exciting diversion, would try a paper war: each
engaging a private tutor to perfect them in
parliamentary Billingsgate. They would find
it a much more amusing pastime than they
could ever have conceived beforehand.

SONG FOR NOVEMBER.

THE brown fogs are rising,
The yellow leaves failing,
The song birds are silent,
The harsh winds are wailing;
The days have shrunk shorter,
The nights have grown longer;
Warmth becomes weaker,
Cold waxes stronger;
Yet, in close darkness
Which no eye can sever.
The World-strength is shaping
Blossoms for ever.

Life is fast, sinking,
Sun-like and bright;
As out of the heavens
Falls the great night.
Yet, fear I never
Leaving this earth-place,
Knowing the grave is
Also a birth-place;
And the soul, growing
With God-power vernal,
Will it not burst into
Blossoms eternal?

KENSINGTON CHURCH.

IN some moods of the mind the juxtaposition
is very painful of a churchyard and a
public way. It looks as if death itself were
no escape from the turmoils of life. We feel
as if the noise of carts and cries were never
to be out of one's hearing; as if the tears,
however hidden, of those who stood mournfully
looking at our graves, were to be mocked
by the passing crowd of indifferent spectators;
as if the dead might be sensible of the very
market going on with all its night-lights and
bustle (as it does here on Saturdays); of the
noise of drunken husbands and wives persisting
in bringing a curse of misery into
the last home.

On the other hand, the sociable man may
sometimes be disposed to regard with complacency
this kind of posthumous intercourse
with the living. We may feel as if the dead
were hardly the departed; as if they were
still abiding among their friends and fellow-creatures;
not displeased even to hear the
noise and the bustle; or at least, as if in
ceasing to hear our voices, they were still, so
to speak, reposing in our arms. Morning,
somehow, in this view of the case, would
seem to be still theirs, though they choose to
lie in bed; cheerful noon is with them, without
their having any of the trouble of it;
the names may be read on their tombstones
as familiarly as they used to be at their
doors; children play about their graves, unthinkingly
indeed, but joyously, and with as
little thought of irreverence as butterflies;
and the good fellow going home at night
from his party, breathes a jovial instead of a
sad blessing on their memories. Perhaps he
knew them. Perhaps he has been joining in
one of their old favourite glees by Callcott or
Spofforth, the former of whom, by the way,
was a Kensington man, and the latter of
whom lies buried here, and is recorded at the
church door.  And assuredly the dead Spofforth
would find no fault with his living
remembrancer.

In quiet country places there is, in fact, a
sort of compromise in this instance between
the two feelings of privacy and publicity,
which we have often thought very pleasing.
The dead in a small sequestered village seem
hardly removed from their own houses. The
last home seems almost a portion of the first.
The clergyman's house often has the churchyard
as close to it as the garden; and when
he goes into his grave, he seems but removed
into another room; gone to bed, and to his
sleep. He has not left. He lies there with
his family still, ready to waken with them
all, on the heavenly morning.

This however is a feeling upon the matter,
which we find it difficult to realise in a bustling
town. We are there convinced upon the
whole, that whether near to houses or away
from them, the sense of quiet is requisite to
the proper idea of the churchyard. The dead
being actually severed from us—no longer
visible, no longer having voices—all sights
and words but of the gentlest and quietest
kind seem to be impertinences towards them;
not to belong to them—quiet being the
thing farthest removed from cities—and what
we imagine to pervade all space, and the
gulfs between the stars, is requisite to make
us feel that we are standing on the threshold
of heaven.

Upon the whole, therefore, we cannot approve
of churchyards in noisy thoroughfares,
and thus must needs object to the one in the
place before us; though there are portions of
it to the north and west of the church, more
sequestered (for a small remove in these cases
makes a great difference), and in those portions
the most noticeable of the graves are
situate. They are not many; nor have we
much to say of persons lying in the church
itself, or in the church vaults.

But first we must return to the church
itself. From what we have said of it, the
reader will conclude that it is remarkable
as an edifice for nothing but the smallness
and homeliness of its appearance; but it
has this curious additional claim to consideration;
namely, that what with partial re-buildings
and wholesale repairs, it has been
altered, since the year sixteen hundred and
eighty-three, nearly a dozen times. How
often before then, we cannot say; nor do we
know when it was first built. But the alterations,
for the most part, appear to have
been as bad as what they altered. They
beat the silk stocking, the repeated mendings