from my bosom, and fling away uncertainty and indecision, and grapple unreservedly and impetuously with the enemy which I could now face plainly and directly.

The proposal which Williams seemed to entertain and was disposed to enforce, of summarily cutting off all danger of unfriendly interference on my part by destroying me and those with whom I was likely to be joined in any such measures, gave me but little concern. Men who had lived for years in the centre of unceasing peril, and had nightly gone to rest in the confidence, not of security from every attack, but of success in every contest, were little likely to be forced to a difficult and very hazardous act by an uneasiness arising from a possible hostility from one of the many of whose enmity they were doubtless abundantly certain. At all events, the date of such a proceeding would necessarily be posterior to the period of their operations in respect of Tyler, and when their result was known it would be time to estimate the risk to which I should be exposed. In the event of that result being favourable I was wholly relieved from apprehension of harm, for such arrangements would be effected as would supersede the necessity of destroying danger and myself at once. If those matters had an unsatisfactory issue, other counsels might be taken, or other obstacles arise to the fulfilment of so bloody a scheme.

The subject which gave me most uneasiness and left me most at a loss how to proceed, was that of Maxwell's fate. The incidents related by Williams, if they might be depended on, were certainly most extraordinary. That he should have entered the house of Tyler and never have come out, gave grounds for entertaining the darkest apprehension as to the termination of his

life; but any conclusion of that complexion was resisted by the statement of the same speaker that he had visited the mansion which must have given evidence either of imprisonment or death, had either been the remedy to which resort had been had. That Tyler had escaped unseen from his own dwelling, whether or not he had gone from the city, that narration rendered certain; and the observations of Williams regarding the terms on which the parties stood, (which, though not contradicted by Thompson's letter, had not been suggested to me by that as the footing which they held in relation to one another,) as well as the account of the manner in which Maxwell had gone to Tyler's house on the day of his disappearance, rendered it probable that by an exercise of talent not difficult to be believed in, one whose enmity would be likely to be a serious inconvenience, had been converted to a friend, and that both had fled together. The prospect of benefit which had been held out on this quarter was thus dashed to the earth.

From this perplexed and fretting scene of doubts and tortuous plans I turned my eyes to the high and expanded scene of light and freedom which extended above me in the balmy silence of purity and peace. The moon, whom I had last seen lofty and alone, like the high-hearted, solitary confessor of principle, who looks out upon a passionate and erring world from the castle of his strong but pensive thoughts, serene in the stillness of eternal sympathy with Truth and Duty, was now girt and garlanded by a thousand thin and pearly clouds, like the state of progressive girlhood whose baser being as it nears to womanhood, like a sea-bird sailing through a mist, seems gradually winged with a most soft and delicate accompaniment of feelings, fan

cies, hopes and dreams which are now a portion of her loveliness. Night after night, the queen of the sky spreads forth her calm magnificence of glory to show to men that the joys of celestial quiet, though they may seem to be insecure and interrupted, yet are abiding, and unchanged; and to give us a glimpse of that deep and undying peace which lies beyond the clouds and tempest of the earth, in whose region alone dwell instability and variableness: and we may bless the benignant power which thus bids the elements minister unto the improvement of our moral life, and the phases of nature be the support of our spirits in the darkling struggles of our life's endurance. It has been said by an ingenious and philosophical thinker, who if he had written books instead of letters, would have stood at the summit of contemporary literature that "the laws of physical nature were originally constructed, on the principle of future applicability, to the illustrations of moral and religious truth:" and though the observation in this particular shape may seem to be too bold and unscrupulous, seeing that errors may be equally and similarly illustrated from nature, in which there is no error, yet it is certain the resemblance or at least the homogeneity between ideas and things, and between moral operations and material processes very clearly indicate that no blind chance has struck them out, but that both are the result of the action of a being whose object is one and whose attributes are uniform. And if for the mind of man this provision is made in the harmony of the actual with the conceivable, the same sympathy exists between the passions of the heart and the conditions of the world. The midnight tempest, with its wild carnival of thunder, expresses the deep and de

fiant humour of the soul, which sometimes frets itself to frenzy: the clearing of the storm, when the gleams of the setting sun are flung over the scene, and the fresh western wind goes forth in its glad brightness, is an emblem of the happy sighs of the overcharged heart, when man long battling against remorse returns to his father and is forgiven:

The morn has enterprise-deep quiet droops

With evening-triumph when the sun takes rest—
Voluptuous transports when the corn-fields ripen
Beneath a warm moon like a happy face.

Thus are the shades that mark the countenance of man imaged like gigantic shadows on the shows of nature, and the external sphere is a storying mirror of the inward spirit. These visible scenes which pass before the eye like moral lessons are the appointed medicine of the heart by which its life is strengthened, purified and expanded: and those narrow and erring religionists who would exclude all communion with what surrounds them to gaze upon one abstract idea, cut themselves off from the richest means of abiding grace; they shade off from the parched soil of their sandy thoughts, the fertilizing showers of the fruitful rain, and hope to reap from the exhausted mould a yet plentier harvest of good feelings. Such systems provide for only half of our nature. If we adopt them we must believe that God did not create the other half. Of the thousand versions of Christianity, there is only one that answers the test of satisfying the whole of our being, and leaves nothing dark or distressful in the moral conditions around us, but "rests in truth, and joy and recompense."

CHAPTER IX.

Around me

All seems like the darkly-mingled mimicry

Of feverish sleep, in which the half-doubting mind
'Wildered and weary, with a deep-drawn breath

Says to itself," shall I not wake?"

Life may change, but it may fly not;
Hope may vanish, but can die not;

Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;
Love repulsed, but it returneth.

BAILLIE.

SHELLEY.

I SAT by my solitary fire on the following evening reviewing the circumstances in which I was placed, and meditating by what plan I could best direct them to advantage. My own sole concern was with Tyler; the conduct or the fate of those who had once been his allies, but had now ceased to be connected with him in those matters which alone interested me, engaged my consideration no farther than as their movements might relate to my safety: offensively, I had nothing to do with them. All efforts on my part to follow the flight of Tyler would be vain, and I felt little doubt that they would be unsuccessful in the hands of those who had now undertaken the search. He who had reigned with an unbending sceptre over turbulence such as that man