ease and enjoyment which is supposed to be the privilege of the higher classes. In our country, this state must usually be reached through industry; and this may be a real blessing: but we cannot count the need of hard work among the blessings of life. It was imposed as a punishment; it cannot of itself bring us any glory; it should be done, as we said above, as a duty, placed on us by Divine Providence, as one burden of the original sin.

We do not consider the convict who faithfully works out his penalty in the State Prison, as having gained honor by being placed there, although he has done well in submitting to the lot his sins have deserved. Just so should man do his duty in hard work, if such is his lot; but it is a hard lot, and shows that we have all broken God's laws, or such a doom would never have been laid on our race. The aspirations of the soul, the visions of the intellect, the longings of the heart, these are never called forth by the holiness or the loveliness of hard manual labor.

Man's work is to subdue the earth; woman's to take charge of the home, to nourish and bring up children. Woman has her work and her duties: but these are neither man's work nor man's duties; and, just in proportion as he seeks to impose his own burdens upon her, will he find his own character degraded and debased by so doing.

In France, and also in Great Britain, women are thus burdened with labors which belong to men. There are

districts in France where they are harnessed to carts with the ox and the ass. In Perigord, the women live in a state of filth and abjectness, which reacts on the whole family. In Picardy and Limousen, they serve their husbands at table without daring to seat themselves. In Brescia, they are mere beasts of burden. In Lower Brittany, all live together, eating black bread from the same trough with their sheep and hogs. A French writer, M. Aimé Martin, well says, "Everywhere is the degradation of the woman a sure proof of the brutishness of the man; and everywhere is the brutishness of the man a necessary consequence and reaction from the degradation of the woman."

We find, among the English statistics for 1861, that 43,964 women and girls were at that time agricultural laborers; besides all those confined in factories, and engaged in other trades properly belonging to men.

To the customs of our country, where man has done his own work of subduing the earth,-has shielded, aided, and protected woman, do we owe it, that we have developed socially, intellectually, and religiously as a nation.

De Tocqueville, at the close of his great work on America, says, "If I were asked to what America owed her greatness, I should say, to the character of her women," or to this effect. If the justly celebrated Frenchman had considered his subject more closely in its moral relations, he would have given at least one-half of his compliment to the American men.

It is not what women do for themselves, but what men do for them, that marks the true greatness of a people, and their real progress in Christian civilization.

This subject may be discussed in another paper: now I would say that women have a good work to do; and perhaps the shortest way of explaining this is to give the conclusion of the poem* from which a quotation was taken to head this article.

While thus to ceaseless task-work doomed to make the world his own,
Lest, in the struggle, sense should drag the spirit from its throne,
Woman's warm heart and gentle hand, in God's eternal plan,
Were formed to soften, soothe, refine, exalt, and comfort man;
And win from pleasure's poison-cup to life's pure fount above,
And rule him, as the angels rule, by deeds of peace and love.
And so the tender mother lays on her soft nurturing breast,
With loving hand, her infant son, and lulls him to his rest;
And dries his tears, and cheers his smiles, and, by her wise control,
She checks his wayward moods, and wakes the seraph in his soul;
And when life's work commands him forth, no more to dwell with her,
She points him to the HAND that saved the sinking mariner,
And broke the bread for famished men, and bids him trust that stay;
And then her hands, unclasped from his, are lifted up to pray.

But man could never work alone; and, even in Eden's bowers,
He pined for woman's smile to cheer his task of tending flowers;
And soon a fair young bride is sought and found to bless the youth,
Who gives, for his protecting hand, her heart of love and truth.
And now his work has higher aims, since she its blessing shares ;
And oft her hand will roses strew where his would scatter tares;
And, like a light within a vase, his home enshrines her form,
Which brightens o'er his world-tossed mind, like sunshine o'er the

storm;

* Unpublished.

And, when she pleads in sorrow's cause, he cannot choose but hear;
And, when her soul with Heaven communes, she draws his spirit near.
And thus they live till age creeps on, or sickness lays him low;
Then will she gird her woman's heart to bear life's deadly woe,
And soothe his pain, and stay his head, and close his dying eyes;
Oh then, his work well done, his hand may rest in Paradise!

VII. - SUNDAY AND ITS REST.

HAST thou stood,

And watched Niagara's earthquake flood
Gather his might for the leap below,
And marked the rapids' whirlwind flow,
And heard the moan like muffled thunder,
And felt the thrill of Nature's life,
When the solid earth was quivering under
The tramp of the flood in his terrible strife? ·
Roaring and rushing,

Gurgling and gushing,

Now like a troop of wild horses away,

Over the prairies in headlong war,
Tossing their thunderous manes of spray,
Rearing and plunging near and far.
Ha! the sea-serpents seize their prey!

Writhing in horror,

Trembling in terror,
Quaking and quivering,

Striving and shivering!

And ever, thus ever, day after day,
Rushing and dashing, away, away,
Whirling aloft a storm of spray,
The furious waters struggle and moan,

Then leap, and are lost in the dread unknown!

And thus in troublous toil and struggling strife,
Forever on had been the law of life, -

The doom of man, unceasing toil and care;
No freedom for the soul, no pause for prayer;
But urged by earth's tumultuous flood away,
Till death's dark gulf received its shrinking prey, -
Had not the restless flow of common time

Been stayed and calmed by Mercy's sacred chime,
Sounding one day in seven the tidings blest,
That God ordained the Sabbath's peaceful rest!

WHO can look abroad over the struggling world of

mankind, and refuse to confess that marked and

peculiar blessings attend those nations, which, since Christianity was established, have been most faithfully observant of the Sabbath, or Lord's Day? Rest and peace, as well as progress in goodness and intelligence, are characteristics of Sunday; and it is exactly these blessings we find wanting among heathen nations, where all knowledge of the true God and his laws are lost; and also among those nations that received the Gospel and its worship on the Lord's day, if they have thrown away or neglected these priceless blessings, show, in their institutions and characteristics, the irreparable injuries to humanity that have been inflicted on their peoples.

Even the most worldly-minded men in our land, while not caring personally for the sacredness of Sunday, must, if they are true patriots, desire its observance for the sake of its good moral influences, as contrasted with the corrupt effects of its neglect which are seen in other countries. The late Theodore Parker, who seems to have labored all his life to break down the Puritan Sab