being disgusting in ours. If we consulted our principles more, and our tastes less, it would cure us of this sharp inquest into their infirmities. Yet, on the other hand, if religious but coarsely mannered persons, however safe they may be as to their own state, could be aware how much injury their want of delicacy and prudence is doing to the minds of the polished and discriminating-who, though they may admire Christianity in the abstract, do not love it so cordially as to bear with the coarseness of some of its professors; nor understand it so intimately as to distinguish what is genuine from what is extrinsic; if they could conceive what mischief they do to religion, by the associations which they teach the refined to combine with it, so as to lead them inseparably to connect piety with vulgarity, they would endeavour to correct their own taste, from the virtuous fear of shocking that of others. They should remember that many a thing is the cause of evil, which yet is no excuse for it; that many a truth is brought into discredit by the disagreeableness which may be appended to it, and which, though utterly foreign, is made to belong to it. DEATH OF WILBERFORCE. I HEARD loud praise of heroes. But I saw History came, Sublimely soaring on her wing of light, And many a name of palatine and peer, Monarch and prince, on her proud scroll she bore, Blazoned by fame. But, mid the sea of time, Helmet and coronet and diadem Rose boastful up, and shone, and disappeared, I heard a knell Toll slow amid the consecrated aisles Where slumber England's dead. A solemn dirge / Broke forth amid the tombs of kings, proclaiming Fell down like rain, for was meet to mourn. Yes, Afric knelt, That mourning mother, and throughout the earth And so I bowed me down in this far nook L. H. SIGOURNEY. LINES WRITTEN ON RECEIVING FROM DR. RUSH OF PHILADELPHIA, A PIECE OF THE ELM TREE UNDER WHICH WILLIAM PENN MADE HIS TREATY WITH THE INDIANS. BLOWN DOWN 1812. FROM clime to clime, from shore to shore, And of that tree, which ne'er again A relic o'er the Atlantic main Was sent the gift of foe to foe.* But though no more its ample shade Waves green beneath Columbia's sky, * Alluding to the war then existing between England and America. Yet, midst the relic's sainted space, So once the staff the Prophet bore, By wondering eyes again was seen To swell with life through every pore, And bud afresh with foliage green. The withered branch again shall grow, ROSCOE. |