Who was Mistress Holden, that she should be blessed among women by having her name spoken gratefully and the little edifice she caused to be erected preserved as her monument from generation to generation?  All these possibilities, the lust of the eye, the lust of the flesh, the pride of life; the tears of grateful orphans by the gallon; the prayers of Westminster Assembly’s Catechism divines by the thousand; the masses of priests by the century;—­all these things, and more if more there be that the imagination of a lover of gold is likely to range over, the miser hears and sees and feels and hugs and enjoys as he paddles with his lean hands among the sliding, shining, ringing, innocent-looking bits of yellow metal, toying with them as the lion-tamer handles the great carnivorous monster, whose might and whose terrors are child’s play to the latent forces and power of harm-doing of the glittering counters played with in the great game between angels and devils.

I have seen a good deal of misers, and I think I understand them as well as most persons do.  But the Capitalist’s economy in rags and his liberality to the young doctor are very oddly contrasted with each other.  I should not be surprised at any time to hear that he had endowed a scholarship or professorship or built a college dormitory, in spite of his curious parsimony in old linen.

I do not know where our Young Astronomer got the notions that he expresses so freely in the lines that follow.  I think the statement is true, however, which I see in one of the most popular Cyclopaedias, that “the non-clerical mind in all ages is disposed to look favorably upon the doctrine of the universal restoration to holiness and happiness of all fallen intelligences, whether human or angelic.”  Certainly, most of the poets who have reached the heart of men, since Burns dropped the tear for poor “auld Nickie-ben” that softened the stony-hearted theology of Scotland, have had “non-clerical” minds, and I suppose our young friend is in his humble way an optimist like them.  What he says in verse is very much the same thing as what is said in prose in all companies, and thought by a great many who are thankful to anybody that will say it for them,—­not a few clerical as wall as “non-clerical” persons among them.

Wind-clouds and star-drifts.

V

     What am I but the creature Thou hast made? 
     What have I save the blessings Thou hast lent? 
     What hope I but Thy mercy and Thy love? 
     Who but myself shall cloud my soul with fear? 
     Whose hand protect me from myself but Thine?

     I claim the rights of weakness, I, the babe,
     Call on my sire to shield me from the ills
     That still beset my path, not trying me
     With snares beyond my wisdom or my strength,
     He knowing I shall use them to my harm,
     And find a tenfold misery in the sense