ut idle show
Strengthens and supports the rest.

For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our to-days and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.

Truly shape and fasten these;
Leave no yawning gaps between;
Think not, because no man sees,
Such things will remain unseen.

In the elder days of art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the gods see everywhere.

Let us do our work as well
Both the unseen and the seen;
Make the house where God may dwell
Beautiful, entire, and clean.

Else our lives are incomplete,
Standing in these walls of Time,
Broken stairways, where the feet
Stumble as they seek to climb.

Build to-day, then, strong and sure,
With a firm and ample base;
And ascending and secure
Shall to-morrow find its place.

Thus alone can we attain
To those turrets, where the eye
Sees the world as one vast plain,
And one boundless reach of sky.

--_Longfellow._

POLONIUS' ADVICE TO LAERTES.

Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportioned thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
The friends thou hast and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hooks of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade.
Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but being in,
Bear it that the opposer may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear; but few thine voice;
Take each man's censure; but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy;
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;
And they in France, of the best rank and station,
Are of a most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be;
For a loan oft loses both itself and friend.
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all--to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou can'st not then be false to any man.

--_Shakespeare._

THANATOPSIS.

To him who in the love of nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his