On other days, the man of toil is doom'd

To eat his joyless bread, lonely; the ground

Both seat and board; screen'd from the Winter's cold,
And Summer's heat, by neighbouring hedge or tree ;—
But on this day, embosom'd in his home,

He shares the frugal meal with those he loves ;
With those he loves he shares the heart-felt joy
Of giving thanks to God-not thanks of form,
A word and a grimace, but reverently,
With cover'd face, and upward earnest eye.
Hail, SABBATH! thee I hail, the poor man's day!
The pale mechanic now has leave to breathe
The morning air, pure from the city's smoke :
While wandering slowly up the river's side,
He meditates on HIM, whose power he marks
In each green tree that proudly spreads the bough,
As in the tiny dew-bent flowers that bloom
Around its root; and while he thus surveys
With elevated joy each rural charm,

He hopes, yet fears presumption in the hope,
That heaven may be one SABBATH without end!

THE KNIGHT OF ARTS AND INDUSTRY.*-THOMSON.

JAMES THOMSON was born in Roxburghshire, in 1700, and after attending the University of Edinburgh went to London, to try his fortune in Literature. After experiencing great poverty, the publication of his poem "Winter," introduced him to notice, and he had adequate resources thenceforth. His fame rests chiefly on his four poems known as "The Seasons," but he also published Tragedies, a long poem called "Liberty," and a very fine one "The Castle of Indolence," from which the following extract is taken.

AMID the greenwood shade this boy was bred,
And
grew at last a knight of muchel fame,
Of active mind and vigorous lustyhed,

The Knight of Arts and Industry1 by name.
Earth was his bed, the boughs his roof did frame;
He knew no beverage but the flowing stream;
His tasteful well-earned food the sylvan game,
Or the brown fruit with which the woodlands teem:
The same to him glad summer, or the winter breme.

* These verses aro in the same form of Stanza as Spenser's "Fairie Queene.”

Him did Minerva2 rear and nurture well,

In every science and in every art,

By which mankind the thoughtless brutes excel,
That can or use, or joy, or grace impart,
Disclosing all the powers of head and heart:
Ne1 were the goodly exercises spared

That brace the nerves, or make the limbs alert,
And mix elastic force with firmness hard:

Was never knight on ground mote3 be with him compared.

Sometimes, with early morn, he mounted gay
The hunter-steed, exulting, o'er the dale,
And drew the roseate breath of orient day;
Sometimes, retiring to the secret vale,

Yclad in steel, and bright with burnished mail,
He strained the bow, or tossed the sounding spear,
Or, darting on the goal, outstripped the gale,

Or wheeled the chariot in its mid-career,

Or, strenuous, wrestled hard with many a tough compeer

At other times, he pried through Nature's store,
Whate'er she in the ethereal round contains,
Whate'er she hides beneath her verdant floor,
The vegetable and the mineral reigns;

Or else he scanned the globe, those small domains,
Where restless mortals such a turmoil keep,

Its seas, its floods, its mountains, and its plains;
But more he searched the mind, and roused from sleep
Those moral seeds whence we heroic actions reap.

Nor would he scorn to stoop from high pursuits
Of heavenly truth, and practise what she taught:
Vain is the tree of knowledge without fruits!
Sometimes in hand the spade or plough he caught,
Forth calling all with which boon earth is fraught;
Sometimes he plied the strong mechanic tool,
Or reared the fabric from the finest draught;
And oft he put himself to Neptune's' school,

Fighting with winds and waves on the vexed ocean pool.

To solace then these rougher toils, he tried
To touch the kindling canvas into life;
With nature his creating pencil vied,
With nature, joyous at the mimic strife;

Or, to such shapes as graced Pygmalion's wife,
He hewed the marble; or with varied fire,9
He roused the trumpet and the martial fife,
Or bade the lute sweet tenderness inspire,

Or verses framed that well might wake Apollo's lyre.10

Accomplished thus he from the woods issued,
Full of great aims, and bent on bold emprise ;
The work which long he in his breast had brewed,
Now to perform he ardent did devise;

To-wit, a barbarous world to civilize.

