eternal plans? A fly perched on one nut in the enormous machinery of some manufactory, and deciding upon the plan and purpose and working of the whole, from the twistings of the point on which he stood; nay, this is not even a poor analogy with the position of man standing on this speck of Time, and complacently deciding concerning the tremendous counsels of Him who inhabiteth Eternity. Heaven is revealed to us as night deepens. Thus, as the Twilight of the good man’s life dusks towards night, stars, unperceived before, stars of certainty, of knowledge, of hope, of trust, steal out one by one into his sky, until the heaven is one glitter above him. Earth dies out, and becomes indistinct; its colours are toned down, its scenery becomes less absorbing and obtrusive; it begins to take its proper place in that eternal glittering dust of worlds. And so amid that speaking silence he falls asleep. I suppose that then, in Paradise, a clear morning breaks, which afterwards, in Heaven, becomes the full light of noon. But the Twilight has gone: night has come down upon the sea: the earnest silence of those infinitely multiplied stars becomes oppressive: I am getting chilly also, and want my tea. Therefore I go indoors, close the shutters, and rest my strained thoughts with the sight of the cheery lamp-lit room; and, asking and obtaining of my wife some half-dozen of my favourite “Songs without Words,” call back my musings from those exhausting mysteries of our twilight state, and lull them with the gentler and more peaceful mystery of music. [Illustration] WINTER DAYS. [Illustration] There is always, I think, much more of sadness in the anticipation of Winter days than we find that they at all deserved when they are once fairly at home with us. The anticipation, the _transition_, is sad from Autumn profusion to Winter bareness. The month that severs the two is a month somewhat tinged with melancholy, and clad in a weeping robe of fogs and mists. There is a certain chill and gloom in wandering about the shrouded face of the so-lately rich Autumn fields,-- “When a blanket wraps the day, When the rotten woodland drips, And the leaf is stamped in clay,”-- there is something sad in passing through the sodden lanes, thickly carpeted with flat damp leaves, and strewn with the bright sienna chesnuts; here the gleaming nut, and there the three-fold shattered husk, brown-green, with cream-white lining. You may find a sort of pleasing melancholy, of tender romance, in watching the first tints of Autumn stealing over the Summer, from the very first, when “The long-smouldering fire within the trees Begins to blaze through vents,” until,--tree by tree, wood by wood, landscape by landscape,--they stand in their glory-- “The death-flushed trees, that, in the falling year, As the Assyrian monarch, clothe themselves In their most gorgeous pageantry to die.”