We thus state the proposition in set phrase, and with what may possibly be deemed stately and ostentatious parade. We bestow upon it the dignity, the importance, and the full significance of a fundamental, primal law, arrogating for it all that this word law ever includes; its neglect or violation to bring upon us no less loss, no less positive detriment, than does the neglect or violation of any law whatever. We believe it will be found to deserve the rank we thus claim for it. But it is, at the same time, capable of being stated in a more simple, or, at least, less pretentious form, when its meaning becomes this: that humble, and, what to our careless apprehension seem altogether contemptible and insignificant agencies, are often the real, the true, the pregnant sources of our advancement; that nature, irrespective of any dogmatic estimates of ours, and quite heedless of our preconceived notions, awards a value, and attaches a consequence, to these so-called "little things," which she will have acknowledged, and which we must ourselves, in the end, recognize and convert to our service, before we can attain to the full stature of which we are capable; that whether success shall attend our efforts, often turns upon exceedingly minute and apparently worthless points, but points, for all that, none the less rigorously insisted upon. A man may spend his whole life in the effort, but he shall never reduce the lump of gold to a perfect sphere by the strokes of a hammer. He may imagine he has done so, after great expenditure of labor to that end, but the microscope shall detect his error, and so, in the world of matter, an instance be afforded to illustrate the "law of equivalents." In a word, its intention is to direct man's attention away from what is pretentious, and frequently nothing more than that; from what is vast, and frequently as vague as it is vast, and admired of us because it is vague; from what gives uncertain promise of magnificent results, to that which gives sure and covenanted reward-covenanted to us by all the undeviating uniformity and inviolable sacredness of law itself.

As illustrative of the foregoing remarks, perhaps nothing

would better reward our search than certain facts lying upon the surface which meet us at every turn. A law of life or of healthy growth has been violated. The statesman has overwrought that active brain of his; the sensualist has fallen into helplessness, perhaps idiocy, by his free indulgences; the laborer, perhaps head of a family, to contribute more generously to the comfort of those who are dependent upon him, has taxed his physical energies beyond the point of healthfulness. To be restored, what is the one, sole equivalent each of these must bring in his hands? Repentance, not in any theologic sense, but a return-a retracing of their steps along the same path by which they were severally led to the catastrophe; for the laborer and the statesman, rest; for the sensualist, abstinence. So of a state or people who have lapsed into imbecility; but one Ariadnean thread conducts out from the labyrinth. In all these cases we understand perfectly well that the price of restoration is a question of kind, and not of amount. And still more heartily do we testify to the same truth when we rebuke the inconsiderate, unseasonable zeal which would repay days and weeks of starvation with instant abundance.

The analogical, and so, if not demonstrative, at least corroborative illustration which physical science furnishes in the material world, is still more abundant. And of this description, perhaps, there is none more curious than that which is afforded by the laws of light. An experiment said to have been performed by Sir William Herschell is in point. On preparing a solar spectrum, and so decomposing and dividing the different colored rays, each from the other, and then exposing a thermometer to each of them in turn, he confidently expected to find the most marked result in the yellow space, which was the brightest; and great was his surprise on finding, not only that this was not true, but that the greatest effect of all was produced at the furthest remove from the yellow, and, indeed, quite beyond the red-which occupied the extreme space-even to where the light ceased to be visible at

all. And in another similar experiment, where, not heat, but chemical action, was looked for, a similar disappointment was the result. So, too, a like surprise has probably happened to some of us, on learning for the first time that glass, which so freely transmits heat from the sun's rays, intercepts the artificial heat which comes from our own fire-sides. But, in the case just mentioned of the spectrum, instead of the greatest heat being found at its centre, where the light was the strongest, it was there precisely that the effect was smallest, both as to heat and chemical forces-a fact which possibly certain modern experimenters in the field of moral science would do well to make a note of.

See this cloyed, limp, voluptuary. How vain are his longings to taste once more the pleasures which a few years ago made life so pleasant to him! In what a painful, perplexed state of hovering does he not find himself, unable to fix a choice anywhere; in some half-lucid interval almost wishing himself that hod-carrier yonder, so that he only had his full complement of life-his rounded muscle and fierce appetite!

