HUMBLY to THEE, our SAVIOUR GOD, this treasure we resign,
The object of so fond a love, exceeded but by Thine:
And for the earthly hopes and joys in our fond hearts destroyed,
Grant us the fulness of Thy love, to fill the aching void!

We know that she was taken in her youth's undimmed sun-shine;
Only the happiest hours of life, beloved one! were thine;
Thy GoD has ta en thee to himself, ere yet their light was dim,
And with bowed down and trusting hearts, we yield thee up to HIM.

Oh sad would be the world, and drear, were not the blest hope given,
That as Love's circle narrows here, 't is widening in heaven:
Then farewell, gentle spirit! we shall claim thee as our own,
From out the white-robed company that sing around the throne.'

MY GRAN D-F A THER'S HOUSE.

BY HANS VON SPIEGEL.

SHADE of Sir Walter Raleigh!' I exclaimed, as I lighted my cigar at the scorching hearth of a tavern fire-place, of how much pleasure would the decriers of thy favorite plant deprive us!' There was some

thing in the old-fashioned arm-chair which I had drawn up to the fire; something in the comfortable inclination of the back, the easy curvature of the arms, the softness of the well-worn leather cushion; that carried me back to the merry time of childhood, when I used to sit in just such an old time-worn chair, gazing into the huge fire of my grandfather's kitchen. Thickly came the fancies and memories of the past; but the impatient Hurrah!' of the stage-driver, as he gathered up the reins into his buckskin grasp, and cracked his whip on the piercing air of a December morning, brought me once more into the cold realities of life, and broke my revery. Throughout the day, undisturbed by the crunching of the snow under the horses' feet, and the groaning of the runners as they ploughed through an occasional drift, or by the comical appear. ance of my fellow-passenger on the front seat, whose red face was covered with a red comforter, and that with long white tendrils of frost, I thought of the scenes which that old chair had called up before me. One after another the lighted Havanas wasted to close proximity with my lips; and when four of the clock found me safely deposited in my room at the C-Hotel,' after a hearty dinner, I was still thinking of early friends, many of whose names were already chiselled on the cold grave-stones. When I fell asleep that night, dreams akin to my waking fancies came to my pillow; and next morning before I got up I promised myself a visit to that old home in New-England.

VOL. XXV.

57

When winter had passed, and the spring with its freshness had gone, the summer sun looked down through the tall locust-trees, and seemed to welcome me as the coach set me down before the gate of the old house with my valise and double-barrelled gun. Except a little space in front, the old mansion was hidden by the dense foliage of the locusts and elms that grew in unshorn wildness around it; but what I saw of the red, weather-beaten front-door, over which the woodbines spread a thick green awning, and the dormer-windows jutting out from the steep roof, and the half-ruined chimneys, made me a child again, and I wept, just for the keeping.' Ah, PETER! you smiled when I told you of it, and even jested on my weakness; but you could not conceal the glistening of your own eyes at the very time, nor the readiness to speak of your own childhood, and the old house by the brook, and the willows that drooped over it. You may pretend to stoicism as much as you please, but your lips and eyes belie you all the while. You and I, perchance, never will harden into statues, but we shall be men for all that; the whole world to the contrary notwithstanding. Gentle reader, do you smile in derision, because my heart welled over in tears when I saw the old house, and the woodbines over the front door, just as they were a score of years before, only that the woodbines had climbed up to the eaves and fastened themselves among the shingles of the roof? Well, smile on, if there are no hallowed memories of childhood in your bosom. I will be sorry, but not angry; yet I would rather you should look sympathizingly, and feel part of a pleasure that to me is sweet. Perhaps you would not have thought of smiling, had I told you at first why I loved that old house so well. Shall I tell you now?

The greater part of my childhood, until the age of eight or nine, had been spent at my grandfather's, so that it seemed always like home; indeed I loved it almost as well as the fireside where my brothers and sisters were. Here my first love of the romantic had its birth, and here was it fostered by a maiden aunt, whose queer notions of men and things, drawn in part from old novels and romances, and in part from her own fervid imagination, were to me an exhaustless store of entertainment and instruction. How often did I sit in her lap, or as I grew older, on a cricket' at her feet, listening to her marvellous stories of ladies rescued and huge monsters subdued by the sword of some gallant knight! The times of the feudal lords and the lion-hearted Richard were as familiar to me as yesterday; and I have been surprised since I have read the chronicles of Sir John Froissart, that my aunt should have had so accurate a knowledge of the times and legends which the old knight portrays. Many of his stories, word for word almost, I found that I knew by heart; but how my aunt could have read him, is to me a wonder: for she did not appear to have read French, and the English translation was so scarce then, that I doubt whether there were three copies in all New-England. However this may have been, and whence she drew the greater portion of her legends, she at any rate kindled my childish fancy; and there danced before me visions of splendid tourneys, with their faces of beauty, and plumes, and glistening armor, and prancing barbs; while a smile of kind-hearted joy played over her features, that she was adding new distance to the horizon of my enjoyment.

