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'Christopher Colombo-the great Christopher Colombo. Well, what did he do?'

'Discover America!-discover America. Oh, ze devil!' 'Discover America. No-that statement will hardly wash. We are just from America ourselves. We heard nothing about it. Christopher Colombo-pleasant name -is-is he dead?'

'Oh, corpo di Baccho!-three hundred year!' 'What did he die of?'

'I do not know!-I cannot tell.'

'Small-pox, think?'

'I do not know, genteelmen!—I do not know what

he die of!'

'Measles, likely?'

'Maybe—maybe—I do not know-I think he die of

somethings.'

'Parents living?' Im-posseeble!'

'Ah-which is the bust and which is the pedestal?' 'Santa Maria!-zis ze bust !-zis ze pedestal !'

Ah, I see, I see-happy combination-very happy combination, indeed. Is is this the first time this gentleman was ever on a bust ?'

That joke was lost on the foreigner-guides cannot master the subtleties of the American joke.

We have made it interesting to this Roman guide. Yesterday we spent three or four hours in the Vatican, again that wonderful world of curiosities. We came very near expressing interest, sometimes-even admiration-it was very hard to keep from it. We succeeded though. Nobody else ever did in the Vatican museums. The guide was bewildered-nonplussed. He walked his legs off, nearly, hunting up extraordinary things, and exhausted all his ingenuity on us, but it was a failure; we never shewed any interest in anything. He had reserved what he considered to be his greatest wonder till the last—a royal Egyptian mummy, the best preserved in the world perhaps. He took us there. He felt so sure this time, that some of his old enthusiasm came back to him:

See, genteelmen!-Mummy! Mummy!' The eye-glass came up as calmly, as deliberately as

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Born in Egypta. Never heard of Egypta before. Foreign locality, likely. Mummy-mummy. calm he is-how self-possessed. Is, ah-is he dead?' 'Oh, sacré bleu, been dead three thousan' year!' The doctor turned on him savagely— Here, now, what do you mean by such conduct as this! Playing us for Chinamen because we are strangers and trying to learn! Trying to impose your vile secondhand carcasses on us!-thunder and lightning, I've a notion to-to-if you've got a nice fresh corpse, fetch him out!-or by George we'll brain you!'

DR JOHN BROWN-MR M. M'LENNAN. JOHN BROWN, son of the distinguished theological professor in connection with the Associate Synod (ante, p. 353), and an accomplished member

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of the literary society of Edinburgh, was born in 1810, studied medicine, and settled down as medical practitioner in the Scottish capital. In 1858 he published Hora Subseciva, a volume of essays on Locke and Sydenham, with other occasional papers. One of Dr Brown's objects in this publication he thus explains:

To give my vote for going back to the old manly, intellectual, and literary culture of the days of Sydenham, Arbuthnot, and Gregory; when a physician fed, enlarged, and quickened his entire nature; when he lived in the ancients, while at the same time he pushed on among world of letters as a freeholder, and reverenced the his fellows, and lived in the present, believing that his profession and his patients need not suffer, though his hora subseciva were devoted occasionally to miscellaneous thinking and reading, and to a course of what his Gaelic historian says of Rob Roy at his bye hours, is elsewhere called 'fine confused feeding,' or though, as

he be a man of incoherent transactions.' As I have

said, system is not always method, much less progress.

He adds, as of more important and general application:

Physiology and the laws of health are the interpreters of disease and cure, over whose porch we may best inscribe hinc sanitas. It is in watching nature's methods of cure in ourselves and in the lower animals, and in a firm faith in the self-regulative, recuperative powers of nature, that all our therapeutic intentions and means must proceed, and that we should watch and obey their truly divine voice and finger with reverence and godly fear, as well as with diligence and worldly wisdom-humbly standing by while He works, guiding and stemming or withdrawing His current, and acting as His ministers and helps.

