solitude for all that were weary of company. Each house
was secluded from its neighbor. Yards and gardens full of trees and
shrubbery, the streets lined with venerable trees, gave the town at a
little distance the appearance of having been built in an orchard or a
forest-park. A few steps and you could be alone--a few steps too would
bring you among crowds. Where else could one watch the gentle conflict
between sounds and silence with such dreamy joy?--or make idleness seem
so nearly like meditation?--or more nimbly chase the dreams of night
with even brighter day-dreams, wondering every day what has become of
the day before, and each week where the week has gone, and in autumn
what has become of the summer, that trod so noiselessly that none knew
how swift were its footsteps! The town filled by July, and was not empty
again till late October.

There are but two perfect months in our year--June and October. People
from the city usually arrange to miss both. June is the month of
gorgeous greens; October, the month of all colors. June has the full
beauty of youth; October has the splendor of ripeness. Both of them are
out-of-door months. If the year has anything to tell you, listen now! If
these months teach the heart nothing, one may well shut up the book of
the year.

* * * * *

From "The Life of Jesus the Christ."

=_51._= THE CONCEPTION OF ANGELS, SUPERHUMAN.

The angels of the oldest records are like the angels of the latest. The
Hebrew thought had moved through a vast arc of the infinite cycle of
truth, between the days when Abraham came from Ur of Chaldea, and the
times of our Lord's stay on earth. But there is no development in angels
of later over those of an earlier date. They were as beautiful, as
spiritual, as pure and noble, at the beginning as at the close of the
old dispensation. Can such creatures, transcending earthly experience,
and far out-running any thing in the life of man, be creations of the
rude ages of the human understanding? We could not imagine the Advent
stripped of its angelic lore. The dawn without a twilight, the sun
without clouds of silver and gold, the morning on the fields without
dew-diamonds,--but not the Saviour without his angels? They shine within
the Temple, they bear to the matchless mother a message which would have
been a disgrace from mortal lips, but which from theirs fell upon her
as pure as dew-drops upon the lilies of the plain of Esdra