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Looking Back.
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experience worth, if we do not contemplate their teachings?

Nothing that keeps the mind impressible, that opens it to mild and touching influences, is harmful, and retrospection has a softening power over the most flint-like natures.

Hearts that seemed almost dead to hope or feeling have leapt and palpitated at the sound of some old strain, some ballad's familiar words. Eyes that were dimmed by oft-shed tears have kindled at the sight of some withered flower, some faded relic that conjured up the shapes, the voices, the aspirations of other days.

Many a wife who has seen the choice of her youth lapsing from virtue until her heart insensibly turned against him, and the hand which should have been stretched out to lure him back into the paths of honor, was paralyzed, has felt her dead affections vivified and awakened by the remembrance of the happy hours of her betrothal, her bridal days, evoked by some olden token, some letter full of loving words which chanced to be turned over in the search after other things. Her tenderness has been rekindled and her strength renewed by these trifles, which forced her to "look back," more potently, than by all the reasoning and chiding to which stern Duty and rebuking Conscience subjected her.

How many instances are there of minds which have wandered into the fantastic realms of mad-

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