father. And should this reverential feeling die out, and the children of this or the coming time, make light of it, we may depend upon it, in its stead, passions will break into their social state, which shall rend them like the "two she bears out of the wood."

Again, power raises more or less of admiration in the mind. When we look at it as an object of the mind's contemplation merely, and not as operating immediately upon ourselves, it makes itself felt. And this it does, however remote in time or place, and however used, whether for a good or a bad end. For use changes not its nature, it is still power; and we acknowledge it from its infinite perfectness in the Almighty, down to its most tortuous acts in the meanest of his creatures.

Aside from moral and intellectual power, in its lowest form, that of brute strength, power calls out a kind of admiration, I had almost said respect. We may have seen in the countenance of a palid book-man, a sort of scornful pity at the exhibition of muscular power in a hale day-laborer. But had we looked into the man's heart, we should have seen how it gave his face the lie. It was an uncomfortable sense of another's superiority, (no matter in what,) driving him home to his misgiving self-complacency, his only hiding place at such times.

If power awakens a sense of admiration, every circumstance that puts it not only out of our check and direct control, but beyond our direct or indirect means of influence, also, increases our sense of the greatness of that power, and our consciousness of our own inferiority to it; and the more we dwell upon it, the more these impressions act and react upon each other; the more our admiration of it rises, larger pomp attends upon it, and we bend in reverence before it.

What a grandeur, then, is thrown round the powers of the past! How they expand on our vision, till their height becomes terrible! Look, for they still live,-awful, mysterious powers! But we can only look and adore, not reach them,

-even uncared for of them! Amid their vast thoughts, amid their great stir of passions, amid the proud structures they raised on earth, and which are now sublimated into ethereal domes and temples, amid all these, what one thought, there, is of us? what one standing-place there for our feet? what cathedral arch, or clustering column there, can we lay an altering hand upon? Time cannot crumble

them now. A hand like that which came out upon the wall, has written on them, Changeless as Eternity!-The past has touched them.

To think of a power so at ease in its own strength and ever-during nature, as to take no concern for our opposition or favor, or even to heed that we exist, has something in it most humbling to our proud natures. But such to us is the past. Let any one who has stood under a heavy-based rock, and strained hard against it, to give himself some sense of the immovable, call to mind his sensations at the time. Did he not feel, at his poor effort, how feebler than a very child he was ? —so feeble that strength and weakness could not express the difference between him and that he pressed against? And was he not conscious of a wonderful diminishing of his importance, at the time? And, so, in the higher relationthat between us and our fellow-man, we have felt, not angered alone, but mortified too, at an unreturned regard. Did not our anger spring from our mortification?

To be conscious, then, that we stand so related to any thing, as to be without influence or notice, lowers pride, and leads to a moderate estimate of self. In the present, however, who is so insignificant as to be self-persuaded that he is altogether without influence, or that there is no way in which some man may not be the better or the worse, the merrier or the sadder, for him? And who has never been in a mood to say to the future, "This shall be so and so?" But who shall say to the past, "I will it thus?" Try it. Are we not dumb? Call to it. Sounds any voice from the present, through its deep recesses? Do its barred gates ring to our blows? Let us be still, then, and be humble; and be content to reverence the glorious and the good, in which we cannot share.

Cannot share! O, be humble, and we shall share. Revere, and we shall enter in. Humility is the golden branch which shall open to us, as at a touch, its heavy doors; and we shall go in, and talk with the spirits of old as with familiar friends, and come back into the present, more thoughtful men, and look forward, wiser discerners into future time.

We shall stand in a true relation to the present and the future, by standing in a right relation to the past. For he who has been back into the past, comes down again into the present midst, and is prepared to travel on into the future, loaden with the experiences of ages gone, and made wise by the observa

tion of principles in their beginnings, their workings, and their remote results. He is able to bring into contact early causes and their distant effects, and tracing the former through their intricate windings down to the latter, to learn how it was that purposes so often produced their contraries-hope despair, and despair hope. He has learned this truth for the consolation and strengthening of his soul, that, sooner or later, evil recoils upon itself, and that if indirectness and wrong be not visited upon the father, it will be upon the children; and through his wide view, he is enabled to see how

from good still good proceeds; Direct or by occasion.

-A truth, stale indeed to the apprehension, but realized and let into the life of only a few hearts. He has found out just how short-lived and little worth are expedients and contrivings, and that, in the main, even temporary and particular ends are best reached through permanent and general principles: he has, in fine, been let into the true meaning of that "great word," as it has been well termed " Simplicity."

