deal said about the importance of gaining mastery over our animal passions, propensities, and emotions. Many an earnest prayer for help to conquer these fleshly lusts has been breathed. The fact is, however, that with minds trained to perfect subservience, the passions can have but little sway. It is unrestrained imagination that kindles the fires of passion. Cool blood generally goes with cool heads. Too much stress can not be laid upon the fundamental importance of perfect command over thought. How many a student finds a lack of this power the chief hinderance to progress! How many a page must be re-read, how many a lesson conned over and over, to compensate for lapses of thought! In the possession or absence of this power over mind, lies the chief difference between mental strength and mental weakness. Some men think as a child plays with a hammer, striking little blows here, there, anywhere, at any object within reach. The action of a strong mind may be compared to the stone-breaker's sledge-hammer, dealing stubborn blows successively upon one spot till the hard rock cracks and yields.

When this command over thought has been acquired through the long exercise of resolute will, the power to arrange ideas and to think systematically will come with it, and no thinking amounts to much unless it is systematic. This, then, may be considered as the second important acquirement in the art of thinking.

The power to classify and arrange ideas in proper order is one that comes more or less slowly to even the best of minds. In proportion as this faculty is strengthened, desultory and wasted effort diminishes. When the mind acts, it acts to some purpose, and can begin where it left off without going over the whole ground again to take up the threads of its ratiocinations.

Concentration and system are thus seen to be the chief elements of the art of thinking. To cultivate the first, constant watchfulness to detect the least wandering, and the

immediate exertion of the will to call back and hold the mind upon the subject under consideration, should be vigilantly exercised. To secure the latter, the practice of analyzing and considering the different parts of a subject, first separately, and then in their relations to each other, is a discipline to which every young mind should be subjected, and which, we are sorry to say, is very much neglected in the methods of instruction practiced in this country.

V.-GONE OUT FOREVER.

LIKE drooping, dying stars, our dearly loved ones go away from our sight. The stars of our hopes, our ambitions, our prayers, whose light ever shines before us, suddenly pale in the firmament of our heart, and their place is left empty, cold, and dark. A mother's steady, soft, and earnest light, that beamed through wants and sorrows; a father's strong, quick light, that kept our feet from stumbling in the dark and treacherous ways; a sister's light, so mild, so pure, so constant, and so firm, shining upon us from gentle, loving eyes, and persuading us to grace and goodness; a brother's light, forever sleeping in our soul, and illuminating our goings and comings; a friend's light, true and trusty-gone out forever! No! the light has not gone out. It is shining beyond the stars, where there is no night and no darkness forever and for

ever.

SILENT INFLUENCE."

If a sheet of paper, on which a key has been laid exposed for some minutes in the sunshine, be then instantaneously viewed in the dark, the key removed, a faded specter of the key will be visible. Let this paper be laid aside for many months where nothing can disturb it, and

K. N. E.-13.

then in darkness be laid on a plate of hot metal, and the specter of the key will appear. This is equally true of our minds. Every man we meet, every book we read, every picture or landscape we see, every word or tone we hear, leaves its image on our brain. These traces, which under ordinary circumstances are invisible, never fade, but in the intense light of cerebral excitement start into prominence just as the spectral image of the key started into sight on the application of heat. It is thus with all the influence to which we are subjected.

VI. THE KING'S PICTURE.

THE king from the council chamber
Came, weary and sore of heart.
He called for Hiff, the painter,
And spake to him apart:

"I am sick of faces ignoble,
Hypocrites, cowards, and knaves!

I shall shrink to their shrunken measure,
Chief slave in a realm of slaves!

"Paint me a true man's picture,

Gracious, and wise, and good;

Dowered with the strength of heroes,
And the beauty of womanhood.

It shall hang in my inmost chamber,
That thither, when I retire,

It may fill my soul with its grandeur,
And warm it with sacred fire."

So the artist painted the picture,
And it hung in the palace hall;
Never a thing so goodly
Had garnished the stately wall.
The king, with head uncovered,
Gazed on it with rapt delight,

Till it suddenly wore strange meaning,
And baffled his questioning sight.

For the form was his supplest courtier's, Perfect in every limb;

But the bearing was that of the henchman Who filled the flagons for him;

The brow was a priest's, who pondered

His parchment early and late;

The eye was a wandering minstrel's
Who sang at the palace gate;

The lips, half sad and half mirthful,
With a fitting, tremulous grace,

Were the very lips of a woman
He had kissed in the market-place;

But the smile which her curves transfigured
As a rose with a shimmer of dew,

Was the smile of the wife who loved him, Queen Ethelyn, good and true.

Then "Learn, O king," said the artist,
"This truth that the picture tells—
How, in every form of the human,
Some hint of the Highest dwells;
How, scanning each living temple,
For the place where the veil is thin,
We may gather, by beautiful glimpses,
Some form of the God within."

VII.-SHORT SELECTIONS.

AMBITION.

NATURE, that framed us of four elements,
Warring within our breasts for regimen,
Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds;
Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend
The wondrous architecture of the world,
And measure ev'ry wand'ring planet's course,
Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres,

Will us to wear ourselves, and never rest
Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,
That perfect bliss, and sole felicity,
The sweet fruition of a heavenly crown.

-Marlowe.

PERSEVERANCE.

STICK to your aim: the mongrel's hold will slip,
But only crow-bars loose the bull-dog's grip;
Small as he looks, the jaw that never yields
Drags down the bellowing monarch of the fields.

-Holmes.

ARGUMENT.

BE calm in arguing; for fierceness makes
Error a fault, and truth discourtesy.
Why should I feel another man's mistakes
More than his sicknesses or his poverty?
In love I should; but anger is not love,
Nor wisdom either; therefore gently move.

AUTHORITY.

AUTHORITY intoxicates,

And makes mere sots of magistrates;

The fumes of it invade the brain,

And make men giddy, proud, and vain;
By this the fool commands the wise,
The noble with the base complies,

The sot assumes the role of wit,

And cowards make the base submit.

-Butler.

CANDOR.

You talk to me in parables:

You may have known that I'm no wordy man;
Fine speeches are the instruments of knaves

Or fools that use them, when they want good sense;
But honesty

Needs no disguise or ornament; be plain.

-Otway.