Here is another oasis, amid the desert of dead-letters from which we glean :

'DEAR M: How our hours fly away into the past eternity, and take us on to the mysterious one to which we are hastening. It seems but yesterday, and yet it is fourteen days since I pressed your fair hand under the mid-night sky and said farewell, there where the bright evening star was looking on from the dark heavens like a sleepless eye-a mild, calm, holy eye, of boundless intelligence. How often it guided me about your neighborhood, and to and from M— during the few happy weeks which I spent in the vicinity; and now its gentle and everlasting light, each time I look up to the floor of heaven, takes my thoughts back to your home, where indeed the promise was held good that where two or three are gathered together, they shall be blessed.

'With this I send you a book, that is, a series of oblong bits of paper full of typical marks, and inclosed in a cover; the outward form of a book, if it have the inward and spiritual grace of one I cannot say. I bought it on the recommendation of a lady, who has worshipped silly and wicked gods enough to people 'Vanity Fair, and fill all the niches in Pandemonium, that is, Madam Fame. Oh! for a potent, intellectual sieve, or spiritual thrashing-machine, to save one's hours and keep the soul from shrinking at the hills of chaff he must wade through to obtain a few 'wheaten grits.' I send you also some flowers, which can hardly be unacceptable, now that Nature has put off all her gay drapery - her fruit-jewels, her flower-robes, and retired for the night.

"You paint! Oh! it is useless denying it; your cheeks, with a certain angle of the light shining on them, show a metallic, glassy surface, proving the fact with mathematical certainty. I can see it farther off than I can tell the color of your eyes, and others also notice and talk of it - besides, it is very unbecoming, I said to a pretty woman at the opera the other night.

'After that exhibition of indomitable will, of reckless daring, of gigantic temerity, to say nothing of the consequences, I require repose-time to calm my nerves and prepare for action; therefore excuse me if for the present I decline telling you 'your faults.'

'No! no! you must not expect my praise for having 'resolved to read the book,' or twenty like it. Wade neck-deep in physiological literature, and of the best, that will not take you out of the Herd of the Sensuous, no more than going to church and resolving to listen to a sermon will take you to where the wicked cease from troubling. I read it many years ago, and others tried to act then too, but my affinity with the herd is not yet wholly destroyed. To reach physical, moral, or spiritual excellence of holiness, requires courage, perseverance, self-denial enough, and only he who seeks one or all with his whole soul, can tell how much. But he sees, also, at every step that the way of the transgressor is still harder, that appetite and 'preference' are enemies only secured in power to the evil one himself. Any attempt to lead a life sufficiently ideal to be in harmony with nature and her laws, will soon give the leader another proof that, Jordan is not to be navigated before a fire in an easy-chair.

'And now good-by. May your life be like the snow which surrounds you, pure, bright, and sparkling in the sun-light, and hiding under its calm, fair surface an untold wealth of fruit and flowers, of sentiment and thought, until it is taken up again quietly, unconsciously, and without pain to its native heaven.'

And so we close. Where the letters give an inkling of joys which are past, they are sorrowful to the soul; how much more so where suffering has given them birth; yet, next to dying the death of a good man, we should prefer that of a dead-letter. The post-man knocks at the door under the designated number. 'A letter for Jones, Esq.' 'Don't live here,' answers the Irish 'stick in-waiting.' A pencil-mark is placed on the epistle, and without even the scratch of a bare bodkin, it is dead, in due time to be forwarded to its tomb at Washington, there to be dissected and burned, where its ashes will lie until that day when all thoughts shall be revealed. It has gone to its long home, it has been launched into another world, amid flame and smoke, without a pang, without a regret for all the hopes or sorrows, joys or griefs which gave it birth, or a single thought on the part of the loved, hated, or doomed Mr. Jones, from its not having lived to fulfil its destiny.

They have a profound interest, these dead-letters! They bring with them mystery, melancholy, and a brooding sadness; and we have to thank them for many a dreamy reverie, as well as for incidents ludicrous and sorrowful. Their deaths, like others, often end friendship and love, and affection grows cold from fancied neglect. Who has lived many years in this sin-marred paradise and not known the importance which may attach to a dead-letter? Anna S, a dark. eyed sylph, now in heaven let us hope if there be one for the suicide, loved and was loved again. Her lover, in search of those smiles of fortune which would enable him to wed, went to the South. He wrote to her with love's own eloquence, but the letters miscarried, and reports reached her of his Southern gayety. Stung to the soul by his apparent neglect, she married another, and too late learned the madness of the act. Poor girl! she breathed chloroform and death together, and followed her letters to the tomb.

And now the originals of these gleanings must go back to their tombs from which we have snatched their spirits for the few years' immortality of print. We part with them regretfully, and would fain hand them over to those who have waited in vain for their coming, and watched as 'they that watch for the morning, until 'hope deferred made the heart sick' and faint, and the faith which was its best support, grow weak and doubting. But what we sympathize with is as a drop in the ocean. Day by day, this letter-maëlstrom sucks in its hecatombs of victims, sad emblem of our own blundering, mistaken or neglected lives, but we have a hope which they can neither claim nor share, that we shall be taken from our dead-letter office, printed in nonpareil type in the book of life, and placed in the library of heaven for communion with the angels near the throne of the ALMIGHTY.