One story in this volume, Rab and his Friends, has been exceedingly popular, and, being published in a separate form, has had as wide a circulation as any of the novels of Scott or Dickens. It is a short and simple tale of a poor Scotch carrier and his dog Rab:

Rab had the dignity and simplicity of great size; and having fought his way all along the road to absolute supremacy, he was as mighty in his own line as Julius Caesar or the Duke of Wellington, and he had the gravity of all great fighters. A Highland gamekeeper, when asked why a certain terrier, of singular pluck, was life's full o' sairiousness to him-he can just never get so much graver than the other dogs, said: 'Oh, sir,

enuff o' fechtin'.

The carrier's wife, Ailie, a gentle, delicate old woman, had to submit to an operation for cancer in the breast. It was performed in the Edinburgh Hospital, Rab and his master being present, and the scene is painted with a truth and dramatic Ailie vividness which go directly to the heart. dies; her husband caught a law fever prevailing in the village, and died also. Rab is present at both interments; there was deep snow on the ground; and after the second of the burials he slunk home to the stable, whence he could neither be tempted or driven, and ultimately he had to be killed. `On this homely and slender basis of fact, the story of Rab and his Friends has been constructed, and its mixture of fancy, humour, and pathos-all curiously blended, and all thoroughly national in expression and feeling-is quite inimitable. No right-hearted Scotsman ever read the little story without tears. In 1861 Dr Brown published a

second series of Hora Subseciva, containing twelve sketches (our dogs' not being forgotten), one of which we subjoin:

Queen Mary's Child-Garden.

If any one wants a pleasure that is sure to please, one over which he needn't growl the sardonic beatitude of the great Dean, let him, when the mercury is at 'Fair,' take the nine A.M. train to the north and a return ticket for Callander, and when he arrives at Stirling, let him ask the most obliging and knowing of station-masters to telegraph to the Dreadnought for a carriage to be in waiting. When passing Dunblane Cathedral, let him resolve to write to the Scotsman, advising the removal of a couple of shabby trees which obstruct the view of that beautiful triple end window which Mr Ruskin and everybody else admires, and by the time he has written this letter in his mind, and turned the sentences to it, he will find himself at Callander and the carriage all ready. Giving the order for the Port of Monteith, he will rattle through this hard-featured, and to our eye, comfortless village, lying ugly amid so much grandeur and beauty, and let him stop on the crown of the bridge, and fill his eyes with the perfection of the view up the Pass of Leny-the Teith lying diffuse and asleep, as if its heart were in the Highlands and it were loath to go, the noble Ben Ledi imaged in its broad stream. Then let him make his way across a bit of pleasant moorland-flushed with maiden-hair and white with cotton grass, and fragrant with the Orchis conopsia, well deserving its epithet odoratissima.

He will see from the turn of the hillside the Blair of Drummond waving with corn and shadowed with rich woods, where eighty years ago there was a black peat-moss; and far off, on the horizon, Damyat and the Touch Fells; and at his side the little loch of Ruskie, in which he may see five Highland cattle, three tawny brown and two brindled, standing in the still water-themselves as still, all except their switching tails and winking ears-the perfect images of quiet enjoyment, By this time he will have come in sight of the Lake of Monteith, set in its woods, with its magical shadows and soft gleams. There is a loveliness, a gentleness and peace about it more like 'lone St Mary's Lake,' or Derwent Water, than of any of its sister lochs. It is lovely rather than beautiful, and is a sort of gentle prelude, in the minor key, to the coming glories and intenser charms of Loch Ard and the true Highlands beyond.

least a bower, what could the little Queen, then five years old, and 'fancy free,' do with a bower? It is plainly, as was, we believe, first suggested by our keensighted and diagnostic Professor of Clinical Surgery, the Child-Queen's Garden, with her little walk, and its rows of boxwood, left to themselves for three hundred years. Yes, without doubt, here is that first garden of her simpleness.' Fancy the little, lovely royal child, with her four Marys, her playfellows, her child maids of honour, with their little hands and feet, and their innocent and happy eyes, pattering about that garden all that time ago, laughing, and running, and gardening as only children do and can. As is well known, Mary was placed by her mother in this Isle of Rest before sailing from the Clyde for France. There is something that tirls the heart-strings a' to the life' in standing and looking on this unmistakable living relic of that strange and pathetic old time. Were we Mr Tennyson, we would write an Idyll of that child Queen, in that garden of hers, eating her bread and honeygetting her teaching from the holy men, the monks of old, and running off in wild mirth to her garden and her flowers, all unconscious of the black, lowering thunder-cloud on Ben Lomond's shoulder.

