BY THE AUTHOR OF KATE WALSINGHAM.

Oh, there is many a spot in this every-day world of ours as bright and beautiful as those of which we dream, or go miles away to visit and admire; but we must seek for them in the right spirit, ere the dimness will pass away from eyes blinded by the love of foreign novelties. Our own land, ay, even our own city—the crowded mart of commerce, and the vast haunt of poverty and crime, is rich in many a quiet nook, which, although it might arrest the attention if depicted on the gemmed page of the picturesque annual by some summer tourist, it is considered plebeian to notice as we pass them in our daily walks.

We have sat beneath the vines and blue skies of Italy, and heard from her moonlight balconies such strains as made us hold our breath to listen that we might not lose a note ere the perfumed breeze bore it lingeringly away: and in after years, in those English balconies we have described, wept, beneath the same moon, tears that had more of joy than grief in them, at some rude and simple strain which, sung by loved lips, made the charm of our careless and happy childhood. We have stood awe-stricken before the walls of the Colosseum, at Rome, and dreamt of it for evermore! But we have likewise paused opposite the Colosseum in the Regent's Park, investing it in the dim twilight with a thousand beauties that made it an object of interest. We can well remember lingering in the neighborhood, before the mimic church, or convent, as we had been taught to call it, of St. Catharine, with the moonshine gleaming through its arches, and the flickering lights appearing here and there in the diamond-paned windows, watching eagerly for the appearance of those white-robed nuns with which our childish fancy had peopled that quiet place—wondering that they never came. And amid all the architectural glory of foreign churches and cathedrals, since visited, have failed again to realize that simple love of, and faith in the beautiful, which then invested every scene with its peculiar charm. Where the mind makes its own picturesque, it never yet failed to find materials, and is often gifted with a strange power to charm others into seeing with its own loving eyes! So the poet immortalizes the humble home of his boyhood, and in after years men make pilgrimages to the time-worn stile, the

which his genius has redeemed from obscurity, and rendered hallowed spots for evermore.

BY MRS. EMMA C. EMBURY.

BY LADY GEORGIANA FULLERTON.

How strange it is to those who are in some sense new to the world, to see the way in which time plasters over wounds which we should have imagined that nothing could have healed: wounds which we should have expected to see bleed afresh at the sight of the inflictor, as it was said of old that those of the murdered did at the approach of the murderer. Sometimes we almost feel as if nothing was real in that singular existence called the world. Like the performers, who laugh and talk behind the scenes after the close of some dreadful tragedy; we see around us men who have ruined the fortunes and destroyed the happiness of others, women who have betrayed and been betrayed, whose existence has been perhaps devoted to misery and to infamy by the first step they have taken in the path of guilt, and whose hearts, if they did not break grew hard; we see the victims and the destroyers, those who have loved and those who have hated, those who have injured and those who have been injured, mix together in the common thoroughfares of life, meet even in social intimacy, with offered hands and ready smiles; not because "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy;" not because "To those who forgive, shall much be forgiven;" but because what is genuine and true, what is deep and what is strong, takes no root in that worn-out soil on which we tread, thrives not in that withering air which we breathe in that fictitious region which we live in, and which we so emphatically and so presumptuously call the world.

BY MRS. LUELLA J. CASE.

CHARITY.

BY G. P. R. JAMES.

He was a fool, and not a philosopher, who said that uncertainty was the just condition of man's mind. In trust, in confidence, in firm conviction, and in faith, is only to be found repose and peace. Assurance is what man's heart and understanding both require, and the very fact of the mind not being capable of obtaining certainty upon many points, is a proof of weakness, not of strength.