1. That, changed through all.— The word that is a relative pronoun, having God or soul as its antecedent. The following lines express the universal presence of God in everything. It is He who gives warmth to the sun, who refreshes in the breeze, &c. 2. As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart. The meaning is, that the presence of God may be as clearly seen in the smallest as in the greatest or most important object-in a human hair, or in a human heart, with all its wonderful and complicate ma chinery, The effect of the line, however, is not pleasing. 3. Secure.-Confident. 4. Or in the natal, or the mortal hour.-Natal hour, the hour of birth. (Latin, natus, born.) Mortal hour, the hour of death. (Latin, mors, mortis, death.) 5. All chance, &c.-What seems to you chance, is really divine direction; what you think discord, or something out of tune, is really a grand harmony, too great for man to understand. LESSON LVI. THOUGHTS ABOUT NEWSPAPERS.—Part I. 1. You may think that there is one side of the paper, one sheet in some journals, which I may pass over without notice-that which contains the advertisements. I believe we may make great use of these advertisements, not merely when we want to find a place, or a person to fill it; not merely when we have something to sell, or when there is something we need to buy; but when we have no special occasions for which we turn over the columns in that strange miscellany, when we merely let our eyes wander over houses, and servants, and shops, and vessels, and books, without knowing very well what we are looking for. 2. It is a curious and motley1 assemblage; that at least we must feel,—a great heap and chaos of things, that are somehow helping to make up this world in which we are dwelling. Might we not stop just for a moment or two to think of that, to recollect what a number of wants and wishes are set down here, and what a number of persons are trying, each in his own way, to gratify them? 3. Before any, even the shortest of these adver tisements, was taken to the office of the newspaper, and the one or more shillings paid for it, how much may have passed in the mind of the advertiser! Take, for instance, the simple case of a general servant wanting a place. I will not choose the opposite case, and enlarge on the doubts and perplexities of a master or mistress parting with a servant and looking out for another, though that might open curious chapters in domestic history. 4. I would speak rather of those anxious, serious moments, they may be, when a poor man or woman, who knows of no other honest way of getting a livelihood but this, and perhaps has a mother and sisters dependent upon earnings obtained in this way, tries one family after another, and then, as a last resource, determines to run the risk of "the paper." 5. Think of all that has gone before this, and of all the waiting for news after it; the uncertainty about the letter to A. B. or C. D., the hope of some particular place which happens to have been filled up the day before. Bring before yourselves just a few of the disappointments, and wearinesses, and temptations that have come to some three or four out of the numbers that are stating their wants day after day, and I believe you will have already got some use out of the newspaper. 6. For is it not a most useful thing to know a little more about our fellow-creatures, and the great or the little things which are occupying or disturbing them? If you had a map of London spread out before you, or if you looked down upon it from the top of St. Paul's, you would not have such a panoramic view of the streets and houses as you have in a large sheet of advertisements. 7. In the one you see the outsides of the houses and some indistinguishable figures walking about in the streets; but in the other you have a glimpse into the insides of them, some little hint of what these people are walking about for, of some of the thoughts that are going on in their hearts. That, I think, is a far more wonderful thing. 8. And there is this advantage in the way we arrive at our knowledge. We cannot gratify a little, petty, prying, vulgar curiosity about the circumstances or the schemes of our neighbours. As to most of the people, we do not know who they are, who are wanting this thing or that. All those notices, which contain so much of secret history, only tell us of some fellow-citizen, some fellow-creature of ours, not who he is, or any gossip about him. 9. What we learn from these records when they are put together is, that we are threads in a very complicated web, or to use another comparison, that we are parts of a puzzle, in which one piece might fit into the other if each that has need of something could just find out the other who has that something to supply. 10. That is one view of the case, but then there is another; that we are not threads, or bits of wood after all, but that we are human beings, with all kinds of sorrows and joys, and contradictions and sins, with a sense of being very little even when we are most trying to be great, and with the sense of having something very great, and mysterious, and immortal about us even when we are doing very little things; so that there may be earnestness and passion enough in us sometimes to move a world, while we are spending our time about a lookingglass or a ribbon. 11. Therefore if we consider these advertisements well, we find that people could not be made to fit into each other even if each man who had something to sell found the man who had that exact thing to buy; if the woman who was wanting to be a housekeeper found the person who desired exactly such a housekeeper as she was; that there must be something else than this to bind us together, and make us live and work together, as men are meant to do. 12. Looked at in this way, the sheet of advertisements seems to me, in spite of the multitude of odd trifles of which it is composed, a very serious document. It may remind us that, after all, we do not want the greater part of the things which these advertisers want, that we can do very well without them; but that there are some things which we do want, each one for himself, and which we want that we may live as if we belonged to a society, and not as if we were a set of different grains of sand, making up a heap which any strong wind will blow hither and thither. 1. Motley, i.e., of different colours. A motley assemblage is one composed of very different kinds and classes of people. 2. A. B. or C. D.-Persons adver tising often state that answers are to be addressed to some place under certain initials, so that the person advertising may not be known. |