wood, are put by builders under an arch of stone, while it is in the process of construction, till the key-stone is put in. Just such is the use that Satan makes of pleasures to construct evil habits upon; the pleasure lasts perhaps until the habit is fully formed, but that done, the structure may stand eternal; the pleasures are sent for firewood, and the hell begins in this life."

The materials a man gathers in his memory for the judgment are solemn, but the elements out of which he weaves his habits are still more so. Memory is for the past, habit is for the future; memory surveys the past, and conscience acts accordingly, but habit determines the future. What a man is, when

So then, though the

he is taken away, that will he be for ever. prospect in youth, looking only to the possibility of an advanced age, is, indeed, important, looking to eternity, it becomes infinitely so.

"Habits," says that great and powerful writer, from whom I have quoted in the opening of this chapter, " are growing very fast; some of them may not be good; but they still grow, while we speculate on them, and will soon close, like the ices from the opposite shores in the Arctic Seas, except dashed by the interruption of a mighty force. Is the spectator unconcerned, while they are closing around him? Or is he descanting wisely on the laws of habit, till he becomes its victim? The mind is a traitor to itself; it will not wait, while we are seeking wise principles, nor return when we have found them."

No! its own habits become its principles. However wisely it may be seeking and speculating, it is itself already, and all the while, forming an inveterate and immutable character. A man seems to be travelling, as he paces the deck of a ship in the ocean; but it is the ship that is carrying him, and he goes

not one step further or faster, for his own exertions or by his own motions, than the vessel, to which he has committed the very power of advancement, and by which he is borne along. Thus has every man two motions through life, his future purposes and his present character; but if his future purposes do not form his present character (as a supreme regard to the unseen and eternal does), then his present character forms and absorbs his future purposes, and as fast as he overtakes them, just makes them but parts of his present self. The soul that is speculating is also acting. The rudder is behind the ship, not before it; the determination of what a man is to be, springs from what he is. The ship cannot sail to a distant port without helm or compass, there to receive, for the first time, those guid ing articles of navigation; she must have them already, in order to reach that port. With the same rudder and compass with

which a man has sailed through life, with those, and none other, does he launch upon the ocean of eternity.

I SIT with all the windows and the doors wide open, and am regaled with the scent of every flower, in a garden as full of flowers as I have known how to make it. We keep no bees, but if I had lived in a hive, I should hardly hear more of their music. All the bees in the neighborhood resort to a bed of mignionette, opposite the window, and pay me for the honey they get out of it, by a hum, which, though rather monotonous, is as agreeable to my ear as the whistling of my linnets. All the sounds that nature utters are delightful.

Everything I see in the fields is to me an object; and I can look at the same rivulet, or at a handsome tree, every day of my life, with new pleasure. This indeed is partly the effect of a natural taste for rural beauty, and partly the effect of habit; for I never in all my life have let slip the opportunity of breathing fresh air, and conversing with nature.

COWPER'S Letters.

AND because the breath of flowers is far sweeter in the air, where it comes and goes like the warbling of music, than in the hand, therefore nothing is more fit for that delight, than to know what be the flowers and plants that do best perfume the air. Roses, damask and red, are fast flowers of their smells; so that you may walk by a whole row of them, and find nothing of their sweetness; yea, though it be in a morning's dew. That which, above all others yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet, especially the white double violet, which comes twice a year. Next to that the musk-rose, then the flower of the vines, then sweet-brier, then wall-flowers, then pinks and gilliflowers, especially the matted pink and clove gilliflower, then the flowers of the lime tree, then the honeysuckles, so they be somewhat afar off. Of bean-flowers I speak not, because they are field flowers; but those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three, that is, burnet, wild thyme, and water-mints; therefore yc & to set whole alleys of them, to have the pleasure when

walk or tread.

LORD BACON'S Essay on Gardens.

CHAPTER XX.

Voices of the Summer, continued-Flowers, with their Loveliness and Lessons-The Process of Ingrafting-Analogy between this Process and that of Regeneration by the Word of God-The Discipline of Severity in Nature and in Providence, and its Uses.

SUMMER is the season of Flowers, though the autumn possesses her harvest of them, quite as fragrant and delightful. There is, perhaps, no grand or solemn analogy that answers to them, or was ever intended by them, except it be their quickly fading beauty and decay; a sad and fit memorial of man's transitory glory, for like the flower of the grass, so he perisheth. But there is in them a dear pervading moral of gentleness and love. They sweetly speak the goodness and loveliness of the Creator. They are thrown everywhere, in rich, unstinted, kindly, rejoicing profusion; and that itself is a lesson to man. Their very nomenclature, not in science, but in the language of the peasantry and of childhood, all over the world, is attractive to the heart, and full of instruction. They are emblems of the sweetest thoughts and feelings, of kind words, bright animating smiles, affectionate greetings, the hearty welcome, sympathising tears, self-forgetting pity, truth, goodness, humility, contentment, peace,