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with all possible splendor. Devout persons are invited to attend, to give greater pomp to this act of religion. On the first proximo there will be the feast of the most Holy Sacrament, with a procession in the evening, a Te Deum, and a sermon. On the 2d, the feast of the patron of San Gonçalo; at three P. M. there will be brilliant horse-racing (!) after which a Te Deum and magnificent fireworks."--Pp. 146, 147.

ers.

The above seems bold enough, and illustrates the results of Romanism when not held in check by heretical Bibles and preachBut we must give still another, which illustrates, also, the harmonious workings of the law of supply and demand; the Church creates the demand, and thus an honest tradesman advertises the supply:

"Notice to the Illustrious Preparers of the Festival of the Holy Spirit.—In the Rua dos Ourives, No. 78, may be found a beautiful assortment of Holy Ghosts, in gold, with glories, at eighty cents each; smaller sizes, without glories, at forty cents; silver Holy Ghosts, with glories, at six dollars and a half per hundred ; ditto without glories, three dollars and a half; Holy Ghosts of tin, resembling silver, seventy-five cents per hundred."-P. 147.

What must be the result of such teachings? Among the ignorant debasement still more profound, among the more enlightened only skepticism. And just such is the actual result. The padres have lost their power in great measure, and are still losing it.

It is hopeful, however, that the empire, with slight restriction, has allowed liberty of conscience and of worship. "All other denominations have the right to worship God as they choose, whether in public or in private, with the single limitation that the church edifice must not be no formo do templo, in the form of a temple," which the supreme judges have defined to be "a building without steeples or bells." Romanism has had a fair chance on that field. She has had no opposition, has had government aid and prestige, has been alone with the people, and yet so palpable has been her failure, so insufficient her priesthood, so powerless for good her teachings, that the people refuse to guarantee her exclusive domination, but throw open the door to all others, and bid them enter, if they bring a better and more ennobling system.

If we may credit the statements of our authors, Brazil opens a promising field for evangelical effort. Dr. Kidder thus speaks of it

in 1845:

"It is my firm conviction that there is not a Roman Catholic country on the globe where there prevails a greater degree of toleration, or a greater liberality of feeling toward Protestants. In all my residence and travels in Brazil, in the character of a Protestant missionary, I never received the slightest opposition or indignity from the people. As might have been expected, a few of the priests made all the opposition they could; but the circumstance that these were unable to excite the people, showed how little influence they pos

sessed. On the other hand, perhaps, quite as many of the clergy, and those of the most respectable in the empire, manifested toward us and our work both favor and friendship."-P. 143.

Mr. Fletcher, who spent some time in the empire as an agent of the American Bible Society, and came in immediate contact with all classes and grades of society from Dom Pedro down, gives the above statements his cordial approval. In addition, it may be said that there was a willingness, nay, a desire to receive the Holy Scriptures most encouraging to pious effort. It is with reluctance we turn from other marked passages, which demonstrate the readiness and docility with which the people receive the Bible and the message of Protestantism. We fear we have too greatly neglected Brazil. Surely if any fields are white to the harvest there they are. Romanism is powerless for good. The infidelity which once poisoned France is working. The training given by the schools to mind will loosen the hold of the papacy. Those young men now in Brazilian schools are not to be held in leading strings by a Church which offers to sell them tin Holy Ghosts at seventy-five cents per hundred. But where shall they go? "How shall they hear without a preacher?"

It is a question which should be asked by every missionboard at each meeting, "What can be done for Brazil ?" Cannot Protestantism go there and grapple with the man of sin, or shall we sit down in full sight of that population of nearly eight millions, who implore bread, and leave them to die of spiritual hunger?

We must forego the pleasure of laying before the reader the interesting account of the exposition of United States art and science, secured by Mr. Fletcher's personal efforts, and which excited so much interest in Rio. We omit it reluctantly, and yet find some compensation in the fact that full accounts have been given through the newspapers of the country. Of this the North American Review says: "The results of this most judicious and praiseworthy enterprise can hardly fail to show themselves in the commercial statistics of the present and succeeding years. Certain it is that attention was emphatically drawn to the superiority of some American. manufactures, that a new demand was created, and the knowledge of the mercantile resources enlarged and extended; and it may prove that the missionary of the cross will have been the prime agent in righting the balance of trade between our own and the Brazilian ports." Not unlikely. And it is but indicative of the future. Commerce is yet to follow the cross as its pole-star. The missionary is yet to be recognized as a power among men.

We close this interesting and richly-executed volume. We have

read it with delight, and yet with trembling in view of the duty of our Church to that vast empire. To those who have not read the book, we are sure the extracts with which we have so plentifully sprinkled this paper, will be welcome, and we trust that they will create a desire to read the whole.

ART. III.-BRYANT'S POEMS.

Poems, by WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. Collected and arranged by the Author. Illustrated with seventy-one engravings, from drawings by eminent artists. New York: D. Appleton & Co.

THE illustrated book of poems whose title stands at the head of this article contains three hundred and forty-four pages, quarto post size, of superb cream-tinted, highly glazed linen paper, with broad margins; is printed in elegant, clearly cut, sharply defined, antique type, shining in the honors of the glossiest black ink, and is bound in substantial brown Turkey morocco, with no flaunting gilt on the covers, but heavily gilded where gold is valuable, on the edges. The whole outside and external appearance is largely suggestive of taste and genius, and may well prepare the heart of the reader for the poetry within.

