Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in these lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the following lesson for the day.

THE TWO STREAMS.

       Behold the rocky wall
       That down its sloping sides
  Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
       In rushing river-tides!

       Yon stream, whose sources run
       Turned by a pebble’s edge,
  Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
       Through the cleft mountain-ledge.

       The slender rill had strayed,
       But for the slanting stone,
  To evening’s ocean, with the tangled braid
       Of foam-flecked Oregon.

       So from the heights of Will
       Life’s parting stream descends,
  And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
       Each widening torrent bends,—­

       From the same cradle’s side,
       From the same mother’s knee,—­
  One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
       One to the Peaceful Sea!

* * * * *

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.

Sixty Years’ Gleanings from Life’s Harvest. A Genuine Autobiography.  By JOHN BROWN, Proprietor of the University Billiard-Rooms, Cambridge.  New York:  Appleton & Company. 1859.

We are all familiar with that John Brown whom the minstrel has immortalized as being the possessor of a diminutive youth of the aboriginal American race, who, in the course of the ditty, is multiplied from “one little Injun” into “ten little Injuns,” and who, in a succeeding stanza, by an ingenious amphisbaenic process, is again reduced to the singular number.  As far as we are aware, the author of this “genuine autobiography” claims no relationship with the famous owner of tender redskins.  The multiplicity of adventures of which he has been the hero demands for him, however, the same notice that a multiplicity of “Injuns” has insured to his illustrious namesake.

We have always had a pet theory, that a plain and minute narrative of any ordinary man’s life, stated with simplicity and without any reference to dramatic effect or the elegances of composition, would possess an immediate interest for the public.  We cannot know too much about men.  No man’s life is so uneventful as to be incapable of amusing and instructing.  The same event is never the same to more than one person; no two see it from the same point of view.  And as we want to know more of men than of incidents, every one’s record of trifles is useful.  A book written by a Cornish miner, whose life passes in subterranean monotony, sparing none of the petty and ever-recurring details that make up his routined existence, would, if set down in the baldest language, be a valuable contribution to literature.  But we rarely, if ever, find a man sufficiently free from vanity and the demon of