The pebble on the peach neither lives nor dies; and we can but imperfectly describe the conditions of its actuality by negational terms. The trees of the forest lead an unconscious life through leafy ages; they toil not, neither do they spin; in the pleasant spring-tide they don gradually their green robes; in the rich and sad autumn they pass slowly into beautiful decay; slowly and noiselessly, like dreams. The lower type of animals most probably have no anticipatory fears of death, but may pass lmost painlessly into inanimate matter out of semivegetable life.

I passed yesterday, in the neighborhood of Leith, a public slaughter-house. A flock of sheep were going one by one up an inclined gangway into an upper room of unpremeditated death. They were pushing each other upwards, to the yelping music of two collie-dogs, in apparent eagerness to follow their leader. As each in turn would stand upon the gangway's upper ledge, too soon he would solve the secret of the horrible charnel-house. Too soon; and too late! For Ba-ba is the cry behind; which interpreted would mean: "Move on, and let us see what's to be seen." They would see it soon enough, poor bleating simpletons; and then there would be the last Ba-ba and the babbling o' green fields.

The higher animals, and especially such as have been highly educated by companionship with man, have unquestionably some dim idea of the last change. Man alone is prescient of all its horrible concomitants; can predict with a fearful accuracy the gradations of the humbling analysis. In the face of these terrible considerations, may we not expect some comfort to be derived from reflections upon our spiritual nature?

Comfort?-comfort there might have been, but for our suicidal propensity of turning blessings into curses. We may safely premise that, in respect of philanthropy, any one sect of Christians is in advance of any body whatsoever of other religionists. Yet there is not a single sect of Christians, but that peoples its particular hell with by far the greater portion of the outer-lying world, and no inconsiderable portion of its own adherents. So covetous are we of pain; so greedy of sorrow; so dissatisfied with the diseases and mischances of life, and the death that inevitably crowns all, that in our most serious and meditative moods we revel in prefigurements of eternal, unutterable, and all but universal misery. From our little noisy pulpits we wag wise pows, and condole in an exhilarating way with our credulous congregations on the steady approach of our common doom. We build in air a world-wide, spiritual scaffold, and erect thereon innumerable gibbets, and comfort one another with detailed speculations on

stand upon our little platforms of life and time, and over the edge peer curiously and shudderingly into the dark, outer void; and through the magnifying lenses of fear and imagination descry therein, or seem to descry, ghastly and hideous forms of physical and spiritual decomposition.

And it were not so very sad that we should do all this, if the doing so made us in the least sad. But the unspeakable sadness of it all is, that the process gives a general though undefined thrill of pleasurable satisfaction.

In the days when men would stand together in the shade and argue a dog's tail off, it was a favorite occupation of the old philosophers to define, chronologically, geographically, and circumstantially, the conditions of perfect happiness. We have no time now-a-days for such idle speculations. We are pulling down our old barns and building greater ones; we are grovelling on the ground before a golden image, like that set up of old in the plain of Babylon; we are searching for a vulgar and ignoble philosopher's stone. But supposing we could give the time and pains required for the consideration of the old question, should we find the problem an easy one?

Childhood can not be esteemed happy, as being an age that, apart from the troubles of teething, is a continued lamentation and a cry. Educational traditions sit as a nightmare on the elastic spirits of boyhood. Youth and early manhood bring heat of blood and immature judgment to cope with the perilous temptations of the unknown world. Over professional life in manhood broods an universal Grundyism; and commercial life is crenellated by a corroding covetousness. We might look to religion for consolation, were it not that the usually received doctrines represent divinity as sterner than the sternest of all human judges, and mankind as a set of hopeless and incorrigible scoundrels. We are sailing in a shut-up ark over a wide sea, fathomless and shoreless. Send out Hope like a dove, and it will come back with no green leaf in its bill. Let us open the narrow door-way, the one window, and end our misery by a plunge into the deep sea. Nay; we are so numerous and disorderly a crew, that we should only trample each other to death in the effort to get out. Let us sit still in the cabin and wait the end. What? Are we to go drifting on and on, until we are starved or suffocated; until our melancholy bark, with its ghastly crew of sitting skeletons, is picked up and opened by mariners of the new order; mariners to whom are reserved the new heavens and the new earth, after the subsidence of our troubled waters? Heaven forbid! sit still, and wait in hope. One day or other we shall come bump upon Mount Ararat. Yea, surely; one day or other.

We are, indeed, weak creatures, moving ever on. wards beneath some irresistible pressure towards an inevitable gulf. From time to time we catch a fleeting glimpse of happiness; but misfortunes cling to

us like burrs; and sorrow clothes us with a Nessusshirt of pain. In the morning we are green and grow up; in the evening we are cut down, dried up, and withered. But is there no balm in Gilead? Hath philosophy no anodyne, and religion no herb of healing?

Let us cease complaining; and consider awhile the dignity, and majesty, and sublimity of our human nature. Let us draw comfort, as in a bucket, from the well of tears. For our weakness is our strength, and our shame our glory. It is the unspeakable sadness of our common lot that gives that lot whate'er of sweetness and of beauty it can call its own. The angels in heaven, amid their monotone of grand, eternal praise, must look, not with pity, but with an almost envying wonderment, at the spectacle of a son weeping beside his dead mother, or of a father staring down into the new grave of his dead son.

Good men have told us that the Infinite made himself finite, and that the Omnipotent divested himself of power, to save a ruined world. They have only given us half the reason. If a world could not be saved by less than such a sacrifice, by only such a sacrifice could Divinity win love. The Hand that guides the stars and wields the thunder. bolt might enforce obedience and strike terror; but Omnipotence is not omnipotent in respect of love. Nay, even goodness is not lovable; but admirable only, unless it be crowned with sorrow and girdled round about with infirmity.

Divinity was not perfect until when the Lord wept; there was a culmination of Godhead when the Man-Christ was agonized in the garden; when his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling to the ground. There went a shudder of awful joy throughout the universe, when the dying lips said,"It is finished-."

So grand a thing is human sorrow; so grand, and terrible, and sublime, and holy.

THE PRESENT AGE.

VICTOR IUGO.

Formerly the world was a place where men walked with slow steps, with backs bent, faces lowered; where the Count de Gouvion was waited upon at table by Jean-Jacques (Rousseau); where the Chevalier de Rohan beat Voltaire with blows of a cudgel; where they set Daniel De Foe in the pillory; where a city like Dijon was separated from a city like Paris by a will to be made, by robbers at all the corners of the woods, and by ten days of coach; where a book was a kind of infamy and rubbish which the executioner burned on the steps of the Hall of Justice; where superstition and ferocity joined hand in hand; where the pope said to the emperor: Jungamus dexteras, gladium gladio copulemus; where one encountered at every step crosses on which were hung amulets, and gibbets on which were hung men;

where there were heretics, Jews, lepers; where the houses had battlements and loopholes; where they shut up the streets with a chain, the rivers with a chain, the cities with walls, the kingdoms with prohibitions and penalties; where, except authority and force, which were closely banded, all was penned up, doled out, cut up, divided, parcelled, hated and hating, scattered and dead; men but dust-power, the king Log.

Now, there is a world in which all is alive, united, combined, related, mingled together; a world where reign thought, commerce, and industry; where politics, continually more settled, tends to associate itself with science; a world where the last scaffolds and the last cannon are hastening to cut off their last heads, and to vomit their last shells; a world where the day grows with each minute; a world in which distance has disappeared, where Constantinople is nearer to Paris than Lyons was a century ago, where America and Europe throb with the same pulsation of the heart; a world all circulation and all affection, whose brain is France, whose arteries are railways, and whose fibres are the electric wires. Do you not see that simply to state such a situation, is to explain, to demonstrate, and to solve everything? Do you not perceive that the old world was fatally possessed by an old spirit, tyranny, and that upon the new world must necessarily, irresistibly, divinely descend a new spirit, that of liberty.

Let us proclaim it firmly, proclaim it even in fall and in defeat, this age is the grandest of all ages; and do you know wherefore? Because it is the most benignant. This age, the immediate issue of the French Revolution, and its first-born, enfranchises the slave in America, uplifts the pariah in Asia, destroys the suttee in India, and extinguishes in Europe the last brands of the stake, civilizes Turkey, penetrates the Koran with the Gospel, dignifies woman, subordinates the right of the strongest to the right of the most just, suppresses pirates, ameliorates penal laws, purifies the galleys, throws the bloody sword in the gutter, condemns the death penalty, takes the chain and ball from the foot of the convict, abolishes torture, degrades and stigmatizes war, weakens the dukes of Alba and the Charles Ninths, plucks out the fangs from tyrants.

This age proclaims the sovereignty of the citizen, and the inviolability of life; it crowns the people and consecrates man.

In art, it possesses every kind of genius; writers, orators, poets, historians, publicists, philosophers, painters, sculptors, musicians; majesty, grace, power, figure, splendor, depth, color, form, style; it reinforces itself at once in the real and in the ideal, and carries in its hand those two thunderbolts, the true and the beautiful. In science it works all miracles; it makes saltpetre out of cotton, a horse out of steam, a laborer out of the voltaic pile, a courier out of the elec. tric fluid, and a painter of the sun; it bathes itself in the subterranean waters, while it is warmed with the

central fires; it opens upon the two infinities those two windows, the telescope on the infinitely great, the microscope on the infinitely little, and it finds in the first abyss the stars of heaven, and in the second abyss the insects which prove the existence of a God. It annihilates time, it annihilates distance, it annihilates suffering; it writes a letter from Paris to London, and has the answer back in ten minutes; it cuts off the leg of a man-the man sings and smiles.

It has only to realize—and it already touches ita progress which is nothing by the side of the other miracles which it has already achieved; it has only to find the means of directing in a body of air a bubble of air still lighter; it has already found the bubble of air, it holds it imprisoned; it has yet only to find the impulsive force, only to create the vacuum before the balloon, for example, only to heat the air before the aeronaut, as the rocket does before it; it has only to solve in some manner this problem-and it will be solved. And do you know what will hap pen then? On the very instant, frontiers will disappear, barriers will vanish away. All that is thrown like a Chinese wall around thought, around commerce, around industry, around nationality, around progress, will crumble; in spite of censorships, in spite of the index expurgatorius, it will rain books and journals everywhere; Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau will fall in showers on Rome, on Naples, on Vienna, on St. Petersburg; the human Word becomes manna, and the surf gathers it in the furrow; fanaticisms die; oppression becomes impossible; man no longer crawls upon the earth, he escapes from it; civilization takes to itself the wings of birds, and flies and whirls and alights joyously on all parts of the globe at once; hold! see there-it passes; point your cannon, ye old despotisms, it disdains you; you are but the cannon ball, it is the flash of lightning; no more hatreds, no more interests devouring one another, no more wars; a kind of new life, made up of concord and of light, surrounds and soothes the world; the brotherhood of nations crosses the bounds of space and mingles in the eternal blue; men frater. nize in the heavens.

THE CHOICE OF LIFE.

SAMUEL JOHNSON-"RASSELAS."

The Prince being now able to converse with fluency, and having learned the caution necessary to be observed in his intercourse with strangers, began to accompany Imlac to places of resort, and to enter into all assemblies, that he might make his choice of 'ife.

For some time he thought choice needless, because all appeared to him equally happy. Wherever he went he met gayety and kindness, and heard the song of joy, or laugh of carelessness. He began to believe that the world overflowed with universal plenty, and that nothing was withheld either from want or merit; that every hand showered liberality,

and every heart melted with benevolence; "and who then," says he, "will be suffered to be wretched?" Imlac permitted the pleasing delusion, and was unwilling to crush the hope of inexperience, till one day, having sat awhile silent, "I know not," said the Prince, "what can be the reason that I am more unhappy than any of our friends. I see them perpetually and unalterably cheerful, but feel my own mind restless and uneasy. I am unsatisfied with those pleasures which I seem most to court. I live in the crowds of jollity, not so much to enjoy company as to shun myself, and am only loud and merry to conceal my sadness."

Every man," said Imlac, "may, by examining his own mind, guess what passes in the minds of others; when you feel that your own gayety is counterfeit, it may justly lead you to suspect that of your companions not to be sincere. Envy is commonly reciprocal. We are long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believes it possessed by others, to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself. In the assembly, where you passed the last night, there appeared such sprightliness of air and volatility of fancy as might have suited beings of a higher order, formed to inhabit serener regions, inaccessible to care or sorrow: yet, believe me, Prince, there was not one who did not dread the moment when solitude should deliver him to the tyranny of reflection."

"This," said the Prince, "may be true of others since it is true of me; yet whatever be the general infelicity of man, one condition is more happy than another, and wisdom surely directs us to take the least evil in the choice of life."

"The causes of good and evil," answered Imlac, "are so various and uncertain, so often entangled with each other, so diversified by various relations, and so much subject to accidents which cannot be foreseen, that he who would fix his condition upon incontestable reasons of preference, must live and die inquiring and deliberating."

"But surely," said Rasselas, "the wise men, to whom we listen with reverence and wonder, chose that mode of life for themselves which they thought most likely to make them happy."

"Very few," said the poet, "live by choice. Every man is placed in his present condition by causes which acted without his foresight, and with which he did not always willingly cooperate; and therefore you will rarely meet one who does not think the lot of his neighbor better than his own."

"I am pleased to think," said the Prince, "that my birth has given me at least one advantage over others, by enabling me to determine for myself. I have here the world before me; I will review it at leisure; surely happiness is somewhere to be found."

THE PRINCE ASSOCIATES WITH YOUNG MEN OF SPIRIT AND GAYETY.

Rasselas rose next day, and resolved to begin his

experiments upon life. "Youth," cried he, "is the time of gladness; I will join myself to the young men, whose only business is to gratify their desires, and whose time is only spent in a succession of enjoyments."

To such societies he was readily admitted, but a few days brought him back weary and disgusted. Their mirth was without images; their laughter without motive; their pleasures were gross and sensual, in which the mind had no part; their conduct was at once wild and mean; they laughed at order and at law, but the frown of power dejected and the eye of wisdom abashed them.

The Prince soon concluded that he should never be happy in a course of life of which he was ashamed. He thought it unsuitable to a reasonable being to act without a plan, and to be sad or cheer. ful only by chance. "Happiness,” said he, “must be something solid and permanent, without fear and without uncertainty."

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But his young companions had gained so much of his regard by their frankness and courtesy, that he could not leave them without warning and monstrance. My friends," said he, "I have seriously considered our manners and our prospects, and find that we have mistaken our own interest. The first years of a man must make provision for the last. He that never thinks never can be wise. Perpetual levity must end in ignorance; and intemperance, though it may fire the spirits for an hour, will make life short or miserable. Let us consider that youth is of no long duration, and that in maturer age, when the enchantments of fancy shall cease, and phantoms of delight dance no more about us, we shall have no comforts but the esteem of wise men, and the means of doing good. Let us, therefore, stop, while to stop is in our power; let us live as men who are sometime to grow old, and to whom it will be the most dreadful of all evils to count their past years by follies, and to be reminded of their former luxuriance of health only by the maladies which riot has produced."

They stared awhile in silence one upon another, and at last drove him away by a general chorus of continued laughter.

The consciousness that his sentiments were just, and his intentions kind, was scarcely sufficient to support him against the horror of derision. But he recovered his tranquility, and pursued his search.

THE PRINCE FINDS A WISE AND HAPPY MAN.

As he was one day walking in the street he saw a spacious building, which all were, by the open doors, invited to enter; he followed the stream of people, and found it a hall or school of declamation, in which professors read lectures to their auditory. He fixed his eye upon a sage raised above the rest, who discoursed with great energy upon the government of the passions. His look was venerable, his action graceful, his pronunciation clear, and his diction ele

gant.

He showed with great strength of sentiment, and variety of illustration, that human nature is de graded and debased when the lower faculties predominate over the higher; that when fancy, the narent of passion, usurps the dominion of the mind, nothing ensues but the natural effect of unlawful government, perturbation and confusion; that she betrays the fortresses of the intellect to rebels, and excites her children to sedition against reason, their lawful sovereign. He compared reason to the sun, of which the light is constant, uniform, and lasting; and fancy to a meteor, of bright but transitory luster, irregular in its motion, and delusive in its direction.

He then communicated the various precepts given from time to time, for the conquest of passion, and displayed the happiness of those who had obtained the important victory, after which man is no longer the slave of fear, nor the fool of hope; is no more emaciated by envy, inflamed by anger, emasculated by tenderness, or depressed by grief: but walks on calmly through the tumults or privacies of life, as the sun pursues alike his course through the calm or the stormy sky.

He enumerated many examples of heroes immovable by pain or pleasure, who looked with indifference on those modes or accidents to which the vulgar gave the names of good and evil. He exhorted his hearers to lay aside their prejudices, and arm themselves against the shafts of malice or misfortune, by invulnerable patience; concluding that this state only was happiness, and that this happiness was in every one's power.

Rasselas listened to him with the veneration due to the instructions of a superior being, and waiting for him at the door, humbly implored the liberty of visiting so great a master of true wisdom. The lecturer hesitated a moment, when Rasselas put a purse of gold into his hand, which he received with a mixture of joy and wonder.

“I have found,” said the Prince, at his return to Imlac, "a man that can teach all that is necessary to be known, who from the unshaken throne of rational fortitude looks down on the scenes of life changing beneath him. He speaks, and attention watches his lips. He reasons, and conviction closes his periods. This man shall be my future guide; I will learn his doctrines; and imitate his life."

"Be not too hasty," said Imlac, "to trust or to admire the teachers of morality; they discourse like angels, but they live like men."

Rasselas, who could not conceive how any man could reason so forcibly without feeling the cogency of his own arguments, paid his visit in a few days, and was denied admission. He had now learned the power of money, and made his way by a piece of gold to the inner apartment, where he found the philosopher in a room half darkened, with his eyes misty and his face pale. "Sir," said he, "you are come at a time when all human friendship is use

less; what I suffer cannot be remedied, what I have lost cannot be supplied. My daughter, my only daughter, from whose tenderness I expected all the comforts of my age, died last night of a fever. My views, my purposes, my hopes are at an end; I am now a lonely being disunited from society."

"Sir," said the Prince, “mortality is an event by which a wise man can never be surprised; we know that death is always near, and it should, therefore, always be expected." "Young man," answered the philosopher, "you speak like one that has never felt the pangs of separation." "Have you then forgot the precepts," said Rasselas, "which you so powerfully enforced? Has wisdom no strength to arm the heart against calamity? Consider, that external things are naturally variable, but truth and reason are always the same." "What comfort," said the mourner, "can truth and reason afford me? of what effect are they now but to tell me that my daughter will not be restored?"

The Prince, whose humanity would not suffer him to insult misery with reproof, went away, convinced of the emptiness of rhetorical sound, and the inefficacy of polished periods and studied sentences.

A GLIMPSE OF PASTORAL LIFE.

He was still eager upon the same inquiry, and having heard of a hermit, that lived near the lowest cataract of the Nile, and filled the whole country with the fame of his sanctity, resolved to visit his

ous of seeing any more specimens of rustic happi. ness, but could not believe that all the accounts of primeval pleasures were fabulous and was yet in doubt whether life had anything that could be justly preferred to the placid gratifications of fields and woods. She hoped that the time would come, when, with a few virtuous and elegant companions, she should gather flowers planted by her own hand, fondle the lambs of her own ewe, and listen without care, among brooks and breezes, to one of her maidens reading in the shade.

THE DANGER OF PROSPERITY.

On the next day they continued their journey till the heat compelled them to look round for shelter. At a small distance they saw a thick wood, which they no sooner entered than they perceived that they were approaching the habitations of men. The shrubs were diligently cut away to open walks where the shades were darkest; the boughs of opposite trees were artificially interwoven; seats of flowery turf were raised in vacant spaces, and a rivulet that wantoned along the side of a winding path, had its banks sometimes opened into small basins, and its stream sometimes obstructed by little mounds of stone heaped together to increase its murmurs.

They passed slowly through the wood, delighted with such unexpected accommodations, and entertained each other with conjecturing what, or who he could be, that, in those rude and unfrequented re

Imlac and the Princess agreed to accompany him, and, after the necessary preparations, they began their journey. Their way lay through the fields where shepherds tended their flocks, and the lambs were playing upon the pasture. "This," said the poet, "is the life which has been often celebrated for its innocence and quiet; let us pass the heat of the day among the shepherds' tents, and know whether all our searches are not to terminate in pastoral simplicity."

The proposal pleased them, and they induced the shepherds by small presents and familiar questions, to tell their opinion of their own state; they were so rude and ignorant, so little able to compare the good with the evil of the occupation, and so indistinct in their narratives and descriptions, that very little could be learned from them. But it was evident that their hearts were cankered with discontent, that they considered themselves as condemned to labor for the luxury of the rich, and looked up with stupid malevolence toward those that were placed above them.

The Princess pronounced with vehemence that she would never suffer these envious savages to be her companions, and that she should not soon be desir

As they advanced they heard the sound of inusic, and saw youths and virgins dancing in the grove; and going still further, beheld a stately palace built upon a hill surrounded with woods. The laws of eastern hospitality allowed them to enter, and the master welcomed them like a man liberal and wealthy.

He was skillful enough in appearances soon to discern that they were no common guests, and spread his table with magnificence. The eloquence of Imlac caught his attention, and the lofty courtesy of the Princess excited his respect. When they offered to depart he entreated their stay, and was the next day still more unwilling to dismiss them than before. They were easily persuaded to stop, and civility grew up in time to freedom and confidence.

The Prince now saw all the domestics cheerful, and all the face of nature smiling round the place, and could not forbear to hope that he should find here what he was seeking; but when he was congratulating the master upon his possessions, he answered with a sigh, "My condition has indeed the appearance of happiness, but appearances are de lusive. My prosperity puts my life in danger; the Bassa of Egypt is my enemy, incensed only by my wealth and popularity. I have been hitherto protected against him by the princes of the country; but, as the favor of the great is uncertain, I know