O! if every one who sorrows for us would help us to assert our claim to Nature’s nursing, we should soon have our solace and our due. We have not all the vigour and spirit,--nor even the inclination, in our morbid state, to turn our faces to the fountain of solace--the fresh waters which cool the spirit when fretted by its tormenting companion. We cannot infallibly keep alive in our weak selves the love of Nature which would lead us to repose ourselves upon her, and forget the evils which even she cannot cure. But this should be done for us. When our sentence is passed, clear and irreversible, the next thing is to make it as lenient as possible in its operation; and especially by seeing that it is through no oversight that, if the outward man must decay, the inward man is not renewed day by day. This renewal, say some, must be by grace. Well, Nature is God’s grace, meant to abound to all,--and not least to those whom, by his chastening, he may be humbly supposed to love. LIFE TO THE INVALID. “There is a pause near death when men grow bold Toward all things else.” ROBERT LANDOR. “Man will come to see that the world is the perennial miracle which the soul worketh, and be less astonished at particular wonders: he will learn that there is no profane history; that all history is sacred; that the universe is represented in an atom, in a moment of time. He will weave no longer a spotted life of shreds and patches, but he will live with a divine unity. He will cease from what is base and frivolous in his own life, and be content with all places, and any service he can render. He will calmly front the morrow in the negligency of that trust which carries God with it, and so hath already the whole future in the bottom of the heart.” EMERSON.