He watched and wept, he prayed and felt for all;
     And as a bird each fond endearment tries,

     To tempt her new-fledged offspring to the skies,
     He tried each art, reproved each dull delay,
     Allured to brighter worlds, and led the way.

Our duty was created with us.  It is a pleasure to live.  What then should be the pleasure to think there is a place for us—­a duty beneficently made that gives us rights with our fellow-creatures?  What though the duty may try your soul and stagger your capabilities?  “Skillful pilots gain their reputation from storms and tempests.”  Bear up with patient courage—­“the bird that flutters least is longest on the wing.”  “Duty is the stern daughter of the voice of God.”

Let us then, upon entering this stately Temple of Life, cast into the Golden Censer our courage, our hope, our energy, our love, our industry, and all those qualities which go to make the air around us redolent with the fragrance of the achievements of life.  It cannot then well be that we shall lack in allegiance to our Maker, our country, or ourselves.  “Duties are ours; events are God’s.”

“On parent knee, a naked, newborn child,
Weeping thou satst while all around thee smiled;
So live that, sinking in thy last long sleep,
Calm thou mayst smile while all around thee weep.”

THE FLIGHT OF TIME.

                               Age steals
     Upon us like a snowstorm in the night: 
     How drear life’s landscape now!—­Henry Guy Carleton.

Whose hand,
Like the base Judean, threw a pearl away
Richer than all his tribe.—­Shakspeare.

We are intrusted with a few short years, and yet with more than we deserve.  It is our misfortune to value those fleeting moments only when our stock of them is in danger of utter exhaustion.  When the bright, beautiful days have vanished, and we find that, like the base Judean’s pearl, those days were richer than all our tribe—­our Vanderbilts, our Stanfords, and our Goulds—­then we turn, in human kindness, to our younger associates, and sound our warning in their ears.  According as our earnestness impresses them, they listen or they hearken not.  A golden thought which the young should learn by heart, would run thus:  However highly I have valued this day, I have “sold it on a rising market,” and too cheaply.  It would grow in value as I looked back upon it, even if I were to live to my eightieth year.  This may not seem true to you, who wish for Saturday night, that you may receive your salary,—­or to you, who long for Sunday, that you may gaze into a pair of eyes that have deep beauties for you—­but when your mother in your babyhood, said a certain letter was “A,”

YOU HAD TO ACCEPT THE STATEMENT

without reservation, or you would not now be able to exercise the grandest of human faculties—­to read, to glean the thoughts of the ages, and to receive, without toiling through the rugged regions of experience, the impressions and the inspirations which have come to man through all his labors and his pains.  Sir William Hamilton has well said that implicit belief is at the foundation of all human happiness—­the knowledge of the mind, as well as the certainty of the future life.