Oh, blessed vision! happy child!
Thou art so exquisitely wild;

I think of thee with many fears
Of what may be thy lot in future years.

I thought of times when Pain might be thy guest,

Lord of thy house and hospitality.

And Grief, uneasy lover! never rest

But when she sat within the touch of thee.
What hast thou to do with sorrow,
Or the injuries of to-morrow?

You have ample time to linger there amid

The gleams, the shadows, and the peace profound, and get your mind informed with quietness and beauty, and fed with thoughts of other years, and of her whose story, like Helen of Troy's, will continue to move the hearts of men as long as the gray hills stand round about that gentle lake, and are mirrored at evening in its depths.

A volume illustrative of Scotch rustic life-true in speech, thought, and action-appeared anonymously in 1870, under the title of Peasant Life: Being Sketches of the Villagers and Fieldlabourers of Glenaldie. There is a degree of force and reality in these homely sketches, drawn directly from nature, equal to the pictures of You are now at the Port, and have passed the Crabbe. Professor Wilson's Lights and Shadows secluded and cheerful manse, and the parish kirk with of Scottish Life are purely Arcadian. The author its graves, close to the lake, and the proud aisle of the of Peasant Life (understood to be a solicitor in Grahams of Gartmore washed by its waves. Across the road is the modest little inn, a Fisher's Tryst. On the Caithness, Mr MALCOLM M'LENNAN) enlists our unruffled water lie several islets, plump with rich sympathy for coarse farm-labourers and 'bondfoliage, brooding like great birds of calm. You some-agers' or field-workers, and shews that pure and how think of them as on, not in the lake, or like clouds lying in a nether sky-like ships waiting for the wind.' You get a coble, and a yauld old Celt, its master, and are rowed across to Inchmahome, 'the Isle of Rest.' Here you find on landing huge Spanish chestnuts, one lying dead, others standing stark and peeled, like gigantic antlers, and others flourishing in their viridis senectus, and in a thicket of wood you see the remains of a monastery of great beauty, the design and workmanship exquisite. You wander through the ruins, overgrown with ferns and Spanish filberts, and old fruit-trees, and at the corner of the old monkish garden you come upon one of the strangest and most touching sights you ever saw-an oval space of about eighteen feet by twelve, with the remains of a double row of boxwood all round, the plants of box being about fourteen feet high, and eight or nine inches in diameter, healthy, but plainly of great age.

What is this? It is called in the guide-books Queen Mary's Bower; but besides its being plainly not in the

natural love, and pure and natural emotion, are best studied under thatched roofs and in untutored hearts. The author published a second work, Dr Benoni, but it is inferior to the Peasant Life.

WILLIAM RATHBONE GREG.

This gentleman is author of various works, political and literary-Political Problems for our Age and Country; The Creed of Christendom; Literary and Social Judgments; Truth versus Edification; Enigmas of Life; Rocks Ahead, or the Warnings of Cassandra; &c. Mr Greg is a man of intellectual power and fine aspirations. Though unorthodox in opinion, he is sound at heart, religious in feeling, and a sincere well-wisher of humanity. He is most popular on directly practical questions, with a philanthropic turn. Mr Greg (born in Liverpool about 1810) succeeded

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John Ramsay M'Culloch in 1864 as Comptroller of H.M. Stationery Office. The following extracts are from the most eloquent of his writings -the Enigmas of Life:

Glorified Spirits.

