MEN's thoughts are much according to their inclination; their discourse and their speeches according to their learning and infused opinions; but their deeds are after as they have been accustomed; therefore there is no trusting to the force of Nature, nor to the bravery of words, except it be corroborate by custom. Therefore since custom is the principal magistrate of man's life, let men by all means endeavor to obtain good customs. LORD BACON'S Essays. 'Tis past! no more the SABBATH blooms! Ascending in the rear, Behold congenial AUTUMN comes, The SABBATH of the year! And twilight consecrates the floods; O let me wander through the sounding woods. LOGAN. As well known streams! Ah wonted groves, Still pictured in my mind! O sacred scene of youthful loves, Whose image lives behind! While sad I ponder on the past, The joys that must no longer last, The wild flower strown on summer's bier, The dying music of the grove, And the last elegies of love, Dissolve the soul, and draw the tender tear. Yet not unwelcome waves the wood, That hides one in its gloom, While lost in melancholy mood, I muse upon the tomb. Their chequered leaves the branches shed They sadly sigh that winter's near; The warning voice I hear behind, That shakes the wood without a wind, And solemn sounds the death-bell of the year. LOGAN. PART IV. VOICES OF THE AUTUMN. CHAPTER XXII. Voices of the Autumn-Joyous and Solemn Characteristics of the Season-The Lessons of the Trees-The Scriptural Expression, Trees of Righteousness-The great Autumnal Question. THE Sabbath of the year! It is certainly a beautiful designation; and the whole Autumnal season, with its mixture of tenderness and melancholy in the fall of the leaf and the preparation for Winter, is not improperly thus characterized. The Indian Summer of America, coming in the midst of Autumn, is more like a Sabbath of Nature, than any other interval of months or seasons. Solemnity and repose, thoughtfulness and silent worship, characterize the air and the landscape. It is difficult to resist, and impossible not to notice, the sober, meditative, pensive impression. All the impulses of Nature are prophetic of the dying year. And yet, the Autumn, with its richness and abundance, its troops of reapers, its merry huskings, and its harvest homes, is at glad, grateful, joyous season. Old nations have celebrated it as such. It is full of joy and happiness in the Word of God, and the old Hebrews connected anything but melancholy associations with it. Indeed their feasts of Harvest and of Tabernacles were occasions of exultant delightfulness, of the sunniest and heartiest kind. For eight days together they dwelt together in shady tents, erected with green boughs along the streets of the Holy City, and on the roofs of the houses, in commemoration and imitation of their dwellings when they wandered from Egypt. As the Feast of Tabernacles was likewise a festival of gratitude after the vintage, and the gathering in of the fruits, they carried about the productions of the choicest trees, with branches of palm, willow, pomegranate, and other verdurous and thickfoliaged boughs. The whole season passed away with songs and music in unmingled cheerfulness. Jerusalem, during its continuance, wore the appearance of one vast, thickly-clustered, luxuriant bower, in the evening widely and splendidly illuminated. A New England Thanksgiving Festival is such an Autumn season of delight, with the warmth and heartiness of home gatherings, to make up for the luxuriance and sweetness of an Oriental clime. Gratitude to God for his ceaseless bounty is the prevailing and abounding lesson in the morals of the Autumn, but the season has likewise deep and solemn analogies peculiar to itself. God's covenant of mercy in the unalterable fixtures of the seasons, is full of heavenly lessons in every part. WHILE THE EARTH REMAINETH, SEED-TIME AND HARVEST, AND COLD AND HEAT, AND SUMMER AND WINTER, AND DAY AND NIGHT, SHALL NOT CEASE. Seed-time and harvest are of all the Seasons the deepest, most direct, most profoundly thoughtful and suggestive in their instructions and their warnings. There is solemn meaning and warning in a seed; though it be out of sight, and dead beneath the ground, it speaketh. And every growth from seeds, the fruits, the trees, the harvests good or bad, all are laden with the lessons of character and consequences. In an autumnal landscape, indeed in every landscape, all the seasons through, but especially when the Frost has commenced its silent ministry, and the leaves are changing, but have not fallen, the trees are the object of most commanding interest. The moral uses and lessons of a great forest are many and deep. In the Word of God itself there are few comparisons more instructive and beautiful than those between the leaves of nature and the life of man; or, in a different relation, those between a growing tree and a growing Christian. The plants of Divine Grace are sometimes called Trees of Righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he might be glorified. In the first Psalm this same presentation of a righteous man stands like a graceful tree before an ornamented gateway to an Oriental garden. Blessed is the man, whose delight is in the Law of the Lord. He shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither, and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper. In the seventeenth chapter of Jeremiah this comparison is drawn out with still greater minuteBlessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green, and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit. ness. In those Egyptian deserts on the banks of the Nile, where the |