=_50._= LIFE IN THE COUNTRY.

It was this union of seclusion and publicity that made Norwood a place of favorite resort, through the summer, of artists, of languid scholars, and of persons of quiet tastes.  There was company for all that shunned solitude, and solitude for all that were weary of company.  Each house was secluded from its neighbor.  Yards and gardens full of trees and shrubbery, the streets lined with venerable trees, gave the town at a little distance the appearance of having been built in an orchard or a forest-park.  A few steps and you could be alone—­a few steps too would bring you among crowds.  Where else could one watch the gentle conflict between sounds and silence with such dreamy joy?—­or make idleness seem so nearly like meditation?—­or more nimbly chase the dreams of night with even brighter day-dreams, wondering every day what has become of the day before, and each week where the week has gone, and in autumn what has become of the summer, that trod so noiselessly that none knew how swift were its footsteps!  The town filled by July, and was not empty again till late October.

There are but two perfect months in our year—­June and October.  People from the city usually arrange to miss both.  June is the month of gorgeous greens; October, the month of all colors.  June has the full beauty of youth; October has the splendor of ripeness.  Both of them are out-of-door months.  If the year has anything to tell you, listen now!  If these months teach the heart nothing, one may well shut up the book of the year.

* * * * *

From “The Life of Jesus the Christ.”

=_51._= THE CONCEPTION OF ANGELS, SUPERHUMAN.

The angels of the oldest records are like the angels of the latest.  The Hebrew thought had moved through a vast arc of the infinite cycle of truth, between the days when Abraham came from Ur of Chaldea, and the times of our Lord’s stay on earth.  But there is no development in angels of later over those of an earlier date.  They were as beautiful, as spiritual, as pure and noble, at the beginning as at the close of the old dispensation.  Can such creatures, transcending earthly experience, and far out-running any thing in the life of man, be creations of the rude ages of the human understanding?  We could not imagine the Advent stripped of its angelic lore.  The dawn without a twilight, the sun without clouds of silver and gold, the morning on the fields without dew-diamonds,—­but not the Saviour without his angels?  They shine within the Temple, they bear to the matchless mother a message which would have been a disgrace from mortal lips, but which from theirs fell upon her as pure as dew-drops upon the lilies of the plain of Esdraelon.  They communed with the Saviour in his glory of transfiguration, sustained him in the anguish of the garden, watched at the tomb; and as they had thronged the earth at his coming, so they seem to have hovered in the air in multitudes