The closing scenes of Mrs. Hemans's life display her affection in a high and rich degree. The recurrences to childhood show how quiet her conscience, and how mellowed her memory: her conversations with her sister all breathe a hope of immortality—the anxious yearning of a mind free from the impurities of earth; and ready to participate in that pleasure which is shared in a land her own pen has so touchingly depicted:— "Dreams cannot picture a world so fair,

Sorrows and death may not enter there,

Time doth not breathe on its fadeless bloom.”—Mrs. Hemans. “Call it not vain-they do not err who say,*

The ruling principle our life that marked,

Is seen most visibly when to decay

We yield. The seaman deems himself embarked,
That man of tempests and of direful storms;

The miser clutches at his gold and dies;
Springing from off his couch, the hated forms

Of enemies the warrior chief descries:

Visions of all his actions swiftly pass

In panoramic view his eyes before;

The poet, as he breathed his choaked alas,'

Has feebly pointed to his escritoir.

These show the spell, that charmed our lives along,

E'en in the last-the dying hour is strong."-Geo. R. Twinn.

THE YOUNG ENTHUSIASTS.

Mr. W. Now, Tom, unload those bulging pockets. Where's the cracked pebble we picked up by the road-side? What beautiful specimens! Quartz! granite! gneiss! limestone ! flints of every size and shape, but all polished and smooth.

Ella. Really, father, I can see nothing but pebble-stones, of which there are thousands as good lying by the road-side, in large heaps. Tom might have brought a cart-load quite as beautiful as these.

Mr. W. But their smoothness, Ella—their polish!

Ella. That is nothing: I suppose, they rubbed against one another till they became smooth.

Tom. Be so obliging, Miss Ella, as to tell me how they rubbed against each other.

Ella. Oh! really, you are a very tiresome boy. What should I know or care about little stones like these? Shew me a great piece of Dover Cliff with a lizard buried in it a hundred feet long, with a tail or a neck as long as the mast of a ship, and I will gladly look at it; but to be running down all manner of lanes after bits of rock and stone, crushing every beautiful flower in your eagerness, is—is—

*Call it not vain-they do not err

Who say, that when the poet dies,

Mute Nature mourns her worshipper,

And celebrates his obsequies.”—Sir W. Scott.

Tom (putting his hand over her mouth). Pray don't say what it is till I tell you of a young lady who also runs down all manner of lanes, treading carelessly upon every fossil or fragment of rock that lies in her way, and having with great trouble clambered up some steep bank to secure some rare flower, sits down upon the grass to tear its beautiful florets to pieces, to enable her to count its pistils and stamens, that she may know its class and order. What shall I call this?

Ella. Call it Botanizing, of all recreations and sciences the most enchanting and beautiful!

Tom. And mine is Geologizing, of all sciences the most astounding and wonderful. My dear Ella, your botany is pretty-may be beautiful, but it is no more; the science of Geology is "sublime," as well as "beautiful," carrying us back into ages immeasurably remote. It reveals to us the creation, existence, and death of many successive generations of animals, as well as plants; it chips off fragments from the tomb of old Time, and exposes him to our gaze in his very infancy.

Mr. W. Pray, my dear boy, check this wild enthusiasm. Gigantic geological fossil remains may commend themselves to you; and the beautiful and simple order and the exquisite colour of flowers may enrapture your sister; but as these young gentlemen and ladies have listened to you both with the most exemplary patience, without comprehending a word of what you have said, suppose we should try if we cannot find something to say about these pebble-stones that would interest them. Here, Cedric, here is a fossil-sponge from chalk!

Cedric. A what! father?

Mr. W. A sponge, a real sponge, such as you clean your slates withrather hardened and changed to be sure, but still a sponge.

Cedric. Let me look in my book: fossil, fossil sponge-I see! it means

a sponge formed under the ground.

Kenneth. But sponges are animals that grow in the sea?

they get under ground?

Cedric. May I break it?

Mr. W. Oh yes, by all means.

How can

Cedric. How it strikes fire! there! Why, Kenneth, it's nothing but flint.

Kenneth. Flint! Why then all the stone walls at Cromer in Norfolk, and the church, and many of the houses, are nothing but sponges turned into flint: I wish I had known that when I was there. I used to listen to the noises these fossil sponges made, as they were rolled over each other by the tide : but where did they come from?

Mr. W. Wait a little while. Where were these flints found?

Kenneth. In chalk.

Mr. W. Well: here is a piece of chalk, in which these flints are found in parallel rows, as you may see where the road is cut between two chalk hills, as at Royston near Cambridge. You see this piece of chalk?

Cedric. Yes.

Mr. W. Now I will chalk a dog on this black board. It has taken a thousand little shells to make his head, twenty thousand at least to form his legs, and about half a million for his body, and yet there is a small piece of the chalk left.

Amelia. Oh, father, you are trying to find out how much we can be made to believe. I can really see nothing upon this board .but a dog drawn in chalk, common chalk.

Tom. But, Milly, a powerful microscope would show that these chalky lines are shells of exquisite delicacy and beauty-chambered shells.

Amelia. I cannot believe that, Tom! I cannot indeed; the sponges turned into flints were hard to believe; but that the chalk hills, the thousands of tons of Dover Cliff that was blown down the other day, were nothing but the minute shells of sea animals is by far too wonderful to be believed by me.

Tom. Do not say so, my dear girl: this is nothing to the wonders geology reveals to us, connected with the history of these despised pebbles. The chalk cliffs, in which lie buried the fossil skeletons of monsters so frightfully vast that their very pictures almost scare us, were slowly forming, by the accumulation of these shells, in the depths of the ocean, ages after the smooth pebble I hold in my hand was broken from some ancient rock; comparatively speaking, chalk is but the formation of yesterday. Here is another pebble stone-when it was thrown through a volcanic crater, from the bowels of the earth, the foundations of the “everlasting hills" were being laid, and the vast mountain ranges,—the Himalayas the Alps-the Andes-the Pyrennees, were beginning to grow and increase. Here is another-when this was rolling at the bottom of some turbulent sea

Mr. W. My dear fellow-again in the clouds! wait till "Henson's Ærial Machine" is ready, that we may soar with you. "Great heights," you know, it's said, “ are dangerous to little heads;" and half your young audience have been asleep for some minutes, and I am persuaded that you have not yet succeeded in convincing Cedric and Kenneth that these wonderful pebbles were not made round that they might be used as boss

taws.

Tom. It's quite impossible that such young children should feel interested in the sublime discoveries of modern geology.

Mr. W. Quite so, if you will persist in sitting in the clouds, whilst your auditors are on terra firma.

Amelia. We should be quite delighted with Tom's flights when we understand more of these "old bones and stones."

Mr. W. Well Tom, let us enter into a compact together. I will undertake to teach the simple and elementary truths of geology; and you shall, occasionally, be indulged with a flight into the regions of your beloved antiquity, when this earth was slowly becoming the paradise it would have been, if sin and wickedness and cruelty had not robbed it of its pristine beauty.

May 4th, 1843.

J. H. W.