This other child, nursed in the lap of ease, quite unsuspecting as to the great wrong that has been practised upon him-could he, by some miraculous interposition in his behalf, be made to understand by how much he is the sufferer in that he can never know the sweets of triumph over difficultieswhat might not he afford to give, so that he were allowed to put forth his hand and pluck some of this pleasant fruit? But the child that cries for the moon shall have his desire as soon as this one.

For it is to be observed, that in all these cases where this price in kind, and not quantity, is exacted, payment must be made by the party who is to be benefited, and not by his friends for him-a strict condition which seems all the greater hardship, because it is very often the man's friends only who see clearly wherein he lacks, and wherein he is overladen; while he himself is mole-blind as to the weakness-that is to say, his blindness is not only complete, but natural or congenital. "We

wanted to get at him and give him a good shaking.”—Have we not, most of us, heard such remark in relation to some third party, who, balancing on the very edge of success, seemed to need but the slightest possible jostle or hint to tip him quite over into the very lap of fruition? "If this friend of ours only had the least bit more heartiness, or even outside animation."—" Were this one just a trifle more pliable."—" If this other will insist upon being so singularly honest, could he not be so in a less blunt and offensive way, with a little more gracefulness?" These remarks, and others like them, we are made to listen to constantly; those who make them not considering that the arrangement is an entire one, and that all tinkering is excluded, at least by strangers. "What a pity

it seems that these two may not be fused and mixed together!" -a simple enough way to make surplus here pay for deficiency there, and full of promise, too; if so be, by any chemical process lately arrived at and patented, this mingling, and so averaging, of two, as at present constituted, unprofitable characters could be thus safely and expeditiously compassed. This life, chemistry, were it but once reduced into our possession, as is that other, which busies itself with the inorganic -with earths, and salts, and acids, and alkalies—what a glorious dispensation would then dawn upon the world! what transmutations might we then behold, bestowing upon us no longer great accumulation of residuary slag, but, instead thereof, streams of molten gold twice refined!

Did our space permit, it would seem neither an uninteresting nor altogether unprofitable employment to hunt out, and more or less carefully analyze some of these equivalents we are speaking of. Has it ever occurred to the reader, nay, is there any one to whom it has not occurred, to consider death in this connection-we mean the death of a friend? that never lost a friend, especially a very near and dear one, can by any external or substituted apparatus, how ingeniously soever contrived, be put in possession of certain emotions, and thoughts, too, which then flow to us all naturally and spon

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taneously, when we reach that experience-emotions and thoughts as new and as strange, we had almost said, as valuable as is the gift of sight when first communicated to a blind man? Into what a new world are we not led by this eloquent interpreter-this sharp-eyed, anatomizing revelator-a world otherwise quite beyond our search, or conception even! The traveller in strange latitudes, who is thus made to behold new constellations over his head, gets this privilege, not by telescopes of greater power, but by a change in his position and relations. And so it is with the child of affliction, who, in the very vault of the tomb, all dark and undiademed as it would else be, is made to see stars, and even suns, he had never seen before, nor so much as dreamed of. Among the rest, how idealized has the absent one now become to our imagination, his or her infirmities all forgotten as though they had never been, while the shining qualities are brought out into full relief, and, without help of spiritual or theologic guide, the object of our affection seems enrobed in garments of a lustre and a purity quite dazzling to look upon! And what new "departures" do we not then take-we travellers across this life-ocean-what new estimates, perhaps more correct, too, do we not then form of this mysterious life of ours, now become both more and less mysterious! And while much that once made the greater part of it, seems now shrunk and almost vanished away, how do other points that pertain to it loom up into a quite unwonted significance! An equivalent this, it is true, is altogether grievous in the payment thereof

-more so than any; but we must know that all payments in this kind are for the most part irksome, not for a moment to be brought into comparison with the mere handing over of a certain sum in money, or with the transfer of other chattels and hereditaments, to be on the instant receipted for, and so the debt discharged against us and our heirs forever.

But to return. How inexorable is this law of equivalents in refusing to recognize exchangeable values, we have most notable evidence, when it is considered that even wisdom itself,