's restless pulse, wherever water gathers from a thousand invisible sources, little pools and miniature lakes are formed, which the clayey ground or solid rock beneath prevents from reaching their great home in the sea. Upon these waters little tiny plants appear, hardly visible confervæ; they come, man knows not whence, but they multiply in amazing haste, and soon cover the stagnant pool with living green. On a sudden, however, they are gone; they have sunk down to the bottom. There they form layer upon layer; slowly, indeed, for the naked eye measures them only by hundreds of generations; but as particles of sand and stone gather in their hidden folds, and as the bodies and shells of countless minute animals, who found a home in the waters above, are buried amidst them, they rise year after year. Gradually they afford a footing and food for numerous water-worts, in whose mouldering remains mosses and rushes begin to settle. These bind their roots firmly, they join hand in hand and arm in arm, until at last they form a soft green cover of peaty mould, far and near, over the dark, mysterious waters. The older the moor, the firmer and stronger is, of course, this turf-cover over the brownish pool, that gives out a faint, but piercing fragrance. Near the sea-shore, and in rainy regions, larger quantities of water frequently remain between the firm ground and the felt-like cover, so that the surface breathes and heaves like the waves of the great ocean. In drier countries, heath, hair-grass, and even bilberry-bushes, grow in the treacherous mould. But the moisture beneath gnaws constantly at their roots, so that they die off, whilst the herb above clings pertinaciously to life, and sends out ever new shoots a faint, false resemblance of life, like the turf on the moor itself, in its restless, unstabled suspension above the dark-brown water beneath.

This turf-cover, consisting of countless partly decayed plants, and their closely interwoven roots, is our peat; those vegetable masses that have accumulated at the bottom of the moor are bog-earth, and below them, as the oldest layer of all, lies the so-called black peat. Dark and dismal the green turf stretches far away, as far as eye can reach. It knows neither spring nor summer. Below is the dark, unfathomed abyss. Here and there fierce gusts of wind, or strange powers from below, have torn the gloomy shroud asunder, and the dark, black waters stare at you. .. Even the

bright sun of heaven cannot light up the haunted mirror-its golden face looks pale and leaden. No fish swims in the inhospitable water; no boat passes swiftly from shore to shore. Whatever has life and dreads death, flees the treacherous moor. Woe to the unfortunate man who misses the narrow path! A single step amiss, and he sinks into the gulf; the green turf closes over him, and drowns the gurgling of the waters and the anxious cry of the victim.

Far, far down in the depths of the moor there lies many a secret of olden times. Below the grim, ghastly surface, below the waters, below the black remnants of countless plants, lie the sad memorials of ages unknown to the history of man. Huge trees stand upright, and their gigantic roots rest upon the crowns of still older forest giants! In the inverted oaks of Murten Moor, in Switzerland, many see the famous oak woods that Charlemagne caused to be cut down, now more than a thousand years ago. For centuries the moors have hid in their silent bosom the gigantic works of ancient Rome; and posterity has gazed with awe and wonder at the masterly roads and massive bridges, like those built of perishable wood by Germanicus, when he passed from Holland into the valley of the Weser. Far in the deep lie buried the stone hatchets and flint arrow-heads of Frisians and Cheruski, by the side of the copper kettle and iron helmet of the Roman soldier. A Phoenician skiff was found of late and alongside of it a boat laden with bricks. The skeletons of antediluvian animals rest there peaceably by the corpses of ancient races with sandals on their feet and the skins of animals around

their naked bodies. Hundreds of brave English horsemen, who sought an honorable death in the battle of Solway, were swallowed up, horse and men, by the insatiable moor.

.

Even in our day moors grasp with their death-hand at living nature around them. Here and there a lofty tree still rises from the dismal depth; in mountain-valleys even groves and forests sometimes break the sad monotony. But in the unequal struggle the moor is sure to win the battle. Like foul disease, the hungry moor-water gnaws at the roots of the noble trees. It softens the ground, it changes it into morass, and the proud giants of the forest fall one by one before the dark invisible foe beneath them. They resist long and bravely; but their roots are drowned with the abominable liquid; their hold is loosened, their leaves turn yellow and crisp; the wintry storm comes in fury, and the noble tree sinks powerless into the grave at its feet. The struggle may be marked, even now, in all its stages. Thus, in the famous Black Forest of Germany, there rise on many a breezy hill glorious old fir-trees, and graceful, silvery birches. Only a few yards beyond, however, the eye meets with but sorry, stunted dwarfs, trees crippled before they reached their height, old before their time, and weak already in the days of their youth. Their crowns are withered, their branches hung with weird weeping mosses. Then the trees become still fewer and smaller; low, deformed trunks with twisted branches alone survive. At last these also disappear, and the dead quiet of the moor, with its humble heath, broken here and there by a dead bush or a lowly hillock, reigns alone and triumphant.-Stray Leaves from the Book of Nature.