Earth was till then a boundless forest wild:
Nought to be seen but savage wood, and skies;
No cities nourished arts, no culture smiled,
No government, no laws, no gentle manners mild.

A rugged wight, the worst of brutes, was man :
On his own wretched kind he, ruthless, preyed:
The strongest still the weakest overran ;
In every country mighty robbers swayed,
And guile and ruffian force were all their trade.
Life was a scene of rapine, want, and wo;
Which this brave knight, in noble anger, made
To swear he would the rascal rout o'erthrow,
For, by the powers divine, it should no more be so!

A PLEA FOR TOTAL ABSTINENCE.-CANON FARRAR. 1. OF far deeper, of far more awful significance, is what drinking costs in disease, what it costs in crime, what it costs in misery, what it costs to the glory of England now, and the hopes of English generations for years to come. I should have no time, I have no heart, to tell you all that could be told under this head. I entreat you not to turn impatiently from it, nay—I tell you plainly you have no right to turn impatiently from it. For the drinking of some means, inevitably, as things are, the drunkenness of many; and these who sin, these who suffer, these who die, are our own flesh and blood. I believe that there is scarcely one family in England which has not suffered from this hideous plague, scarce a house in England where there is not one dead.

2. You know what drink costs to the nation in money, what does it cause in disease and accident? Ask the dreary page of statistics, and you will read in so-called accidents, but accidents perfectly preventable, that it costs us broken limbs, and shipwrecked vessels, and burnt houses, and shattered railway trains, and the deaths of children, overlaid by drunken mothers, or beaten savagely by drunken fathers. To tell you what it costs in disease, I should have to take you, not, in fancy, but in hard fact, to what the poet saw as the result of intemperance in meats and drinks:

"A lazarhouse it seemed, wherein were laid
Numbers of all diseased: all maladies

Of ghastly spasm, and racking torture: qualm
Of heart-sick agony--all feverous kinds-
Dropsies, and asthmas, and heart-racking rheums.
Dire was the tossing, deep the groans: despair
Tended the sick, busiest from couch to couch;
And over them triumphant Death his dart
Shook-but delayed to strike."

3. This is what those who claim a right to speak with authority tell us it costs in sheer disease; and which of you is so ignorant of English history, of English literature, of English life, as not to know, further, of noblest reputations stained, of glorious intellects ruined, of great souls embittered, of invaluable lives cut short by it? And what does it cost in crime? I will tell you, not as a surmise of my own, but on the recorded testimony, on the emphatic evidence of almost every judge and magistrate and recorder on the English bench.

4. Remember that those arrested for drunkenness do not furnish one-tithe of the drunkards, and then shudder to hear that, in one year alone, 204,820 were arrested for crimes in which drunkenness was entered as a part of the charge, and that last year 5,131 women-only think of that, and of all the hideous degradation, all the unspeakable horror, which it implies-were arrested for drunkenness in Westminster alone. In every province, in every county, in every great city of the United Kingdom, it has been stated from the seat of justice again and again that but for drunkenness there would not be in England one-tenth of the existing crime. It is getting a hideous common-place of judges.

5. Only a few days ago Lord Coleridge said at Durham that but for drink we might shut up nine-tenths of our gaols. Last week there was brought up before Mr. Justice Manisty, a wretched creature in man's semblance, who, as though he were worse than a natural brute beast, made to be taken and destroyed, had brutally kicked to death a feeble and ailing wife, and the judge, in sentencing him to the gallows, said, "You have been found guilty of the crime of wilful murder, your victim being your own wife. You are a sad, sad instance of the consequences of indulging in drink, which has brought you to this fearful condition. It is only owing to God's mercy that this has not brought many more into a similar case. I am afraid that if this vice continue to be indulged in as it now is, many more will stand in a like position. Oh, that we could by administering the law put an end to such things!"

6. He might well say that; but dare you blink such testimony? Do you think that they say these things rashly? And if you will not listen to the reiterated warnings of the judges in their ermine, will you listen to the noble-hearted missionaries, who tell us what drink costs to the glory of England in the execration of her name over whole continents, and the ruin of her efforts among whole populations? Could I summon the Maoris of New Zealand-once