Whether in the lapse of ages and in the course of progressive being, the more dormant portions of each man's nature will be called out, and his desires, and therefore the elements of his heaven, change; whether the loving will learn to thirst for knowledge, and the fiery and energetic to value peace, and the active and earnest to grow weary of struggle and achievement, and to long for tenderness and repose, and the rested to begin a new life of aspiration, and those who had long lain satisfied with the humble constituents of the beatific state, to yearn after the conditions of a loftier being, we cannot tell. Probably. It may be, too, that the tendency of every thought and feeling will be to gravitate towards the great centre, to merge in one mighty and all-absorbing emotion. The thirst for knowledge may find its ultimate expression in the contemplation of the Divine Nature-in which indeed all may be contained. It may be that all longings will be finally resolved into striving after a closer union with God, and all human affections merged in the desire to be a partaker in His nature. It may be that in future stages of our progress, we shall become more and more severed from the human, and joined to the divine; that, starting on the threshold of the eternal world with the one beloved being who has been the partner of our thoughts and feelings on this earth, we may find, as we go forward to the goal, and soar upward to the throne, and dive deeper and deeper into the mysteries and immensities of creation, that affection will gradually emerge in thought, and the cravings and yearnings of the heart be calmed and superseded by the sublimer interests of the perfected intelligence; that the hands which have so long been joined in love may slowly unclasp, to be stretched forth towards the approaching glory; that the glance of tenderness which we cast on the companion at our side may become faint, languid, and hurried before the earnest gaze with which we watch the light that shall be revealed. We might even picture to ourselves that epoch in our progress through successively loftier and more purified existences, when those who on earth strengthened each other in every temptation, sustained each other under every trial, mingled smiles at every joy and tears at every sorrow; and who, in succeeding varieties of being, hand in hand, heart with heart, thought for thought, penetrated together each new secret, gained each added height, glowed with each new rapture, drank in each successive revelation, shall have reached that point where all lower affections will be merged in one absorbing Presence; when the awful nearness of the perfect love will dissolve all other ties and swallow up all other feelings; and when the finished and completed soul, before melting away into that sea of light which will be its element for ever, shall turn to take a last fond look of the now glorified but thereby lost companion of so much anguish and so many joys! But we cannot yet contemplate the prospect without pain: therefore it will not be yet; not till we can contemplate it without joy: for heaven is a scene of bliss and recompense, not of sorrow and bereavement.

Human Development.

Two glorious futures lie before us: the progress of the race here, the progress of the man hereafter. History indicates that the individual man needs to be trans

planted in order to excel the past. He appears to have reached his perfection centuries ago. Men lived then whom we have never yet been able to surpass, rarely even to equal. Our knowledge has, of course, gone on increasing, for that is a material capable of indefinite accumulation. But for power, for the highest reach and

range of mental and spiritual capacity in every line, the lapse of two or three thousand years has shewn no sign of increase or improvement. What sculptor has surpassed Phidias? What poet has transcended Eschylus, Homer, or the author of the Book of Job? What devout aspirant has soared higher than David or Isaiah? What statesman have modern times produced mightier or grander than Pericles? What patriot martyr truer or nobler than Socrates? Wherein, save in mere acquirements, was Bacon superior to Plato? or Newton to Thales or Pythagoras? Very early in our history individual men beat their wings against the allotted boundaries of their earthly dominions; early in history God gave to the human race the types and patterns to imitate and approach, but never to transcend. Here, then, surely we see clearly intimated to us our appointed work-namely, to raise the masses to the true standard of harmonious human virtue and capacity, not to strive ourselves to overleap that standard; not to put our own souls or brains into a hotbed, but to put all our fellowmen into a fertile and a wholesome soil. If this be so, both our practical course and our speculative difficulties are greatly cleared. The timid fugitives from the duties and temptations of the world, the selfish coddlers and nursers of their own souls, the sedulous cultivators either of a cold intellect or of a fervent spiritualism, have alike deserted or mistaken their mission, and turned their back upon the goal. The philanthropists, in the measure of their wisdom and their purity of zeal, are the real fellowworkmen of the Most High. This principle may give us the clue to many dispensations which at first seem dark and grievous, to the grand scale and the distracting slowness of nature's operations; to her merciless inconsideration for the individual when the interests of the race are in question :

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MATTHEW ARNOLD, ETC.

