From the hour of the invention of printing, books, and not kings, were to rule in the world. Weapons forged in the mind, keen-edged, and brighter than a sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and the battle-axe. Books! light-houses built on the sea of time! Books! by whose sorcery the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before the eyes. From their pages great souls look down in all their grandeur, andimmed by the faults and follies of earthly existence, consecrates by time.

Edwin P. Whipple.

TREASURES

FROM

THE PROSE WORLD

Indian Summer.

The Year has paused to remember, and beautiful her memories are. She recalls the Spring; how soft the air! And the Summer; how deep and warm the sky! And the harvest; how pillar'd and golden the clouds! And the rainbows and the sunsets; how gorgeous are the woods!

Indian Summer is nature's "sober, second thought," and to me, the sweetest of the thinking. A veil of golden gauze trails through the air; the woods en déshabillé, are gay with the hectic flushes of the Fall; and the bright sun, relenting, comes meekly back again, as if he would not go to Capricorn. He has a kindly look; he no longer dazzles one's eyes out, but has a sunset softness in his face, and fairly blushes at the trick he meditated. Round, red Sun! rich ruby in the jewelry of God! it sets as big as the woods; and ten acres of forest, in the distance, are relieved upon the great disc-a rare device upon a glorious medallion. The sweet south wind has come again, and breathes softly through the woods, till they rustle like a banner of crimson and gold; and waltzes gaily with the dead

leaves that strew the ground, and whirls them quite away sometimes, in its frolic, over the fields and the fences, and into the brook, in whose little eddies they loiter on the way, and never get "down to the sea" at all.

Who wonders that, with this mirage of departed Summer in sight, the peach trees sometimes lose their reckoning, fancy Winter, pale fly-leaf in the book of Time, has somehow slipped out, and put forth their rosy blossoms only to be carried away, to-day or to-morrow, by the blasts of November.

And with the sun and the wind, here are the birds once more. A blue bird warbles near the house, as it used to do; the sparrows are chirping in the bushes, and the wood-robins flicker like flakes of fire through the trees. Now and then a crimson or yellow leaf winnows its way slowly down through the smoky light, and "the sound of dropping nuts is heard" in the still woods. The brook that a little while ago stole along in the shadow, rippling softly round the boughs that trailed idly in its waters, now twinkles all the way, on its journey down to the lake. It is Saturday night of Nature and the Year

"Their breathing moment on the bridge where Time
Of light and darkness, forms an arch sublime."

There is nothing more to be done; everything is packed up; the wardrobe of Spring and Summer is all folded in those little russet and rude cases, and laid away here and there, some in the earth, and some in the water, and lost, as we say, but after all, no more lost than is the little infant, when, laid upon a pillow it is rocked and swung, this way and that, in the arms of a careful mother. So the dying, smiling Year is all ready to go.

"Aye, thou art welcome, heaven's delicious breath,

When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf,

And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief,
And the year smiles as it draws near its death.

Winds of the sunny south! oh, still delay,

In the gay woods and in the golden air,

Like to a good old age, released from care
Journeying in long serenity, away.

"With such a bright, late quiet, would that I

Might wear out life like thee, 'mid bowers and brooks:
And dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks,
And music of kind voices ever nigh.

And when my last sand twinkles in the glass,
Pass silently from men as thou dost pass.'

1

Poetry and Mystery of the Sea.

[Our Treasures would not be complete without the following beautifully sublime selection from the pen of Dr. Greenwood. Kind reader, if you love poetry and beautiful word pictures, you can never weary in reading the following:]

"The sea is His, and He made it," cries the Psalmist of Israel, in one of those bursts of enthusiasm in which he so often expresses the whole of a vast subject by a few simple words. Whose else, indeed, could it be, and by hom else could it have been made? Who else can heave its tides and appoint its bounds? Who else can urge its mighty waves to madness with the breath and wings of the tempest, and then speak to it again in a master's accents and bid it be still? Who else could have peopled it with its countless inhabitants, and caused it to bring forth its various productions, and filled it from its deepest bed to its expanded surface, filled it from its center to its remotest shores, filled it to the brim with beauty, and mystery, and power? Majestic ocean! Glorious sea! No created being rules thee or made thee.

What is there more sublime than the trackless, desert, all-surrounding, unfathomable sea? What is there more peacefully sublime than the calm, gentle-heaving, silent sea? What is there more terribly sublime than the angry, dashing, foaming sea? Power-resistless, overwhelming power-is its attribute and its expression, whether in the careless, conscious grandeur of its deep rest, or the wild tumult of its excited wrath. It is awful when its crested waves rise up to make a compact with the black clouds and the howling winds, and the thunder and the thunderbolt, and they sweep on, in the

joy of their dread alliance, to do the Almighty's bidding. And it is awful, too, when it stretches its broad level out to meet in quiet union the bended sky, and show in the line of meeting the vast rotundity of the world. There is majesty in its wide expanse, separating and enclosing the great continents of the earth, occupying two-thirds of the whole surface of the globe, penetrating the land with its bays and secondary seas, and receiving the constantly pouring tribute of every river of every shore. There is majesty in its fulness, never diminishing, and never increasing. There is majesty in its integrity, for its whole vast substance is uniform in its local unity, for there is but one ocean, and the inhabitants of any one maritime spot may visit the inhabitants of any other in the wide world. Its depth is sublime; who can sound it? Its strength is sublime; what fabric of man can resist it? Its voice is sublime, whether in the prolonged song of its ripple or the stern music of its roar-whether it utters its hollow and melancholy tones within a labyrinth of wave-worn caves, or thunders at the base of some huge promontory, or beats against a toiling vessel's sides, lulling the voyager to rest with the strains of its wild monotony, or dies away with the calm and fading twilight, in gentle murmurs on some sheltered shore.

The sea possesses beauty in richness of its own; it borrows it from earth, and air, and heaven. The clouds lend it the various dyes of their wardrobe, and throw down upon it the broad masses of their shadows as they go sailing and sweeping by. The rainbow laves in it its many-colored feet. The sun loves to visit it, and the moon, and the glittering brotherhood of planets and stars, for they delight themselves in its beauty. The sunbeams return from it in showers of diamonds and glances of fire; the moonbeams find in it a pathway of silver, where they dance to and fro with the breezes and the waves, through the livelong night. It has a light, too, of its own, a soft and sparkling light, rivaling the stars; and often does the ship which cuts its surface leave streaming behind a milky way of dim and uncertain luster, like that which is shining dimly