A Review.

What shall I say to you ? What can I say Better than silence is ? When I survey This throng of faces turned to meet my own , Friendly and fair , and yet to me

unknown , Transformed the very landscape seems to be ; It is the same , yet not the same to me . So many memories crowd upon my

brain , So many ghosts are in the wooded plain , I fain would steal away , with noiseless tread , As from a house where some one lieth

dead . I cannot go ;—I pause;— -I hesitate ; My feet reluctant linger at the gate ; As one who struggles in a troubled dream To speak and cannot , to myself I seem . ' '

Aud here comes as fine a burst of poetic fervour aud truthfulness as it has been our lot to peruse for many a long day : — " Vanish the dream ! Vanish the idle fears ! Vanish the rolling mists of fifty years !

Whatever time or space may intervene , I will not be a stranger in this scene . Here every doubt , all indecision ends ; Hail , my companions , comrades , classmates , friends !

Ah me ! the fifty years since last we met Seem to me fifty folios bound and set By Time , the great transcriber , on his shelves , Wherein are written the histories of

ourselves . What tragedies , what comedies , are there ; What joy and grief , what rapture and despair ! What chronicles of triumph and defeat

, Of struggle , and temptation , and retreat ! What records of regrets , and doubts , and fears ! What pages blotted , blistered by our tears !

What lovely landscapes on the margin shine , What sweet , angelic faces , what divine And holy images of love and trust , Undimmed by age , unsoiled b y damp or dust !

Whose hand shall dare to open and explore These volumes , closed and clasped for evermore 1 Not mine . With reverential feet I pass ; I hear a voice that cries , ' Alas ! alas ! Whatever hath been written shall

remain , Nor be erased nor written o ' er again ; The unwritten only still belongs to thee : Take heed , and ponder well what that shall be . ' "

Most effective is the poet's " argumentum ad peuros et ad seniores ! " : — " The scholar and the world ! The endless strife , The discord in the harmonies of life ! The love of learning , the sequestered

nooks , And all the sweet serenity of books ; The market-place , the eager love of gain , Whose aim is vanity , and whose end is pain !

But why , you ask me , should this tale be told To men grown old , or who are growing old ? It is too late ! Ah , nothing is too late Till the tired heart shall cease to

palpitate . Cato learned Greek at eighty ; Sophocles Wrote his grand QMipus , and Simonides Bore off the prize of verse from his compeers , When each had numbered more than

fourscore years , And Theophrastus , at fourscore and ten , Had but begun his Characters of Men . Chaucer , at Woodstock with the nig htingales , At sixty wrote the Canterbury Tales j

Goethe at Weimar , toiling to the last , Completed Faust when eighty years were past . These are indeed exceptions ; but they show How far the gulf-stream of our youth may flow