MR ARNOLD is perhaps better known as a critic and theologian than as a poet (ante, page 472). He has published Essays on Criticism, 1865; Lectures on the Study of Celtic Literature, 1867; Culture and Anarchy, 1870; St Paul and Protestantism, Literature and Dogma, God and the Bible, a review of objections to Literature and Dogma, 1875 ; &c. Without subscribing to Mr Arnold's theological opinions, we may note the earnest, reverential tone with which he discusses such subjects, and the amount of thought and reading he has brought to bear on them. He says: risk of breaking a tie which it is so hard to join 'Why meddle with religion at all? why run the again? And the risk is not to be run lightly, and one is not always to attack people's illusions about religion merely because illusions they are. But at the present moment two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear to anybody with eyes in his head. One is, that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.'

Two volumes, partly biographical and partly critical-A Manual of English Prose Literature, 1872; and Characteristics of English Poets from Chaucer to Shirley, 1874-have been published by WILLIAM MINTO, M.A., now editor of The

Examiner. The first work' endeavours to criticise upon a methodical plan,' and selects certain authors (De Quincey, Macaulay, and Carlyle) for full criticism and exemplification.' The second volume, besides describing the characteristics of the poets, traces how far each was influenced by his literary predecessors and his contemporaries. The two works are valuable for students of our literature, and are interesting to all classes of readers. Mr Minto is, we believe, a native of Aberdeen, and promises to take a high place among our critical and political writers-a place worthy the successor of Leigh Hunt, Albany Fonblanque, and John Forster.

Something similar to Mr Minto's volumes are two by MR LESLIE STEPHENS, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, entitled Hours in a Library, being a series of sketches of favourite authors, drawn with taste and discrimination, and bearing the impress of a true lover of literature. Another editor, Mr R. H. HUTTON of the Spectator, has collected two volumes of his Essays Theological and Literary, in which there is more of analytical criticism and ingenious dogmatic discussion than in the above.

SCIENTIFIC WRITERS.

mental optics-which had well-nigh slumbered for more than a century during the too short lives of Young and Fresnel, we shall be disposed to admit the former, part of the statement; and when we recollect that the same period has given birth to the steam-engine of Watt, with its application to shipping and railways-to the gigantic telescopes of Herschel and Lord Rosse, wonderful as works of art as well as instruments of sublime discovery-to the electric telegraph, and to the tubular bridge-we shall be ready to grant the last part of the proposition, that science and art have been more indissolubly united than at any previous period.'

A series of Lectures on Some Recent Advances in Physical Science, 1876, by PROFESSOR TAIT of the university of Edinburgh, continues the history of modern progress, and describes fully the marvels of the spectrum analysis, one of the triumphs of the present generation.

SIR HUMPHRY DAVY.

A great chemist and a distinguished man of letters, HUMPHRY DAVY, was born at Penzance, in Cornwall, in 1778. He was educated at the school of Truro, and afterwards apprenticed to a surgeon at Penzance. He was an enthusiastic reader and student. 'His was an ardent boyhood,' says Professor Forbes: Educated in a manner somewhat irregular, and with only the advantages of a remote country town, his talents appeared in the earnestness with which he cultivated at once the most various branches of knowledge and speculation. He was fond of metaphysics; he was fond of experiment; he was an ardent student of nature; and he possessed at an early age poetic powers which, had they been cultivated, would, in the opinion of competent judges, have made him as eminent in literature as he became in science. All these tastes endured throughout life. Business could not stifle them even the approach of death was unable to extinguish them. The reveries of his boyhood on the sea-worn cliffs of Mount's Bay may yet be traced in many of the pages dictated during the last year of his life amidst the ruins of the Coliseum. But the physical sciences

