are, indeed, a few glorious creatures in this world. who can throw the light of their own geniality, sympathy, and goodness upon the commonest objects. But their delight springs from themselves, not from their circumstances. It is imagination thrown upon the present just as day dreams are imagination thrown upon the future. Let me conjure you, dear friends, to cherish this power of dreaming. Leave fair things in life still to be attained; the land of promise is also a joy in possession. Above all things, revere imagination (another phrase for loving faith) which is the soul of joy both in present and future. And, even though you have "the bird in the hand," turn not from the singing of "the bird in the bush."

IN QUIET WATERS:

A POST-YULE-TIDE MEDITATION.

ELL, Christmas is over; the Yule-log is fairly burnt out; the sounds of festivity

have died away; we are tossed no more upon a sea of revelry; we have got at last into quiet waters. It is a pleasant thought. Christmas comes but once a year; and well it is that it should be so. Life is at best a sad experiment, clouded with care and full of trouble even under the most favourable conditions of fortune; but only fancy what it would be if Christmas were to come once a week! To live in a perpetual whirl of dissipation; to be doomed to perennial consumption of roast turkeys and plum-pudding; to be compelled from January to December to eat and drink three times as much as is good for you; to be trotted out from one theatre to another; to wear a cast-iron smile, it matters not how sad your heart may be; to kiss and be kissed everlastingly under the mistletoe; and to have to wish everybody you meet "the compliments of the season "whatever on earth that may mean-to have to do and suffer all these and many other things of kindred absurdity without intermission from one end of the year to the other were such a destiny that life would not be worth having upon the terms. It maddens one to think of it. It is

as though a man should be married anew regularly every morning. For my own poor part I had rather be Othello's toad, living upon the vapour of a dungeon, where at all events there is peace, than a man dwelling in perpetual commotion under a Yule-tide, which like the great Pontic sea should know no retiring ebb. Indeed, dear reader mine, I will take thee into my confidence, and borrowing a favourite phrase of Lord Clarendon, in his much bepraised and very heavy book, The History of the Great Rebellion, I will "let myself loose to say' that viewed only in its social aspects, and without reference to its purely religious signification which, though undoubtedly most consolatory, is too often eclipsed by the carnalities of the celebration, Christmas is but a melancholy time for people who have any faculty of thought, and have passed the age of five-and-twenty. Truly for them its mirth is very tragical. It is all very well for children who know not what care means, to whom "To-morrow" is a Canaan flowing with milk and honey; whose spirits are unclouded by the shadows of coming sorrows; whose palates are unpalled; whose digestion is unimpaired. Let them gather the rose-buds while they may, which is not for long; let them laugh and gambol, be glad and rejoice. If they are not happy now when may they hope to be so? Ah! when indeed? Who could find it in his heart to quell their delight, or to "stop their tide of laughter with a sigh?" Leave them at the high topgallant of their mirth and say not a word to damp the ardour of their joy; but really when we are arrived at that most unenviable of all epochs "years of discretion; " when we have lived to know what life truly is, how mournful, how precarious; when our hearts are full of sad memories,

and dark forebodings, how dismal then is the very thought of jollity, and with what a mocking echo does the sound of conventional merriment fall upon the ear.

Christmas comes round again and we are told to be jolly. The streets swarm with elated citizens laboriously intent on pleasure; the shops are decked out in finery; the bells are ringing, and the busy note of preparation resounds through the land; everywhere people are preparing to be happy; but another year is gone, gone past recall, and we sigh to think what havoc death has committed since this time twelvemonth; what gaps he has made in the circle of our friends; what loved ones he has slain; what homes he has destroyed; what hearths he has made cold and desolate. How many were there amongst us bright and joyous last Christmas whom we shall never see again? We are reminded of that ghastly German story about the band of students who swore to dine together and drink one another's healths every Christmas eve; how exuberant was their mirth at first, but how it got clouded as time rolled on; how every year saw a seat emptied and the company growing thinner, till there was but one old man left to drink to his own health in a mirror; and how he at last was found lying cold and stark by the side of his chair. "Such is life, which is the end of all things," as Mrs. Gamp charmingly remarks.

But independently of the tragic vicissitudes to which, from the very conditions of humanity we are all of us subject, and which give a melancholy aspect to the recurrence of any anniversary, however festive in itself, there are circumstances, both social and climatic, which make Christmas here in London anything rather than a season of enjoy

ment. It is a period fraught with calamity. The papers teem with accidents and offences. "News means the intelligence of shipwrecks, colliery explosions, railway collisions, marriages, and other disasters, the mere recital whereof is most disheartening. Winter is ever rife with misfortunes -and with crime as well. Witness the awful record of misdeeds chronicled in every journal. So much for the social aspect of Christmas in modern times. Nor are we more fortunate in matters meteorological. The Christmas season may now be divided into four chapters, entitled respectively Fog, Fat, Frost, and Thaw. There was a time when November was supposed to be, and was, in fact, the foggiest of all the months in the year; but to that sad distinction it may no longer lay claim. November now-a-days is often very enjoyable-hardly less so than October, so dear to artists for its cold, grey days. November is keen, bluff, and stormy, but it is not unfrequently dry, clear, and bracing. The palm of fogginess belongs to the last of the months. The December fog, in fact, is the most ominous harbinger of Christmas, and it is hardly possible to imagine anything in the way of atmospheric visitations more horrible, more depressing. It envelopes you as with a wet sheet, chokes you as with a filthy duster, and bothers and bewilders you out of your seven senses. It wraps up the sun in a mustard poultice, it takes the azure out of the sky and substitutes pea soup, it enshrouds the world in clammy yellow vapours, which not only forbid all enjoyinent of nature, but do the gravest injury to our health. Not to ours alone, for even the prize cattle at Islington succumb to their dreadful influ

ence.

Scarcely have we emerged from the fogs when