This is a beautiful Sabbath morning, the blazing sun wades through the blue ether, and space seems redolent of purity and beauty.  The breeze is as bland as the breath of a babe, coming through my casement with the light, and bathing my parched cheek; and the sere summer is warming away the gentle, genial spring.  This is her last day; and to how many countless thousands is it the last day of life?  Oh! could I die as gently, as beautifully as dies this budding season of the year, and could I know my budding hopes, like these buds of spring, would, in their summer, grow to fruit as these are growing, how welcome eternity!  But I, as well, have my law, and must wait its fulfilment.  It is the Sabbath wisely ordained to rest, and in its quiet and beauty obviating care and sorrow.  Would it were to the restless mind as to the weary limbs, and as to these, to this give ease and repose!

I have been dreaming, and my boyhood days revive with busy memories.  My gentle mother, ever tender and kind, seems busy before me; the old home, the old servants, as they were; the old school-house in the woods by the branch, and many a merry face laughing and beaming around; and my own old classmate, my solitary classmate, so loved, ah! so loved even unto this day.  It was only yesterday I saw him, old and care-worn, yet in all the nobility of his soul, bearing with stern philosophy the miseries of misfortune inflicted by the red hand of merciless war, yielding with dignity and graceful resignation to the necessities imposed by unscrupulous power, conscious of no wrong, and sustained by that self-respect the result of constant and undeviating rectitude which has marked his long life.  From childhood our hearts have been intertwined, and death only has the power to tear them apart.  We sat together long hours, and talked of the past—­alternately, as their memories floated up, asking each other, “Where is this one? and this?” and to each inquiry the sad monosyllable, “Dead!” was the reply, of all who were with us at school when we were boys.  We alone are left!

  In my strife with the world, I can never forget
  The scenes of my childhood, and those who were there
  When I was a child.  I remember them yet;
  Their features, their persons, to memory so dear,
  Are present forever, and cling round my heart—­
  On the plains of the West, in the forest’s deep wild,
  On the blue, briny sea, in commerce’s mart,
  ’Mid the throngs of gay cities with palaces piled.

  The bottle of milk, and the basket of food,
  Prepared by my mother, at dawning of day,
  For my dinner at school; and path through the wood: 
  How well I remember that wood and that way,
  The brook which ran through it, the bridge o’er the brook,
  The dewberry-briers which grew by its side,
  My slate, and my satchel, and blue spelling-book,
  And little white pony father gave me to ride!