Another Chance.

Around us on every side are cramped, hindered, stillborn lives-merchants who should have been painters, clerks who should have been poets, laborers who should have been philosophers. Their talent is known to a few friends; they die, and the talent is buried in their coffin. Jesus says no! It has at last been sown for the harvest. It will come into the open and blossom in another land. These also are being trained-trained by waiting. They are the reserve of the race, kept behind the hill till God requires it. They will get their chance; they will come into their kingdom—

"Where the days bury their golden suns

In the dear, hopeful West."

-JOHN WATSON [Ian MacLaren].

An Easter Flower.

We buried underneath the snow, one day
In early Winter, the beloved clay

Of one our hearts had held in tender love.
We wiped away our tears, and looked above
To Him whose life and death assure

The deathless life of all the good and pure.

Today, I visited the "City of the Dead."
The April sun was warming overhead,
And just beside the grassy little mound

There peeped a flower, half-opened, from the ground.

Tomorrow it shall bloom, and we may see
God's silent pledge of Immortality.

CHARLES C. ALBERTSON.

Premonitions of Immortality.

Are there not times in every man's life when there flashes on him a feeling-nay, more, an absolute conviction that this soul is but a spark belonging to some upper fire; and that so much as we draw near by effort, by resolve, by intensity of endeavor, to that upper fireby so much we draw nearer to our home, and mate ourselves with angels? Is there not a ringing desire in many minds to seize hold of what floats above us in the universe of thought, and drag down what shreds we can, to scatter to the world? Is it not belonging to greatness to catch lightning, from the plains where lightning lives, and curb it for the handling of men?-DONALD G. MITCHELL.

If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

INFLUENCE.

The Influence of Carlyle and Emerson.

Man is not all intellect. If he were so, science would, I believe, be his proper nutriment. But he feels as well as thinks. He is receptive of the sublime and the beautiful as well as of the true. Indeed, I believe that even the intellectual action of a complete man is, consciously or unconsciously, sustained by an under-current of the emotions. It is vain, I think, to attempt to separate moral and emotional nature from intellectual nature. Let a man but observe himself, and he will, if I mistake not, find that in nine cases out of ten moral or immoral considerations, as the case may be, are the motive force. which pushes his intellect into action. The reading of

the works of two men, neither of them imbued with the spirit of modern science-neither of them, indeed, friendly to that spirit-has placed me here today. These men are the English Carlyle and the American Emerson. I never should have gone through Analytical Geometry and the Calculus had it not been for those men. I never should have become a physical investigator, and hence without them I should not have been here today. They told me what I ought to do in a way that caused me to do it, and all my consequent intellectual action is to be traced to this purely moral source.—TYNDAll.

Spiritual Influence.

When a lecturer on electricity wants to show an example of a human body surcharged with his fire, he places a person on a stool with glass legs. The glass serves to isolate him from the earth, because it will not conduct the fire-the electric fluid. Were it not for this, however much might be poured into his frame, it would be carried away by the earth; but, when thus isolated from it, he retains all that enters him. You see no fire, you hear no fire; but you are told that it is pouring into him. Presently you are challenged to the proof—asked to come near, and hold your hand close to his person. When you do so, a spark of fire shoots out toward you.

If thou, then, wouldst have thy soul surcharged with the fire of God, so that those who come near thee shall feel some mysterious influence proceeding out from thee, thou must draw nigh to the source of that fire, to the throne of God and of the Lamb, and shut thyself out from the world-that cold world which so swiftly steals our fire away. Enter into thy closet and shut thy door, and there, isolated "before the throne," await the baptism. Then the fire shall fill thee; and, when thou comest forth, holy power will attend thee, and thou shalt labor, not in thine own strength, but with demonstration of the Spirit, and with power.-W. ARTHUR.

The Influence of a Book.

A Puritan tract, old and torn, was lent by a poor man to Baxter's father. It was called "Bunny's Resolutions."