With heaven’s gold gates about to ope,—­
        With friends’ praise, gold-like, lingering still,—­
    What instinct had bidden the girl’s hand grope
        For gold, the true sort?—­“Gold in heaven, I hope;
    But I keep earth’s, if God will!”

    Enough!  The priest took the grave’s grim yield;
        The parents, they eyed that price of sin
    As if thirty pieces lay revealed
        On the place to bury strangers in,
    The hideous Potter’s Field.

But the priest bethought him:  “‘Milk that’s spilt’
—­You know the adage!  Watch and pray! 
Saints tumble to earth with so slight a tilt! 
It would build a new altar; that we may!”
And the altar therewith was built.

* * * * *

Why I deliver this horrible verse? 
As the text of a sermon, which now I preach: 
Evil or good may be better or worse
In the human heart, but the mixture of each
Is a marvel and a curse.

The candid incline to surmise of late
That the Christian faith may be false, I find;
For our Essays-and-Reviews’ debate
Begins to tell on the public mind,
And Colenso’s words have weight: 

    I still to suppose it true, for my part,
        See reasons and reasons; this, to begin: 
    ’T is the faith that launched point-blank her dart
        At the head of a lie,—­taught Original Sin,
    The Corruption of Man’s Heart.

* * * * *

CALIFORNIA AS A VINELAND.

It has been reserved for California, from the plenitude of her capacities, to give to us a truly great boon in her light and delicate-wines.

Our Pacific sister, from whose generous hand has flowed an uninterrupted stream of golden gifts, has announced the fact that henceforth we are to be a wine-growing people.  From the sparkling juices of her luscious grapes, rich with the breath of an unrivalled climate, is to come in future the drink of our people.  By means of her capacity in this respect we are to convert the vast tracts of her yet untilled soil into blooming vineyards, which will give employment to thousands of men and women,—­we are to make wine as common an article of consumption in America as upon the Rhine, and to break one more of the links which bind us unwilling slaves to foreign lands.

It is a little singular, that, in a country so particularly adapted to the culture of the grape, no species is indigenous to the soil.  The earliest record of the grape in California is about 1770, at which time the Spanish Jesuits brought to Los Angeles what are supposed to have been cuttings from the Malaga.  There is a difference of opinion as to what stock they originally came from; but one thing is certain,—­from that stock has sprung what is now known all over the State as the “Mission” or “Los Angeles” grape, and from which is made all the wine at present in the market.  The berry is round, reddish-brown while ripening, turning nearly black when fully ripe.  It is very juicy and sweet, and a delicious table-grape.