Simile.b 20. ("So when an angel, by divine command, a ELYS'IUM (e lizh'i um), in ancient mythology, was the abode of the blessed. In early times the Isles of the Blessed were supposed to be in the Western Ocean, west of Europe. At a later day, as geographical knowledge extended, Elysium was moved down to the lower world, as the place of reward for the good. b It was at the suggestion of Lord Halifax that Addison was employed to celebrate in verse the battle of Blenheim. When he showed his patrons this splendid simile, he was at once rewarded with the place of Commissioner of Appeals; and from that time Fortune began to smile upon him. • Pronounced Mawl'bro. LESSON XXXIX. THE CHILD AND THE DEW-DROPS. J. E. CARPENTER. [The Simile. As the dew-drops, glittering in the moonbeams, and sparkling in the sunlight, soon lose their brightness, and pass away from earth to be reset in the beautiful dyes of the rainbow, so the brightness and beauty of youth, that so soon wither on earth, shall bloom the more brightly in heaven.] 1. "O FATHER, dear father, why pass they away,- 2. "My child," said the father, "look up to the skies; 3. Alas for the father'10 !-how little knew he LESSON XL. THE CONVICT SHIP. T. K. HERVEY. [JOHN HERVEY, known as Lord Hervey, a distinguished political and poetical writer, born in England in 1696; died in 1743.] FIRST SCENE, MORN ON THE WATERS." [A ship is represented as seen, first, under full sail, in the morning light, borne gallantly on by a favoring breeze, with every thing bright and beautiful around her. Yet below-in the hold-are human hearts that are breaking,-banished, for their crimes, to a far distant penal colony.] 1. MORN on the waters-and purple and bright, Full to the breeze she unbosoms her sail, And her pennons stream onward, like hope in the gale; 2. See! she looks up to the golden-edged clouds, Bright as the visions of youth, ere they part, [The convict ship is seen tranquilly gliding over the moonlit waters, like a phantom of beauty. And yet so lovely a thing is bearing away young hearts that sorrow and guilt can not wean from the ties and affections of home.] F 3. Night on the waves!—and the moon is on high, 4. Who-as she smiles in the silvery light, THIRD, THE SIMILE. [Here the formal comparison is made between the convict ship at sea and the course of human life,-the simile being introduced by such words as thus, like, and a8.] 5. 'Tis thus with our life:-while it passes along, As the smiles we put on just to cover our tears; know, Like heart-broken exiles, lie burning below; While the vessel drives on to that desolate shore Where the dreams of our childhood are vanished and o'er. LESSON XLI. THE LIFE FLEET. Adapted.-Eclectic Magazine. [The following instructive lesson, in which human life is compared to a fleet, would be a descriptive allegory, if the comparison were not plainly expressed. See "Allegory," p. 159.] 1. ADDISON, in that beautiful allegory, "The Vision of Mirza," compares Human Life to a bridge with seventy tolerably firm and entire arches, which represent the threescore years and ten of man's earthly pilgrimage. Individuals, indeed, occasionally survive to the term of a century; but it is under manifest infirmities; and hence several broken arches are supposed to be connected, at one extremity of the bridge, with those that are entire, making the total number about a hundred. 2. Modern statistics of Life Insurance now enable us to trace the outflow of human life, and to compute the respective lengths of the current with wonderful exactness, in the instance of great groups of mankind subject to like conditions; so that out of a large promiscuous number who are born at the same time,—or who, in Addison's figure, emerge from the cloud and enter on the bridge simultaneously,-it can be stated with close exactitude to how many the "trapdoors" and "pitfalls" of the first arch will prove treacherous, or how many will die the first year; and so of each succeeding arch in the series. 3. Let us suppose one hundred thousand born at the same date, say January 1, 1870. According to the usual proportion among the sexes, fifty-one thousand two hundred and seventy-four will be boys, and forty-eight thousand 'seven hundred and twenty-six will be girls. They may be compared to a fleet of one hundred thousand vessels setting sail together, and consisting of two grand divisions, one of males, which may be called the red squadron, and another of females, which we may name the white squadron. 4. At first the white squadron is inferior in number to the other. Owing to disease peculiarly incident to infancy, at |