position. If that be good, riches will bring pleasure; but only vexation, if that be evil. To lavish money upon shining trifles; to make an idol of one's self for fools to gaze at; to rear mansions beyond our wants; to garnish them for display, and not for use; to chatter through the heartless rounds of pleasure; to lounge, to gape, to simper, and giggle; can wealth make VANITY happy by such folly? If wealth descends upon AVARICE, does it confer happiness? It blights the heart, as autumnal fires ravage the prairies! The eye glows with greedy cunning, conscience shrivels, the light of love goes out, and the wretch moves amidst his coin no better, no happier, than a loathsome reptile in a mine of gold. A dreary fire of self-love burns in the bosom of the avaricious rich, as a hermit's flame in a ruined temple of the desert. The fire is kindled for no deity, and is odorous with no incense, but only warms the shivering anchorite. Wealth will do little for LUST, but to hasten its corruption. There is no more happiness in a foul heart than there is health in a pestilent morass. Satisfaction is not made out of such stuff as fighting carousals, obscene revelry, and midnight orgies. An alligator, gorging or swollen with surfeit and basking in the sun, has the same happiness which riches bring to the man who eats to gluttony, drinks to drunkenness, and sleeps to stupidity. But riches indeed bless that heart whose almoner is BENEVOLENCE. If the taste is refined; if the affections are pure; if conscience is honest; if charity listens to the needy, and generosity relieves them; if the public-spirited hand fosters all that embellishes and all that ennobles society,— then is the rich man happy. On the other hand, do not suppose that poverty is a waste and howling wilderness. There is a poverty of vice mean, loathsome, covered with all the sores of depravity. There is a poverty of indolence where virtues sleep, and passions fret and bicker. There is a poverty which despondency makes a deep dungeon, in which the victim wears hopeless chains. May God save you from that! There is a spiteful and venomous poverty, in which mean and cankered hearts, repairing none of their own losses, spit at others' prosperity, and curse the rich, themselves doubly cursed by their own hearts. But there is a contented poverty, in which industry and peace rule, and a joyful hope, which looks out into another world, where riches shall neither fly nor fade. This poverty may possess an independent mind, a heart ambitious of usefulness, a hand quick to sow the seed of other men's happiness, and find its own joy in their enjoyment. If a serene age finds you in such poverty, it is such a wilderness if it be a wilderness - as that in which God led his chosen people, and on which he rained every day a heavenly manna. If God open to your feet the way to wealth, enter it cheerfully; but remember that riches will bless or curse you, as your own heart determines. But if, circumscribed by necessity, you are still indigent after all your industry, do not scorn poverty. There is often in the hut more dignity than in the palace; more satisfaction in the poor man's scanty fare than in the rich man's satiety. CANKER; an eating or corroding humor. VINDICTIVE; revengeful, malignant. DENOUNCE; accuse publicly, censure, condemn. CARGO; freight, load. ADVOCACY; act of pleading, vindication, defence. RESERVOIR; a place where any thing is kept in store, a cistern, a pond. GLOAT; stare with admiration or desire, gaze. EQUIPAGE; carriage, attendants, retinue. PARTNERSHIP; union of two or more in the same business. SWELTERING; Sweating profusely. PRIMARILY; in the first place. SIMPER; smile affectedly or foolishly. SHRIVELS; shrinks, withers. ANCHORITE; a recluse, a hermit. MORASS; a bog, a marsh. CAROUSALS; revellings, festivities. ORGIES; disorderly rites or revelry. GORGING; filling up to the throat. SURFEIT; excess of food. BICKER; skirmish, quarrel. THE SNOW-FLAKE. "Now, if I fall, will it be my lot And there will my course be ended?" It seemed in mid-air suspended. "O, no!" said the Earth; "thou shalt not lie But, then, I must give thee a lovelier form- "And then thou shalt have thy choice, to be With the pearls that the night scatters over the mead, Regaining thy dazzling brightness. "I'll let thee awake from thy transient sleep, Or, leaving the valley, the meadow, and heath, "Or, wouldst thou return to a home in the skies, And appear in the many and glorious dyes "Then I will drop," said the trusting Flake; "But bear it in mind, that the choice I make Is not in the flowers, nor the dew, to wake, Nor the mist, that shall pass with the morning. For, things of thyself, they will die with thee; But those that are lent from on high, like me, Must rise, and will live, from thy dust set free, To the regions above returning. "And if true to thy word and just thou art, For I would be placed in the beautiful bow, w 237. HANNAH F. GOULD. t 27. THREE PICTURES OF BOSTON. UNDERSTAND; er as in her; sound nd. MUST; sound final t. SURVEY; ur like er in her, not suv. FARMS; sound r. COMPRISES; o as in not; do not call it cum. To understand the character of the commerce of our own city, we must not look merely at one point, but at the whole circuit of country, of which it is the business centre. We must not contemplate it only at this present moment of time, but we must bring before our imaginations, as in the shifting scenes of a diorama, at least three successive historical and topographical pictures; and truly instructive I think it would be to see them delineated on canvass. We must survey the first of them in the company of the venerable John Winthrop, the founder of the state. Let us go up with him, on the day of his landing, the seventeenth of June, sixteen hundred and thirty, to the heights of yonder peninsula, as yet without a name. Landward stretches a dismal forest; seaward, a waste of waters unspotted with a sail, except that of his own ship. At the foot of the hill you see the cabins of Walford and the Spragues, who-the latter a year before, the former still earlier had adventured to this spot, untenanted else by any child of civilization. On the other side of the river lies Mr. Blackstone's farm. It comprises three goodly hills, converted by a spring-tide into three wood-crowned islets; and it is mainly valued for a noble spring of fresh water which gushes from the northern slope of one of the hills, and which furnished, in the course of the summer, the motive for transferring the seat of the infant settlement. This shall be the first picture. The second shall be contemplated from the same spot the heights of Charlestown - on the same day, the eventful |