n.

_Sermons_ (_Good News of God_).

Ash Wednesday.

There is a repentance too deep for words--too deep for all confessionals,
penances, and emotions or acts of contrition; the repentance, not of the
excitable, theatric Southern, unstable as water even in his most violent
remorse, but of the still, deep-hearted Northern, whose pride breaks
slowly and silently, but breaks once for all; who tells to God what he
will never tell to man, and having told it, is a new creature from that
day forth for ever.

_Two Years Ago_, chap. xviii.

The True Fast.

The _rationale_ of Fasting is to give up habitual indulgences for a time,
lest they become our masters--artificial _necessities_.

_MS._

March.

Early in the Springtime, on raw and windy mornings,
Beneath the freezing house-eaves, I heard the starlings sing--
Ah! dreary March month, is this then a time for building wearily?
Sad, sad, to think that the year is but begun!

Late in the Autumn, on still and cloudless evenings,
Among the golden reed-beds I heard the starlings sing--
Ah! that sweet March month, when we and our mates were courting
merrily;
Sad, sad, to think that the year is all but done.

_The Starlings_.

Knowledge and Love. March 1.

Knowledge and Love are reciprocal. He who loves knows. He who knows
loves. Saint John is the example of the first; Saint Paul of the second.

_Letters and Memories_. 1842.

A Charm of Birds. March 2.

Little do most people know how much there is to learn--what variety of
character, as well as variety of motion, may be distinguished by the
practised ear in a "charm of birds"--from the wild cry of the
missel-thrush, ringing from afar in the first bright days of March a
passage of one or two bars repeated three or four times, and then another
and another, clear and sweet and yet defiant--for the great "storm-cock"
loves to sing when rain and wind is coming on, and faces the elements as
boldly as he faces hawk and crow--down to the delicate warble of the
wren, who slips out of his hole in the brown bank where he has huddled
through the frost with wife and children, all folded in each other's arms
like human beings. Yet even he, sitting at his house-door in the low
sunlight, says grace for all mercies in a song so rapid, so shrill, so
loud, and yet so delicately modulated, that you wonder at the amount of
soul within that tiny body; and then stops suddenly