So the son left the father kneeling by the grave.

Again a few years are passed.  It is winter, with a roaring wind and a thick gray fog.  The graves in the Church-yard are covered with snow, and there are great icicles in the Church-yard.  The wind now carries a swathe of snow along the tops of the graves as though the “sheeted dead” were at some melancholy play; and hark! the icicles fall with a crash and jingle, like a solemn mockery of the echo of the unseemly mirth of one who is now coming to his final rest.

There are two graves near the old yew tree; and the grass has overgrown them.  A third is close by; and the dark earth at each side has just been thrown up.  The bearers come; with a heavy pace they move along; the coffin heaveth up and down, as they step over the intervening graves.

Grief and old age had seized upon the father, and worn out his life; and premature decay soon seized upon the son, and gnawed away his vain ambition, and his useless strength, till he prayed to be borne, not the way yonder that was most opposite to his father and his mother, but even the same way they had gone—­the way which leads to the Old Churchyard Tree.

* * * * *

In dreamy hours the dormant imagination looks out and sees vague significances in things which it feels can at an after time be vividly conceived and expressed; the most familiar objects have a strange double meaning in their aspects; the very chair seems to be patiently awaiting there the expounder of its silent, symbolical language.—­Boston Morning Post.

* * * * *

[FROM BENTLEY’S MISCELLANY.]

GREECE AND TURKEY.[2]

Whatever Mr. AUBREY DE VERE sees, he picturesquely describes; and so far as words can do so, he makes pictures of all the subjects he writes upon; and had he painted as he has written, or used his pencil equally well with his pen, two more delightful volumes, to any lover of Greece, it would be difficult to name.  With an evidently refined taste, and a perfect acquaintance with the ancient history of the country he traveled through, and the ever famous characters that made its history what it is, his descriptions combine most pleasingly together, the past with the present.  He peoples the scenery with the men whose deeds give to that scenery all its interest; and whether on the plain of Marathon, or the site of Delphi or the Acropolis, he has a store of things to say of their past glories, and links together, with great artistic skill, that which is gone with that which remains.

[Footnote 2:  Picturesque Sketches of Greece and Turkey.  By Aubrey De Vere, 2 vols. [Philadelphia:  A. Hart.]]