to be hoped, however, that his 'grace' was not
like the few set words handed down from father to son, mumbled without
emotion, and despatched with indecent haste, which one sometimes hears
repeated over country repasts. 'Bless this portion of food now in
readiness for us; give it to us in thy love; let us eat and drink in thy
fear--for CHRIST's sake----LORENZO, _take your fingers out of that
plate!_' was a grace once said in _our_ hearing, but evidently not in that
of the spoilt boy, 'growing and always hungry,' who could not wait to be
served. We should prefer to such insensible flippancy the practice of an
old divine in New-England, who in asking a blessing upon his meals, was
wont to name each separate dish. Sitting down one day to a dinner, which
consisted partly of clams, bear-steak, etc., he was forced in a measure to
forego his usual custom of furnishing a 'bill of particulars.' 'Bless to
our use,' said he, 'these treasures hid in the sand; bless this----' But
the bear's-meat puzzled him, and he concluded with: 'Oh! LORD, _thou only
knowest what it is_!' . . . A FAVORITE correspondent of this Magazine, who
appears in the pages of the present number for the first time in several
months, accompanies his excellent paper with a letter, from which we take
these sentences: 'Since you last heard from me, I have experienced a
severe domestic affliction in the loss of my father, who died during the
last summer. Day after day and night after night for two months I sat by
his bed-side, hoping in vain for his recovery, until life's star was
extinguished in the darkness of the grave.' Our cordial sympathies are
with our correspondent; but sympathy for affliction such as his can carry
with it little of consolation to the bereaved:

----'A FRIEND is gone!
A FATHER, whose authority, in show
When most severe, and must'ring all its force,
Was but the graver countenance of love;
Whose favor, like the clouds of spring, might lower,
And utter now and then an awful voice,
But had a blessing in his darkest frown,
Threat'ning at once, and nourishing the plant.'

Perchance our friend may now think with COWPER, that 'although he loved,
yet not _enough_, the gentle hand that reared him.' 'The chief thing that
I have to reproach myself with,' writes one who laments a kindred
dispensation of the SUPREME, 'is a sort of inattention to my father's
feelings, occasionally, arising merely from the disparity of years betwee