Grim castles, with their haunted towers, secret doors, and animated statues that walked out of the niches they occupied, and returned again ere the terrified stranger could leap from his bed, dusty with the neglect of years; long halls, filled with unhelmetted knights, and beauties flashing love and despair at every glance; court-yards resounding with the courser's armed hoof, or tumultuous with boisterous retainers; these were ever in my thoughts, whether of revery or slumber. Troubadours tuned their harps and sang in sweet accord' their passionate verse in my delighted ear; and before my mental vision deployed the array of dauntless chivalry, with banners waving and wild trumpets blowing. I dwelt as it were with the Past, and shunned the Present, if in the least it disturbed the spell. Aunt Hetty, in short, was the enchantress of my childhood, filling the mist that encircled my young fancy with spirits who should lead me out into the land of imagination; where, in truth, all our truest happiness can alone be found. Happiness dwells not with Reality. Smooth-cheeked Utility may deny this; and Sensuality say it nay; Ambition, with eye turned steadily on the sun of its high resolves, may declare its falsity; and Love, with its twin sister Despair, may snap its rosy fingers, and cry 'Ah! ha!' yet it is so. We must leave realities, if we would find true pleasure. But I must return to the road side in front of the old house where the stage-coach had set me down.

Before me stood once more the scene of many a bright memory. The windows seemed peeping out under the woodbines to see me, and I could have sworn that the oriole flitting among the trees over my head, and gurgling out its liquid note, was the same that sang there twenty years before. The round white capitals of the gate-posts were the same; the picket-fence, except where the young locusts and lilacs on either side held it up, was leaning here and there, as if choosing the spot where it might fall the easiest; and the walk to the front door was all grown up with rank grass, untrampled by the foot of any intruder. The porch-door of the wing was open, and the windows up; and as I opened the gate of the larger yard, and passed up the footpath that led to the wing, I heard the old familiar hum of the spinning-wheel, and, in a voice that I could not have mistaken if I would, a well-remembered air, which ceased as I entered the door. My aunt Hetty, for it was she, when she had taken an incredulous survey of my countenance, and then came really to know me, suffered me to kiss her, and returned my kiss with warm affection, and wondered how the little boy, who used to sit on her lap and listen to her stories, could have grown so tall. Her voice had the same ringing music that it possessed years before, and the same smile still played over her once beautiful and still interesting features. Here and there a gray hair had taken up its residence among her dark tresses; but my aunt did not plead guilty to the charge of vanity, and the arrivals of these messengers of time in no wise troubled her equanimity. Suffice it to say, that she welcomed me back to the old kitchen in the wing, and I was again at home, and overwhelmed with questions about every thing under the canopy,' which I answered a dozen at a time. The spinning-wheel was unceremoniously spirited into the corner; and throwing her blue-checked apron over head to keep off the sun, mý

aunt Hetty bade me amuse myself while she went out to find my grandfather, who had gone out to the lot behind the orchard, to see to the fences.