William Cullen Bryant is one among the few precocious children that have more than redeemed the promises of an early dawn of genius. He was born in the town of Cummington, Hampshire county, in western Massachusetts, November, 1795. He came from a family in which the profession of physician had for several generations been hereditary. His childhood and youth were therefore spent among cultivated society, where elegance and literature would be appreciated, and where genius would be encouraged. His early rambles were along the eastern slopes of the picturesque and romantic Green Mountain range, and the influences which their gorges and chasms, their streams, and cascades, their valleys and woods, exerted upon the future man, are very visible in almost every one of the poems in this volume.

His earliest attempts at poetry were made at the age of nine, and are as good as those of Pope, Cowley, Tasso, or Chatterton at the same age, or a little later. In 1808, when the poet was not quite thirteen, a book of poems, containing "The Embargo" and "Spanish Revolution," was published by his friends. So wide was

the range of reading, and the extent of knowledge of political affairs and of general history, as well as the maturity of talent and stretch of thought here exhibited, that his friends deemed it necessary, when a second edition was called for in February, 1809, to issue a kind of affidavit, assuring the public that the author's age was a matter of record, and could be verified by examination. "The Embargo" was chiefly a satirical attack upon the policy of the administration of Mr. Jefferson, who had laid an embargo on all foreign bound vessels belonging to the United States, a policy which was thought to be highly detrimental to New England, and which was most fiercely and persistently denounced in all her borders. This poem, written and passed to a second edition before the author was thirteen and a half, is really as good as most of the satirical poems on political subjects published by more ambitious authors. Its sentiments and ideas undoubtedly were learned in the daily discussions at the table of his father, and from the partisan newspapers of the vicinity, more than by his own observation or reflection; and the versification is probably due to the lad's ardent admiration of Pope and Dryden, more than to any great labor of thought, or enthusiastic inspiration of real genius or lofty purpose. It was nevertheless well received, and made the public both anxious to hear more from its young author, and fastidious concerning all that he might thenceforward compose.

In 1810 Bryant entered Williams College, where he remained two years, and then devoted himself to the study of the law in Plymouth county, Massachusetts, where he was admitted to the bar as a practising attorney in 1815. About this time "Thanatopsis," written, it is said, at the age of eighteen, was first published in one of the periodicals of the day. This poem has been a great favorite with everybody since the day it first saw the light. It purports to be the voice of Nature herself to man concerning death, and is full of noble sentiments of the pantheistic school. Its versification is liquid and flowing, and has scarcely a harsh cadence or an imperfect rhythm. It is the voice of Nature seeking to make us content to die, after a life of brave and useful labor. In 1821 "The Ages," the longest poem which Mr. Bryant has yet published, consisting, however, of only thirty-five Spenserian stanzas, was printed at Cambridge, Massachusetts, together with "Thanatopsis," "To a Water-Fowl," "The Yellow Violet," "Green River," "Inscription at the Entrance of a Wood," and a few other pieces. This volume was the proper commencement of his career and fame, and it established his reputation as the first of American poets, a position from which no rival has yet dislodged him, after forty years of

almost continual writing. In the year 1825 he left his native state and removed to the city of New York, where he has since resided, engaged chiefly in the business of editing a political newspaper, and devoted to the promulgation and defense of the principles of what claims to be Jeffersonian democracy. In 1834 and 1835 he traveled extensively in Europe, and in 1843 made the tour of the Mississippi and the Great West. His mind is therefore enriched by ancient and modern classical studies and literature, disciplined by the methodical training and practice of the law, polished and elevated by intercourse with the best of metropolitan society, enlarged and refined by domestic and foreign travel, and strengthened by almost daily exercise in the practice of literary composition. Add to these a genial temper, a habit of quick and correct observation, an ardent sympathy with the varying moods of nature, and a soul alive to all generous instincts and impulses, and we have a character well fitted to become a national favorite as a poet. Of all our American male writers of verse, he has been the most praised, if not the most read and most influential; and his poems are now almost daily found in the poet's corner of our multitudinous newspapers, though they may have been already fifty times printed in the former volumes of the same periodical.

As a poet he therefore needs no introduction to an American or even a European auditory. Years ago his poems, edited and introduced by Irving, were dedicated to Rogers, and cordially reviewed and complimented by Christopher North in Blackwood. Their reputation is established. But Bryant is something else than a poet.

The subjects sung in this volume are none other than the topics common to all true poetry, with the almost exception of religion and home, in the highest and most endearing senses of these words. No volume of poems can be at all complete where these topics are wholly neglected, nor can it be at all popular when these subjects, the noblest for human contemplation, and the dearest to the human heart, as well as the sweetest and most consoling, are not often recurred to; and therefore there is found in some one or other of its phases and appearances, on almost every page, natural religion, or that kind of quietism that may grow out of the observation of nature, and prompts to a lazy, indifferent morality and benevolence, together with those feelings and affections that make home agreeable and desirable, such as respect for age and parental authority, chivalric regard for woman and love for childhood, virtues which also grandly dignify and ennoble the character and render a people honorable, and often they are very beautifully and forcibly expressed.

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