The progress of physical and mental science, up to the nineteenth century, was traced with eminent ability in the dissertations written for the Encyclo- | pædia Britannica. Ethical philosophy was treated by Dugald Stewart and Mackintosh, as already stated, and a third dissertation was added by Archbishop Whately, exhibiting a general view of the rise, progress, and corruptions of Christianity. Mathematical and physical science was taken up by PROFESSOR JOHN PLAYFAIR (1748–1819), distinguished for his illustrations of the Huttonian theory, and for his biographies of Hutton and Robison. Playfair treated of the period which closed with Newton and Leibnitz, and the subject was continued through the course of the eighteenth century by SIR JOHN LESLIE, who succeeded to Playfair in the chair of Natural Philosophy in the university of Edinburgh. Sir John (1766-1832)-those more emphatically called at that time was celebrated for his ardour in physical research, and for his work, an Experimental Inquiry into the Nature and Propagation of Heat, 1804. A sixth dissertation was added in 1856 by the Professor of Natural Philosophy in the university of Edinburgh, DR JAMES DAVID FORBES, who continued the general view of the progress of mathematical and physical science principally from 1755 to 1850.

'If we look for the distinguishing characteristic of the centenary period just elapsed (1750-1850), we find it,' says Professor Forbes, 'in this, that it has drawn far more largely upon experiment as a means of arriving at truth than had previously been done. By a natural conversion of the process, the knowledge thus acquired has been applied with more freedom and boldness to the exigencies of mankind, and to the further investigation of the secrets of nature. If we compare the now extensive subjects of heat, electricity, and magnetism, with the mere rudiments of these sciences as understood in 1750; or if we think of the astonishing revival of physical and experi

chemical-speedily attracted and absorbed his most earnest attention. The philosophy of the imponderables of light, heat, and electricitywas the subject of his earliest, and also that of his happiest essays.' Of his splendid discoveries, the most useful to mankind have been his experiments on breathing the gases, his lectures on agricultural chemistry, his invention of the safety-lamp, and his protectors for ships.

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At the early age of twenty-two, Davy was appointed lecturer to the Royal Institution of London. In 1803 he commenced lecturing on agriculture, and his lectures were published in 1813, under the title of Elements of Agricultural Chemistry. His lecture On Some Chemical Agents of Electricity is considered one of the most valuable contributions ever made to chemical science. Dr Paris, the biographer of Davy, observes that, since the account given by Newton of his first discoveries in optics, it may be questioned whether so happy and successful an instance of philosophical induction has ever been afforded as that by which Davy discovered the composition of the

fixed alkalis.' In 1812 he published Elements of Chemical Philosophy. About 1815 he entered on the investigation of fire-damp, which is the cause of explosions in mines. The result was his invention of the safety-lamp, for which he was rewarded with a baronetcy by the prince regent in 1818, and the coal-owners of the north of England presented him with a service of plate worth £2000. In 1820 Davy was elected President of the Royal Society, in the room of Sir Joseph Banks, deceased.

It is mortifying to think that this great man, captivated by the flatteries of the fashionable world, and having married (1812) a rich Scottish lady, Mrs Apreece, lost much of the winning simplicity of his early manner, and of his pure devotion to science. In 1826 Sir Humphry had a paralytic attack, and went abroad for the recovery of his health. He composed an interesting little volume, Salmonia, or Days of Fly-fishing, 1828; and he wrote also Consolations in Travel, or the Last Days of a Philosopher, which appeared after his death. He died at Geneva on the 29th May 1829, and the Genevese government honoured him with a public funeral.

The posthumous volume of Consolations contains some finely written speculations on moral and ethical questions, with descriptions of Italian scenery. The work is in the form of dialogues between a liberal and accomplished Roman Catholic and an English patrician, poetical and discursive, whose views on religion entered the verge of scepticism. The former he calls Ambrosio; the latter, Onuphrio. Another interlocutor is named Philalethes. We subjoin part of their dialogues.

The Future State of Human Beings. Ambrosio. Revelation has not disclosed to us the nature of this state, but only fixed its certainty. We are sure from geological facts, as well as from sacred history, that man is a recent animal on the globe, and that this globe has undergone one considerable revolution, since the creation, by water; and we are taught that it is to undergo another, by fire, preparatory to a new and glorified state of existence of man; but this is all we are permitted to know, and as this state is to be entirely different from the present one of misery and probation, any knowledge respecting it would be useless, and indeed almost impossible.

Philalethes. My genius has placed the more exalted spiritual natures in cometary worlds, and this last fiery revolution may be produced by the appulse of a comet.