The andirons, with lions'-heads for tops, still rested in the old fireplace, where they had stood for more than half a century, doing good service; during which time I am credibly informed, the lions'-heads, even when the hottest fire crackled up in the winter evenings, were never even once so much as heard to growl, or show any thing but the most determined stoicism. The crane, all hung over with copy-book emblems, still oscillated on the jams; and the iron tea-kettle that used to sing, to tell me that it was hot, and wanted to get off the fire, and if I did not heed its singing would rattle its cover, and spirt the steaming water from its proboscis half-way to my chair- stood on the hearth as still as a mouse, and somewhat stiller. This simile of the mouse puts me in mind, that as I came in, a venerable pussy ran out of the cat-hole in the linter-door, whose gray-coat and shortened ears betokened the playmate of my childhood. How it was that she had lived so long, I leave it for wiser heads than mine to determine. There was the musket hanging by wooden hooks on a cross-beam overhead, and its bayonet, in the leathern case of the revolution, hung with the belt and cartridgebox, over the mantel-piece. There too hung the same touch-wood pincushion, full of needles of all sizes, on one of which was my aunt's steel thimble, without a top, and a skein of brown thread clipped at both ends into convenient needle-fulls. Ranged on the mantel-piece were half a dozen flat-irons, pointing their noses to the chamber-floor as steadily as ever. 'Dale and Company' are next to immortal. The old curlingtongs that I used to heat on Sabbath mornings for my aunt Hetty, looked as natural as then; and I wondered if she used them still. The clean sink, white inside from scouring and dingy-red without, yet just as clean; and the little doors beneath it, and the clumsy button that fastened them, which I had once cut from a piece of thick leather and nailed on, seemed without change. Over it hung the bright tin basin and dipper, and beside the window was the linen roller-towel, and miniature lookingglass in a convex mahogany frame at least a hundred years old. The great clothes-horse stood behind the door, and my grandfather's boot-jack in its old corner kept it company. The chairs around the room were the same strait-backed, withe-bottomed, round-posted, unpainted seats that they had been from my earliest recollection; and standing in conscious dignity, aloof from these plebeian seats, was the old arm-chair whose counterpart I had seen by the tavern fire-place. The shining leathern cushion, with its black smooth buttons at the bottom of the innumerable indentations which diversified its surface, like dimples in the full cheeks of a St. Domingo beauty, seemed to invite me to sit down, while the chair seconded the invitation, holding out its arms with a patronizing, benevolent air. I sat down just to please the old chair, and while ten thousand fancies were crowding into my head, the linter-door opened, and my grandfather shook me by the hand.

Hale and hearty, yet on the verge of ninety, he was looking the same that he did at seventy; his voice a little broken, perhaps, but his gray eye as bright as ever. His long white hair was combed back from

his broad high brow, and the ends of his white neckcloth, loosely tied, dangled over his buff vest, and presented him the same that he was when I was a mere baby playing on his knee, or listening to his stories of the times that tried men's souls;' of his marching over the frozen roads at the head of his company, captain and men without stockings, and sometimes without shoes; their bread frozen in their knapsacks, and the British troops pursuing them; of the crossing of the Delaware, and getting his almost frozen leg broken between two cakes of ice, and of his hiding in the cabin of a slave till his unsplintered leg got well, and he could again walk, and follow the track of the army, which then was three hundred miles off. As he sat down in his chair, I noticed that his silver knee-buckles wore the same brightness, and his long hose were fastened under them and the many buttons of his gray breeches with the same scrupulous exactness which had always been his characteristic. His long queue was unaltered, and was braided with a narrow black ribbon, which for me, when a child, to touch seemed about as bad as annihilation. Whenever I see a picture of WASHINGTON, I am reminded of my grand-father, whose dress and countenance and white hair were like what our painters delight to portray as part and parcel of the Father of his Country.'

The dinner which my aunt Hetty soon set out on the circular table, which till then had stood with its top turned up against the wainscot, was all of a piece with other days. Rye-and-Indian' bread, and rich creamy cheese, and a roll of butter, with the stamp of an eagle on it; and the silver pepper-box, the last of a long and noble line; and the blue plates,Chineses,' with umbrellas crossing a bridge, the two ends of which, disdaining to rest on the ignoble ground, flourished in mid-air. One of the figures being a lady, it used to puzzle me to imagine how she could get off; much more, how she could have got on, unless her legs were made of India-rubber, and could stretch to any conceivable distance. The lady who had one foot in the grave and the other in the stars, must have been one of the same family. Never any where else have I eaten such pies as at all seasons of the year my aunt Hetty made; and the pie which she placed on the dinner-table this day bore testimony to her nicety and skill. At least one would have thought so from the tinge of my lips and teeth when we arose from the round table, after the returning of thanks by my grand-father. After refusing a cigar which I offered him, while helping myself, my grand-father took down his long clay-pipe, which always protruded from a little box over the fire-place, and was soon still more like himself, as he used to appear to me. Cigars he considered an innovation too barbarous to have his countenance, at least so much of it as was included between his lips; therefore he smoked a pipe. When my second cigar had dwindled away to a point, and my grand-father had knocked the ashes out of his pipe with the blade of a horn-handled jack-knife that he had used full fifty years, my aunt decreed that I was tired and must lie down; and as I make it a point never to cross the wishes of my friends, when they coincide with mine, I accordingly was led by her to the little bed-room which I had so often occupied years before, and was soon dreaming of 'the old familiar faces' which Lamb liked to remember.