STANZAS: TO ANNA.

BY THOMAS WARD.

I.

WHEN some pet bird escapes the cage,
And wings once more the heavenly plain,

We grieve, yet soon our pangs assuage,
To know 't is with its mates again.

II.

SO, ANNA, since the will divine

To all thy dear ones gives thee free,
We'll pay our peace to purchase thine,
Since robbing us enriches thee.

III.

To know our loss thy gain became,
Would soothe even parting's bitter doom :
The heart, unselfish, braves the flame,
Whose rays the loved one's path illume.

IV.

Farewell! - they claim thee now, and we
With struggling smiles and tears obey :
Flee to their longing bosoms, flee!
We weep, yet would not bid thee stay.

THE PLOUGH AND THE PEN.

We love to associate the Plough and the Pen as representing two of the noblest callings that have ever been followed by mankind, agriculture and literature. The plough and the pen seem to be inseparable. As we look down the long vista of the classic ages, we see them side by side; and as we glance over the enlightened portions of mankind at the present day, we see them still the same. Wherever we go, together we find or miss them. The untutored savage prefers his venison to the choicest fruits of agriculture; and the unlettered nomadic tribes of Asia care naught for all else beside their flocks and herds. The plough and the pen are at once the prophecy and fulfilment of the prosperity and civilization of a people. Long may they continue to culture this favored land of ours.

Literature, in its broad sense, includes whatever relates to the propagation of thought. We often hear it stated, and truly stated, that the object of education is not so much to crowd the memory with particular facts as to educe, draw out, the latent powers of the mind and make them active. Following out this idea, literature may be divided into two classes, the literature of fact and the literature of power. The former class embraces such books as treat of mathematics, law, and medicine; the latter, those works of philosophy, history, and poetry, that give a higher tone to character, and furnish us with motives to become better men and women. The literature of fact reveals; the literature of power inspires. Thought propagates thought. The thoughts expressed on the printed page are repeated in kindred thoughts of our own. The full, round thought of the writer becomes a central sun, around which circle a constellation of thoughts of the reader. The literature of fact is wheat stored away in the granary; the literature of power is seed thrown broadcast, and wherever sown, yielding harvests great or small in proportion to the care and culture of the reapers. Many a poet has caught his inspiration from the pages of Shakspeare; many a philosopher his spirit of inquiry from the works of Bacon. Take up Carlyle or Emerson, and the suggestions of thought crowd almost every line. It is a trite and true saying that the greatest powers of nature are the stillest in their movements. This is especially true of whatever moves the mind. We can form no adequate conception of the immense motive power of literature every day working in our midst, at our firesides. Silently and unseen, our thoughts, our sentiments, our characters, are moulded by what we read. Remove from our age and country literature as a power giving form and culture to character, and we should relapse into condition of barbarism. We doubt whether Washington, Jackson, and Taylor, as warriors, did more in building up and sustaining American institutions than those intellectual giants known the world over for their state papers, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Webster.

Literature has its pleasures. There is one kind of pleasure in penning our own thoughts, and another in reading the thoughts of others. Those only who are fully initiated can enjoy the former pleasure. The youth who for the first time sits down to blot a bit of paper with a few common-place thoughts would give a sorry tale of the pleasures of literary life. He must persevere in spite of a few head-aches and heartaches; he must think long and earnestly; he must scribble here and blot out there; he must watch early and late, before he can even enter the vestibule of that temple where Homer and Dante and Milton feasted upon the ambrosia of their own great thoughts. And yet we all know somewhat of the pleasures of the author, for we all, at times, have enjoyed self-communings and musings. We all now and then have spent an hour in converse with ourselves. And pleasant hours too, they were. The pleasures arising from our memories and hopes and fancies are akin to the pleasures of the author as he writes out his thoughts and feelings. There are times when we all are dreamers. But the master writer is more than dreamer; he is creator. How intense must have been those thrillings of pleasure that ran through the frame of blind old Milton, as the gorgeous scenes of 'Paradise Lost,' at imagination's bidding opened to his enraptured vision!

Again, there is that other and closely allied pleasure in poring over pages rich with the thoughts and fancies of others and of other days. That pleasure is now open to the common mass of minds. The school-boy knows what it is, when on a spring afternoon, with his Robinson Crusoe under his arm, he steals away to the sunny side of the house or barn, and reads on and on, and turns over leaf after leaf, till the shades of night close thick about him. The poetic amateur knows what it is, when with the works of Scott or Byron or Longfellow in his hand, out in the green field beside the clear running stream, under the branching elm, with the sweet notes of birds above him, and the incense of flowers borne upon every breeze, he reads those lyrics or lengthier poems which will ever be the pride of the English language. Yes! And the man of maturer years and riper judgment knows what it is, as he takes up some physical or metaphysical treatise, and dives deep into the mysteries of the world of nature about him, or attempts to explore the still more hidden laws of the mind. There he does not look for the rich vein of imagination and 'the ornate style and rounded period. The bare facts are enough, for every one of them is a pearl of priceless value. Thus from early boyhood to mature old age, the flowers and prints of literature are