of lodgings to let was put up on this
cottage.

I question whether any part of the world looks so beautiful as
England--this part of England, at least--on a fine summer morning. It
makes one think the more cheerfully of human life to see such a bright,
universal verdure; such sweet, rural, peaceful, flower-bordered
cottages,--not cottages of gentility, but dwellings of the laboring
poor; such nice villas along the roadside, so tastefully contrived for
comfort and beauty, and adorned more and more, year after year, with the
care and afterthought of people who mean to live in them a great while,
and feel as if their children might live in them also. And so they plant
trees to overshadow their walks, and train ivy and all beautiful vines
up against their walls,--and thus live for the future in another sense
than we Americans do. And the climate helps them out, and makes
everything moist and green, and full of tender life, instead of dry and
arid, as human life and vegetable life are so apt to be with us.
Certainly, England can present a more attractive face than we can, even
in its humbler modes of life,--to say nothing of the beautiful lives
that might be led, one would think, by the higher classes, whose
gateways, with broad, smooth gravelled drives leading through them, one
sees every mile or two along the road, winding into some proud
seclusion. All this is passing away, and society must assume new
relations; but there is no harm in believing that there has been
something very good in English life,--good for all classes, while the
world was in a state out of which these forms naturally grew.

MONA'S MOTHER.

In the porch that brier-vines smother,
At her wheel, sits Mona's mother.
O, the day is dying bright!
Roseate shadows, silver dimming,
Ruby lights through amber swimming,
Bring the still and starry night.

Sudden she is 'ware of shadows
Going out across the meadows
From the slowly sinking sun,--
Going through the misty spaces
That the rippling ruby laces,
Shadows, like the violets tangled,
Like the soft light, softly mingled,
Till the two seem just as one!

Every tell-tale wind doth waft her
Little breaths of maiden laughter.
O, divinely dies the day!
And the swallow, on the rafter,
In her nest of sticks and clay,--
On the rafter, up above her,
With her patience doth reprove her,
Twittering s