Amb. Human fancy may imagine a thousand ways in which it may be produced; but upon such notions it is absurd to dwell. I will not allow your genius the slightest approach to inspiration, and I can admit no verisimility in a reverie which is fixed on a foundation you now allow to be so weak. But see, the twilight is beginning to appear in the orient sky, and there are some dark clouds on the horizon opposite to the crater of Vesuvius, the lower edges of which transmit a bright light, shewing the sun is already risen in the country beneath them. I would say that they may serve as an image of the hopes of immortality derived from revelation; for we are sure from the light reflected in those clouds that the lands below us are in the brightest sunshine, but we are entirely ignorant of the surface and the scenery; so, by revelation, the light of an imperishable and glorious world is disclosed to us; but it is in eternity, and its objects cannot be seen by mortal eye or imaged by mortal imagination.

Phil. I am not so well read in the Scriptures as I

hope I shall be at no very distant time; but I believe the pleasures of heaven are mentioned more distinctly than you allow in the sacred writings. I think I remember that the saints are said to be crowned with palms and amaranths, and that they are described as perpetually hymning and praising God. the sensual pleasure which approaches nearest to an Amb. This is evidently only metaphorical; music is intellectual one, and probably may represent the delight resulting from the perception of the harmony of things and of truth seen in God. The palm as an evergreen tree, and the amaranth a perdurable flower, are emblems of immortality. If I am allowed to give a metaphorical allusion to the future state of the blest, I should image it by the orange-grove in that sheltered glen, on which the sun is now beginning to shine, and of which fruit and balmy silver flowers. Such objects may well the trees are at the same time loaded with sweet golden portray a state in which hope and fruition become one eternal feeling.

Indestructibility of Mind.

The doctrine of the materialists was always, even in my youth, a cold, heavy, dull, and insupportable doctrine to me, and necessarily tending to atheism. When I had heard, with disgust, in the dissecting rooms, the plan of the physiologist, of the gradual accretion of matter, and sensibility, and acquiring such organs as were necessary its becoming endowed with irritability, ripening into by its own inherent forces, and at last issuing into intellectual existence, a walk into the green fields or woods, by the banks of rivers, brought back my feelings from Nature to God. I saw in all the powers of matter the instruments of the Deity. The sunbeams, the breath of the zephyr, awakening animation in forms prepared by divine intelligence to receive it, the insensate seed, the slumbering eggs which were to be vivified, appeared, like the new-born animal, works of a divine mind; I saw love as the creative principle in the material world, and this love only as a divine attribute. Then my own mind I felt connected with new sensations and indefinite hopes-a thirst for immortality; the great names of other ages and of distant nations appeared to me to be still living around me, and even in the fancied movements of the heroic and the great, I saw, as it were, the decrees of the indestructibility of mind. These feelings, though generally considered as poetical, yet, I think, offer a sound philosophical argument in favour of the immortality of the soul. In all the habits and instincts of young animals, their feelings and movements, may be traced an intimate relation to their improved perfect state; their sports have always affinities to their modes of hunting or catching their food; and young birds, even in the nests, shew marks of fondness which when their frames are developed, become signs of actions necessary to the reproduction and preservation of the species. The desire of glory, of honour, of immortal fame, and of constant knowledge, so usual in young persons of well-constituted minds, cannot, I think, be other than symptoms of the infinite and progressive nature of the intellect-hopes which, as they cannot be gratified here, belong to a frame of mind suited to a nobler state of existence.

Religion, whether natural or revealed, has always the same beneficial influence on the mind. In youth, in health and prosperity, it awakens feelings of gratitude and sublime love, and purifies at the same time that it exalts. But it is in misfortune, in sickness, in age, that its effects are most truly and beneficially felt; when submission in faith and humble trust in the divine will, from duties become pleasures, undecaying sources of consolation. Then, it creates powers which were believed to be extinct; and gives a freshness to the mind, which was supposed to have passed away for ever, but which is now renovated as an immortal hope. Then it is the Pharos, guiding the wave-tossed mariner

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