h all its gulfs and inlets and
multitudinous shores, hardly seems to be. It does not love you very
dearly, and will not miss you much when you disappear from its margin;
but it means well to you, bids you good-morning with its coming waves,
and good-evening with those which are leaving. It will lead your
thoughts pleasantly away, upwards to its source, downwards to the stream
to which it is tributary, or the wide waters in which it is to lose
itself. A river, by choice, to live by in middle age.

"In hours of melancholy reflection, in those last years of life which
have little left but tender memories, the still companionship of the
lake, embosomed in woods, sheltered, fed by sweet mountain brooks and
hidden springs, commends itself to the wearied and saddened spirit. I am
not thinking of those great inland seas, which have many of the features
and much of the danger that belong to the ocean, but of those 'ponds,'
as our countrymen used to call them until they were rechristened by
summer visitors; beautiful sheets of water from a hundred to a few
thousand acres in extent, scattered like raindrops over the map of our
Northern sovereignties. The loneliness of contemplative old age finds
its natural home in the near neighborhood of one of these tranquil
basins."

Nature does not always plant her poets where they belong, but if we look
carefully their affinities betray themselves. The youth will carry his
Byron to the rock which overlooks the ocean the poet loved so well. The
man of maturer years will remember that the sonorous couplets of Pope
which ring in his ears were written on the banks of the Thames. The old
man, as he nods over the solemn verse of Wordsworth, will recognize the
affinity between the singer and the calm sheet that lay before him as he
wrote,--the stainless and sleepy Windermere.

"The dwellers by Cedar Lake may find it an amusement to compare their
own feelings with those of one who has lived by the Atlantic and the
Mediterranean, by the Nile and the Tiber, by Lake Leman and by one of
the fairest sheets of water that our own North America embosoms in its
forests."

Miss Lurida Vincent, Secretary of the Pansophian Society, read this
paper, and pondered long upon it. She was thinking very seriously of
studying medicine, and had been for some time in frequent communication
with Dr. Butts, under whose direction she had begun reading certain
treatises, which added to such knowledge of the laws of life