Having seen, also, that man is a creature of excess, blindly indifferent where worthy occasions open upon him, and straining with exhausting effort against that which, if let alone, would go harmlessly by of itself, a spirit of waiting composure is begotten in him, and over his actions is spread the great calm of thought.

To

An hour's reflection is worth a life's experience. have studied and meditated upon the past, is better for a man than if he had been born of Adam and had only lived along his centuries of years down to this day. For then, he would have been always in the present, agitated by its excitements, ever changing with its shiftings, and so crowded before and behind, as neither to look back on what he had left, nor forward into that towards which he was going.-What a motley, inexperienced, short-sighted, short-lived creature would be your present man of six thousand years!

Contemplation has also taught him the spiritual uses of material things, and how, from the outward acts of mere outward men, to draw vigor for inward action, and nourishment for the inward life. His mind is become an universal solvent, letting out the residuum of things, and taking up their essences into his own clear spirit. And see, again, how he has put the present all away from around him; and there he

stands alone. No, not alone; for by him stands the great spirit of the past, as stood the angel of God by Adam. And he is lifting up before him, in vision, time to come. we would but stop and hear this seer tell unto us what he hath seen!

O, that

There are many other aspects in which the past might be put. If, however, the influences of which I have spoken be admitted as true, they are enough. If they are disputed, nothing which I could add would be likely to gain for me an assent.

It may be that I have not made myself entirely understood by some, though what I have said seems to lie clearly enough before my own mind. For I deny the frequent assertion, that whatever one sees distinctly, he may, of course, make distinct to another. There are apt handlers of particulars, who observe all their minute differences, their numbers, their forms, and store these up in the memory, who never once think of considering them in their comprehensive whole. While generalizing minds, which catch just enough of particulars to answer their main purpose, and then forget them, may have powers so unlike, though equal, and associations of thoughts and moods of mind so differing, and may look at things from such opposite points, that one may not see at all, or see but dimly, what lies before the other in the light of day. The human mind can hardly conceive an unassociated truth. To communicate to another, therefore, a perception of a truth, in its fulness and clearness, there must be sympathizing movements between two minds, which, at a touch from the one, shall put in motion in the other sets of associations, which shall answer, like for like, in both minds. There are not only different orders of minds; but each mind also, hath its several sphere.

Let us now turn to the influences of a too exclusive attention to the present, upon the mind.

One influence is to impart a materializing character to man. Present time constitutes, in a peculiar degree, a state of sense. He who is interested singly in the present, lives mainly in a material world. He perceives only things, and he cares for only things. Even man is little more to him, than a complex frame of head and trunk, legs and arms; endowed with animal life, and sets of thoughts and affections, to fit him to keep in motion as a part of that great piece of machinery, the social state; and when he wears out, that is, dies, to be laid by in that vast lumber room, where all

old machinery is stowed away-called the grave. This is an extreme view of the matter, I acknowledge. But in proportion to an undue concern in the present, will be the tendency to this state. There is so constant a pressing upon the senses by the surrounding present, that the remote, which requires effort from within, to be an object of the mind, becomes quite ineffectual; the intuitive dies of mere neglect, and the outward and visible are all that are real to the mind, because they are all about which it is occupied, or disposed to be intent.

This materializing operation has a narrowing and deadening influence over the soul. Living in the present alone, the imagination is bounded by the visible and actual, its combinations are lessened in number, and its creative power, held in check, can no longer go out into the invisible-no longer expand and exalt itself by the loftier and purer excellencies of the ideal, or call into being creations, around which the affections may gather, and be made indeed alive with conceptions and emotions, speaking of a higher original, and prophesying a return up thither, through infinite love. Thus it is that the soul is kept unconscious of its finer powers, and loses even its longing after something better and nobler than any thing that is. Instead of being limited by the ideally possible alone, it is tethered down to the actual, the ordinary, and the poor, and learns to be satisfied with the secondary, instead of having prime objects before it, and its prime faculties made strong in the earnest reach after them. The present! The soul has no empyrean there!

As a necessary consequence from this, true sentiment goes out of fashion, and the romantic is held up to ridicule; for these cannot live long, if the air of the ideal world breathe not on them, and sweeten the atmosphere of our daily life.

And what, asks the self-complacency of worldly wisdom, what do we lose, in losing these, so long as we retain the real and the useful? The real and the useful! Let me tell him who asks this, that these longings after something not attained to here, take hold upon higher realities and uses than ever moved his soul, and speak a brighter truth than ever shone in upon his mind; and that to be without them, is to be ignorant of the past, lost to the better uses of the present, and blind to the times to come.

However these qualities may have been perverted, along with all else that belongs to man, even now they make the