Nasturtium. _Tropocolum majus._
Dedicated to _St. Felix_.
_To the Summer Zephyr._
Zephyr, stay thy vagrant flight,
And tell me where you’re going.--
Is it to sip off the dew-drop bright
That hangs on the breast of the lily white
In yonder pasture growing;
Or to revel ’mid roses and mignionette sweet;
Or wing’st thou away some fair lady to meet?--
If so, then, hie thee away, bland boy;
Thou canst not engage in a sweeter employ.
“From kissing the blue of yon bright summer sky,
To the vine-cover’d cottage, delighted, I fly,
Where Lucy the gay is shining;
To sport in the beams of her lovely eye,
While her temples with roses she’s twining.
Then do not detain me; I sigh to be there,
To fan her young bosom--to play ’mid her hair!”
~July 8.~
_St. Elizabeth_, Queen of Portugal, A. D. 1336. _St. Procopius_, A. D.
303. _Sts. Kilian_, _Colman_, and _Totnam_, A. D. 688. _St.
Withburge_, 10th Cent. _B. Theobald_, 13th Cent. _St. Grimbald_, A. D.
903.
_New Churches._
Every one must have been struck by the great number of new churches
erected within the suburbs of the metropolis, and the novel forms of
their steeples; yet few have been aware of the difficulties encountered
by architects in their endeavours to accommodate large congregations in
edifices for public worship. Sir Christopher Wren experienced the
inconvenience when the fifty churches were erected in queen Anne’s time.
He says, “The Romanists, indeed, may build large churches; it is enough
if they hear the murmur of the mass, and see the elevation of the host,
but ours are to be fitted for auditories. I can hardly think it
practicable to make a single room so capacious with pews and galleries,
as to hold above two thousand persons, and both to hear distinctly, and
see the preacher. I endeavoured to effect this, in building the parish
church of St. James’s, Westminster, which I presume is the most
capacious, with these qualifications, that hath yet been built; and yet,
at a solemn time, when the church was much crowded, I could not discern
from a gallery that two thousand were present. A moderate voice may be
heard fifty feet distant before the preacher, thirty feet on each side,
and twenty behind the pulpit; and not this, unless the pronunciation be
distinct and equal, without losing the voice at the last word of the
sentence, which is commonly emphatical, and, if obscured, spoils the
whole sense. A French is heard further than an English preacher, because
he raises his voice, and does not sink his last words. I mention this as
an insufferable fault in the pronunciation of some of our otherwise
excellent preachers; which schoolmasters might correct in the young, as
a vicious pronunciation, and not as the Roman orator spoke; for the
principal verb is in Latin usually the last word; and if that be lost,
what becomes of the sentence?”
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