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ON THE CHOICE OF COMPANIONS.

evenings together. But let me entreat you to be cautious how you spend them.

If your games and your cups take up your time till you entrench on the night, and perhaps on the morning too, you will quickly corrupt each other. Farewell, then, to prayer, and every other religious exercise in secret. Farewell, then, to all my pleasing hopes of you, and to those hopes which your pious parents have entertained. You will then become examples and instances of all the evils I have so largely described. Plead not that these things are lawful in themselves; so are most of those in a certain degree, which, by their abuse, prove destruction to men's souls and bodies. If you meet, let it be for rational and christian conversation; and let prayer and other devotions have their frequent place among you: and if you say or think that a mixture of these will spoil the company, it is high time for you to stop your career, and call yourselves to an account; for it seems by such a thought, that you are lovers of pleasure, much more than lovers of God. Some of these things may appear to have a tincture of severity, but consider whether I could have proved myself faithful to you, and to him in whose name I speak, if I had omitted the caution I have now been giving you. I shall only add, that had I loved you less tenderly, I should have warned you more coldly of this dan gerous and deadly snare.

YOUTH RENEWED.

SPRING flowers, spring birds, spring breezes
Are felt, and heard, and seen;
Light trembling transport seizes

My heart, with sighs between ;
These old enchantments fill the mind
With scenes and seasons left behind;
Childhood, its smiles and tears,
Youth, with its flush of years,
Its morning clouds and dewy prime,
More exquisitely tinged by time!

Fancies again are springing,

Like May-flowers in the vales;
While hopes long lost, are singing,
From thorns, like nightingales;
And kindly spirits stir my blood,
Like vernal airs that curl the flood:
There falls to manhood's lot,
A joy which youth has not,
A dream more beautiful than truth,
Returning spring, - renewing youth;

Thus sweetly to surrender

The present for the past,
In sprightly mood yet tender,
Life's burden down to cast,

This is to taste, from stage to stage,
Youth, or the lees refined of age;
Like wine well kept and long,
Heady, nor harsh, nor strong;
A richer, purer, mellower draught,
With every annual cup is quaffed.

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THE LOVE OF FLOWERS.

HORTICULTURE was the first occupation instituted for man, and he cannot pursue a more innocent and harmless employ we were given 'every herb, and every tree upon the face of the earth.' For food, or raiment, the immediate necessities of man, a very few of them are applicable; but we can collect them for amusement, in admiration of their beauty. Without this beauty, they would be no object of research; and man, who is exclusively sensible of its existence, can alone find pleasure in viewing it. The mind that is delighted with such admiration, must be almost insensibly led to an attendant pleasure, the contemplation, the perception of infinite wisdom and power, manifested in the adornment, splendor, and information, of even the simplest flower of the field. I would not arrogate for man an exclusive right, or make him generally the sole consideration of the beneficence of Providence; but there are influences, which

his reason can alone perceive incitements to good thoughts and worthy actions.

Flowers, in all ages, have been made the representatives of innocence and purity. We decorate the bride and strew her path with flowers: we present the undefiled blossoms, as a similitude of her beauty and untainted mind; trusting that her destiny through life will be like theirs, grateful and pleasing to all. We scatter them over the shell, the bier, and the earth, when we consign our mortal blossoms to the dust, as emblems of transient joy, fading pleasures, withered hopes; yet rest in sure and certain trust that each in due season will be renewed again.

All the writers of antiquity make mention of their uses and application in heathen and pagan ceremonies, whether of the temple, the banquet, or the tomb- the rites, the pleasures, or the sorrows of man; and in concord with the usages of the period, the author of the Book of Wisdom' says, 'let us crown ourselves with rose-buds and flowers before they wither.' All orders of creation, 'every form of creeping things and abominable beasts,' have been, perhaps, at one time or another by some nation or sect, either the objects of direct worship, or emblems of an invisible sanctity; but though individuals of the vegetable world may have veiled the mysteries, and been rendered sacred to particular deities and purposes, yet in very few instances, we believe, were they made the representatives of a deified object, or bowed down to with divine honors. The worship of the one true Being could never have been polluted by any sym

bol suggested by the open flowers and lily-work of the temple.

The love of flowers seems a naturally implanted passion, without any alloy or debasing object as a motive: the cottage has its pink, its rose, its polyanthus; the villa, its geranium, its dahlia, and its clematis: we cherish them in youth, we admire them in declining days; but, perhaps, it is the early flowers of spring that always bring with them the greatest degree of pleasure, and our affections seem immediately to expand at the sight of the first opening blossom under the sunny wall, or sheltered bank, however humble its race may be.

In the long and sombre months of winter, our love of nature, like the buds of vegetation, seems closed and torpid; but, like them, it unfolds and reanimates, with the opening year, and we welcome our long-lost associates with a cordiality, that no other season can excite, as friends in a foreign clime. The violet of autumn is greeted with none of the love with which we hail the violet of spring; it is unseasonable; perhaps it brings with it rather a thought of melancholy than of joy; we view it with curiosity, not affection and thus the late is not like the early rose.

It is not intrinsic beauty or splendor that so charms us, for the fair maids of spring cannot compete with the grander matrons of the advanced year; they would be unheeded, perhaps lost, in the rosy bowers of summer and of autumn; no, it is our first meeting with a long-lost friend, the reviving glow of a natural affection, that so warms us at this season: