lady" should teach Sambo to read, we have no evidence that she would be imprisoned therefor.

Mr. Fletcher regards slavery as surely doomed in Brazil. In 1850 the slave-trade was suppressed, and since then there has been a heavy immigration. Europe has rolled a countless tide up the beautiful bay, and along the coast. Free labor is everywhere coming into contact with slave labor, and the result is obvious. The question unavoidably suggests itself, whether, the climate and soil of Brazil being adapted to the colored race, may not many of that doomed people, who feel deeply their anomalous condition, find there the home and the nationality denied them here?

Since the commencement of the reign of the present emperor, there has been an increase in the facilities for popular education, and the influence of the crown is altogether in its favor. There is a common school system for the realm, and its teachers and officers seek quite eagerly for reports from United States' Boards of Education, as imbodying safe principles and practice. This systemi is becoming popular, and although, perhaps, one half the children are educated in private schools, or those under provincial authority, yet the reports of 1855 show that in the schools of the empire there were sixty-five thousand four hundred and thirteen children. The government has also founded colleges, naval and military academies, and seminaries of law, medicine, and theology. There is also an imperial academy of the fine arts, with professors of painting, architecture, sculpture, and design, which receives annually about seventy pupils, and even provides for the support of a number of its graduates at Rome.

It is also worthy of note that the Brazilian press is free, something unusual in an empire of which Romanism is the tutelar deity. Rio de Janeiro has its four dailies, besides weeklies, tri-weeklies, etc. Any citizen may ventilate his opinions by paying for the privilege, for journalism is made a profitable affair.

It is true there is a vast amount of ignorance in Brazil; but we have reason to be modest in our censures until the damaging disclosures of the United States census are forgotten. It must be remembered, however, that her educational and literary apparatus has been newly created. There is progress. Inquiry is encouraged, books are scattered, papers are multiplying, public libraries are being opened, and there must be an intellectual elevation of the

masses.

It is, however, a gloomy look-out when we sweep over the moral and religious condition of this vast empire. When we see its mummery, and take the present condition contrasted with what it might have FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XI.-3

been had success smiled upon the colony of French Huguenots, whose songs went up to God, sooner by half a century than Protestant psalmody was heard elsewhere in the New World, but which was destroyed by the base perversion of their leader, Villegagnon, we have another illustration of the unsearchableness of Divine counsels. Why was that colony blotted out, and that embryo empire abandoned to the man of sin?

The blight of Brazil is its ecclesiastical system in the hands of a profligate and ignorant priesthood. These "successors of the apostles" perform the ritual of the Church at all canonical times, but are careful to add no unwritten duty. They shun the hospital, but attend the race-course; they preside in the confessional when not allured to the cock-pit. There is no preaching to the people, but processions and gorgeous pageantry are seen upon every hand. The ecclesiastics live in open licentiousness, and sink to its lowest degree. There are proofs of all these statements given, but we prefer not transferring them to these pages. Such things are the legitimate fruit of a system which so separates between the man and the minister; between what he is personally, and what he does officially; allowing him to be vile as Satan, and claiming for him power to create his God, and to absolve from all punishment the victims or companions of his debaucheries. Lest we be deemed guilty of misrepresenting the true condition of Brazilian morals. under infallible training, we will give a few specimens of the advertisements which may be read in the newspapers, or found affixed to church doors. The first is of a festival in the Church of Santa Rita :

"This festa is to be celebrated with high mass and a sermon, at the expense of the devotees of the said virgin, the Most Holy Mother of Grief, who are all invited by the Board to add to the splendor of the occasion by their presence, since they will receive from the above-named lady due reward."-P. 146.

This is modest, however, and decidedly reverent, compared with some others, as per example:

"The Judge and some devout persons of the Church of Lady of our Estrella, erected in the village of the same name, intend to hold a festival there, with a chanted mass, sermon, procession in the afternoon, and a Te Deum, all with the greatest pomp possible, on the 23d instant; and at night there will be a beautiful display of fireworks. The managers of the feast have asked the director of the Inhomerim Steamboat Company to put on an extra steamer that will leave the Praia dos Mineiros at eight o'clock in the morning, and return after the fireworks. It is requested that all the devotees will deign to attend this solemn act, to render it of the most brilliant description.

"Estrella, Sept. 17, 1855. FRANCISCO PEREIRA RAMOS, Sec."-P. 146.

And yet again:

"The Brotherhood of the Divine Holy Ghost of San Goçalo [a small village across the bay] will hold the feast of the Holy Ghost, on the 31st instant,

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.

The above seems bold enough, and illustrates the results of Romanism when not held in check by heretical Bibles and preachers. But 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