With them I take delight in weal, And seek relief in woe; And while I understand and feel How much to them I owe, My cheeks have often been bedewed With tears of thoughtful gratitude. My thoughts are with the Dead; with them I live in long-past years, Their virtues love, their faults condemn, Partake their hopes and fears, And from their lessons seek and find Instruction with an humble mind. My hopes are with the Dead; anon My place with them will be. And I with them shall travel on Through all Futurity; Yet leaving here a name, I trust, That will not perish in the dust. R. SOUTHEY. A HEAVENLY DELIGHT Talk of the happiness of getting a great prize in the lottery! What is that to the opening a box of books! The joy upon lifting up the cover must be something like what we shall feel when Peter the Porter opens the door upstairs, and says, Please to walk in, sir. That I shall never be paid for my labour according to the current value of time and labour, is tolerably certain; but if any one should offer me £10,000 to forgo that labour, I should bid him and his money go to the devil, for twice the sum could not purchase me half the enjoyment. It will be a great delight to me in the next world, to take a fly and visit these old worthies, who are my only society here, and to tell them what excellent company I found them here at the lakes of Cumberland, two centuries after they had been dead and turned to dust. In plain truth, I exist more among the dead than the living, and think more about them, and, perhaps, feel more about them.--R. SOUTHEY (Letter to S. T. Coleridge). THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE COMPANY Coleridge is gone to Devonshire, and I was going to say I am alone, but that the sight of Shakespeare, and Spenser, and Milton, and the Bible, on my table, and Castanheda, and Barros, and Osorio at my elbow, tell me I am in the best of all possible company.--R. SOUTHEY (Letter to G. C. Bedford). Worthy books Are not companions--they are solitudes; We lose ourselves in them and all our cares. P. J. BAILEY. _Festus._ THE FELLOWSHIP OF BOOKS What were days without such fellowship? We were alone in the world without it. Nor does our faith falter though the secret we search for and do not find in them will not commit itself to literature, still we take up the new issue with the old expectation, and again and again, as we try our friends after many failures at conversation, believing this visit will be the favoured hour and all will be told us.... One must be rich in thought and character to owe nothing to books, though preparation is necessary to profitable reading; and the less reading is better than more;--book-struck men are of all readers least wise, however knowing or learned.--A. B. ALCOTT. _Tablets._ A COMPANY OF THE WISEST AND THE WITTIEST