When I looked once more, and for the last time, upon the darling village drowsing in the sunshine, I felt that I had learned the burden of the hearth:  Not length of days is given, but the sweetness and strength thereof:  their memory shall live even though the dead be dust.  Out of the loam of this corrupting body springs heavenward the invisible blossom of the soul.  You have watered it with tears:  let the performance thereof comfort you.  Though ye die, yet shall ye live:  thus saith the Lord.  But shall the old days delight us and the past live?  Yea, verily, saith the Spirit—­once, but never again!

CHARLES WARREN STODDARD.

THE SCIENTIFIC LIFE.

It has been my good fortune to be thrown much with men of science, and to find among them companions made agreeable by the best of social qualities and by many larger capacities.  Perhaps it is their life apart, their consciousness of belonging to a distinct class, that has made them, as I have found them, so strikingly individual, and partly for this very reason so interesting.  Indeed, it is curious to observe how varied and how utterly different maybe the non-essentials, moral and mental, of the beings to whom God has given the rare gift of power to look into the secrets He has scattered around us in plant and earth and animal life.  Consistently with various grades of competence for investigation, the man may be social, or may flee his fellows; may be witty, or incapable of seeing the broadest fun; a poet, or almost devoid of creative imagination; full of refinement and rife with multiple forms of culture, or neither scholarly nor well-informed outside of his especial line of work.  According as he is endowed with mental graces and forms of culture, apart from his science, will be his charm as a companion; but while the absence of these means of pleasing is sometimes met with, and while their lack in no wise lessens his power of investigation, I have found most men of science to possess in a high degree qualities which rendered them delightful as comrades at the camp-fire or as guests at the dinner-table.  Indeed, the best talkers I know are men of science—­not the mere students of a knowledge already garnered, but those who discover new facts or who spend their lives in original research.  The most mirthful, cheery, happy and liberal-minded of men are to be found in the limited ring of those who are known in this country as investigators.  On the European continent the same remark holds true, but in Europe this class is very often less refined than with us.  In England the same class is undoubtedly notable for a curious absence of the wide range of general information constantly found in America, so that English men of science often amaze us in social life by their lack not so much of culture, as of wide knowledge of matters outside of their own studies, as well as by their inaptitude to share the lighter chat of the dinner-table.