ung,
The welcome sound of supper-call to hear;
And down the shadowy lane, in tinklings clear,
The pastoral curfew of the cow-bell rung.
Thus soothed and pleased, our backward path we took,
Praising the farmer's home. He only spake,
Looking into the sunset o'er the lake,
Like one to whom the far-off is most near:
"Yes, most folks think it has a pleasant look;
I love it for my good old mother's sake,
Who lived and died here in the peace of God!"
The lesson of his words we pondered o'er,
As silently we turned the eastern flank
Of the mountain, where its shadow deepest sank,
Doubling the night along our rugged road:
We felt that man was more than his abode,--
The inward life than Nature's raiment more;
And the warm sky, the sundown-tinted hill,
The forest and the lake, seemed dwarfed and dim
Before the saintly soul, whose human will
Meekly in the Eternal footsteps trod,
Making her homely toil and household ways
An earthly echo of the song of praise
Swelling from angel lips and harps of seraphim!

INDIVIDUALITY.

At a certain depth, as has already been intimated in our literature,
all bosoms communicate, all hearts are one. Hector and Ajax, in Homer's
great picture, stand face to face, each with advanced foot, with
levelled spear, and turgid sinew, eager to kill, while on either side
ten thousand slaughterous wishes poise themselves in hot breasts,
waiting to fly with the flying weapons; yet, though the combatants
seem to surrender themselves wholly to this action, there is in each a
profound element that is no party to these hostilities. It is the pure
nature of man. Ajax is not all Greek, nor is Hector wholly Trojan: both
are also men; and to the extent of their mutual participation in this
pure and perpetual element of Manhood, they are more than friends,
more than relatives,--they are of identical spirit. For there is an
imperishable nature of Man, ever and everywhere the same, of which each
particular man is a testimony and representation. As the solid earth
underruns the "dissociating sea"--_Oceano dissociabili_--and joins in
one all sundered lands, so does this nature dip beneath the dividing
parts of our being, and make of all men one simple and inseparable
humanity. In love, in friendship, in true conversation, in all happiness
of communion between men, it is this unchangeable substratum or
substance of man's being tha