The very presence of a lengthened festivity--for festivity can never be _solitary_--would, apart from its sacred causes, promote these wholesome effects. The extended space of time over which this festival is spread, the protracted holiday which it creates, points it out for the gathering together of distant friends whom the passing nature of an occasional and single celebration would fail to collect from their scattered places of the world. By this wise and beautiful arrangement the spell of home is still made to cast its sweet and holy influence along the sterile regions as along the bright places of after-life, and from the dark valleys and the sunny hilltops of the world to call back alike the spoiled of fortune and the tired and travel-stained to refresh themselves again and again at the fountain of their calmer hopes and purer feelings. A wise and beautiful arrangement this would be, in whatever season of the year it might be placed! Wise and beautiful is any institution which sets up a rallying-place for the early affections and re-awakens the sacred sympathies of youth,--which, from that well-head of purity and peace, sends forth, as it were, a little river of living waters, to flow with revivifying freshness and soothing murmur along the wastes and wildernesses of after years; which makes of that spring-time of the heart a reservoir of balm, to which in hours of sorrow it can return for joy, and in years of guilt for regeneration; and which, like the widow's cruse of oil, wasteth not in all the ages of the mind's dearth. But how greatly are the wisdom and the beauty of this arrangement increased by the sacred season at which it has been placed! Under the sanctions of religion the covenants of the heart are renewed. Upon the altars of our faith the lamps of the spirit are rekindled. The loves of earth seem to have met together at the sound of the "glad tidings" of the season, to refresh themselves for the heaven which those tidings proclaim. From "Abana and Pharpar" and all the "rivers of Damascus" the affections are returned to bathe in "the waters of Israel." In many a peaceful spot and lowly home, "Wi' joy unfeigned, brothers and sisters meet, An' each for other's welfare kindly spiers;" and as the long-separated look once more into the "sweet, familiar faces," and listen in that restored companionship to strains such as "once did sweet in Zion glide" (even as they listened long ago, and, it may be, with some who are gone from them for ever),-- "Hope springs, 'exulting on triumphant wing' That thus they all shall meet in future days, There ever bask in uncreated rays, No more to sigh or shed the bitter tear, Together hymning their Creator's praise In such society, yet still more dear, While ceaseless time moves round in an eternal sphere."