repeated quarrels. It is not fair, however, to charge him with indiscriminate destruction; there are few garden plants for which he has any regard, and the vast havoc he makes in the insect broods amply compensates for the stealing of a little green meat for his young

ones.

But the sparrow has his enemies. He lives no life of uninterrupted enjoyment. His acts of petty larceny bring upon him the vengeance of the farmer, who sets a price upon his head, and thereby encourages vagrancy and destructiveness in all the ragged urchins of a village. Arsenic, nux vomica, and baited traps, are offered him, and he takes his choice and dies forthwith, to haunt the fields afterwards in a ghostly shape, and revenge himself by watching the growth and multiplication of caterpillars caterpillars which he, if living, would have destroyed, but which, left to fatten on the farmer's crops, entail upon him ten times the cost of a sparrow. Then there is the screech owl, who now and then finds her way to the nest when both parents are out, and gobbles up the callow brood, and, if she could, would do a similar office for the parents. But the windhover hawk is his most deadly enemy. He dreads the high-flying mouser, and has no appetite for growing corn when she is within sight. It is seldom that he suffers in a positive way, for the windhover is mostly content with a few mice and cockchafers, but the dread is instinctive; he knows the hawk-like swoop, and he cowers under cover without making the necessary distinctions. As to scarecrows, he snaps his bill at such in perfect contempt. He views them as demonstrations of eccentricity,

matters for amusement rather than fear, and after a careful survey of a straw-stuffed man, with boots turned behind, and face without expression, he deems it the relic of some gunpowder-plot freak, and so far from being frightened, chooses it immediately as a suitable spot for his nest. Old hats stuffed with red rags, dead dogs and cats crucified on broom sticks, and rows of gay ribbons threaded on sticks, he holds in equal disregard, and if puzzled by them for a day or two, pays no more attention to them after he has seen their emptiness; and as to boys with horns and clappers, he takes no alarm from their hideous noises, but keeps at a safe distance in case of stones. Thus, in every sense, the sparrow is very individual; his ways and means are interesting, though neither song nor plumage claim any particular regard. He has character, and that redeems him from indifference. Song and plumage are both poor things compared with character: it is character we seek in men; and strong individualities make even rogues tolerable; for, after all, Will, which is the foundation of individuality, compels reverence, no less in feathered than in coated bipeds.

109

THE INNER LIFE.

EMERSON remarks in his beautiful essay on "Gifts," that "Flowers and fruits are always fit presents,— flowers, because they are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world. These gay natures contrast with the somewhat stern countenance of ordinary nature; they are like music heard out of a workhouse;" and it is in the sympathy which all natural objects have for the best sentiments of our nature which makes them always acceptable. Man is something more than a bundle of petty cares and jealousies he has within him a world of living beauty, and an existence ever seeking for closer sympathy with moral worth, and anxiously striving after higher states of perfection. But in the intercourse of men with each other the tendencies, and desires, and passions, which have been implanted within them for purposes of beauty -and beauty is the highest form of utility-get pushed beyond the legitimate sphere of their action, and become characterized in their development as vices. Hence, in all cities and large aggregations of men, the true nobility and intrinsic stamp of human character is sunk below the duplicities which float upon the surface of customs

and usages. Thus civilization, viewed in a narrow and partial light, has all the appearance of soul-murder; but, seen through the "optic glass" of a transcendental philosophy, simply indicates a necessary phase of the human mind in its progress upward; and is a manifestation, not of the destruction and annihilation of virtue, but of the perversion and distortion of our legitimate aims and actions. To look at modern society in its existing state of complexity and petty warfare, it has all the semblance of a huge mad-house; but, seen as a necessary condition of the human mind in its transition from a rugged barbarity to a high and exalted morality and beauty, it appears as a plain fact, but significant of the multiform changes and modifications of the same identical purpose, still striving to evolve itself through all the ages of the world.

But when we leave this inclosed world of antipodean and twisted interests, where we are eternally compelled to hedge and dodge, and dance a shapeless game of evasion, and go into the pine woods or mountain solitudes, where Nature still wears the freshness of a primeval morning, and awaits with complacent brow, and meekly folded hands, the appeals of her repentant children; we come into the sheen and lustre of a newmade life, and grow young again in the beauty and simplicity of a rugged and heroic virtue. The soul, tattered and despoiled, and weather-beaten in the strife and storm of petty contentions and mean and degrading tendencies, awakens again to the vigour and freshness of its true life, and seems to have been made anew. With men, the true soul seems ever in the presence of a blight

or pestilence, and droops and fades as in the hot and parching air of a sirocco: but with Nature, the true old love of innumerable ages comes dawning upon it, and it grows and expands in the opening of a new future, a future teeming with truth and beauty; and finds in this new realm of thought and perception an insight into its highest tendencies. In the buzz and distracting whirl of the world, the only hope of satisfaction seems to be in sorrow, for there we expect to meet with "sharp peaks and edges of truth;" but in Nature all is perpetual jubilee and song, and every feature wears the aspect of festive hilarity,-pure, ennobling, and true. The sunshine of Paphian skies seems ever dawning upon the horizon of a holier hope; the warmth and fruition of a new summer seems ever alighting upon the petals of unfading flowers; and in the dark brows of Dodonian oaks we see the type of ceaseless renewal and unspared exuberance. The soul grows and grows, and feels in its inmost recesses the awakening light and divinity of its highest spiritual truths.

Life is a constant flux of moods or conditions, evanescent and transmutable, yet, together, forming a great circle in which the true character is encentred. Be the mood what it may, it is but a reflex of the combined conditions of the true character which lies beneath, and the outward and visible influences which surround us. Every man wishes for good, wishes to attain to the practice of virtue, and to gather to himself the noblest thoughts; but while we glide hither and thither under masks and pretensions, we mutually deceive ourselves and others, and the world comes at last to wear the