"The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light thro' chinks that time has made; Stronger by weakness, wiser men become As they draw near to their eternal home. Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view That stand upon the threshold of the new." Amongst the poems of Mrs. Barbauld is a stanza on Life, written in extreme old age. Madame D'Arblay told the poet Rogers that she repeated it every night. Wordsworth once said to a visitor, "Repeat me that stanza by Mrs. Barbauld." His friend did so. Wordsworth made him repeat it again. And so he learned it by heart. He was at the time walking in his sitting-room at Rydal, with his hands behind him, and was heard to mutter to himself, "I am not in the habit of grudging people their good things, but I wish I had written those lines." "Life! we've been long together, Thro' pleasant and thro' cloudy weather: 'Tis hard to part when friends are dear, Perhaps 'twill cost a sigh, a tear: Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not good-night, but in some brighter clime Bid me good-morning." XIII. RELIGION. "Ah!" sighed Shelley to Leigh Hunt, as the organ was playing in the cathedral at Pisa, "what a divine religion might be found out if charity were really made the principle of it instead of faith." "In the seventeenth century," said Dean Stanley, in one of his Lectures on the Church of Scotland, "the minister of the parish of Anworth was the famous Samuel Rutherford, the great religious oracle of the Covenanters and their adherents. It was, as all readers of his letters will remember, the spot which he most loved on earth. The very swallows and sparrows which found their nests in the church of Anworth were, when far away, the objects of his affectionate envy. Its hills and valleys were the witnesses of his ardent devotion when living; they still retain his memory with unshaken fidelity. It is one of the traditions thus cherished on the spot, that on a Saturday evening, at one of those family gatherings whence, in the language of the good Scottish poet,-- 'Old Scotia's grandeur springs,'