Imagination's world of air,

And our own world, its gloom and glee, Wit, pathos, poetry, are there,

And death's sublimity.

And Burns-though brief the race he ran,
Though rough and dark the path he trod-
Lived-died-in form and soul a Man,
The image of his God.

Through care, and pain, and want, and woe,
With wounds that only death could heal,
Tortures-the poor alone can know,
The proud alone can feel,

He kept his honesty and truth,

His independent tongue and pen,
And moved, in manhood and in youth,
Pride of his fellow-men.

Praise to the bard! his words are driven,
Like flower-seeds by the far winds sown,
Where'er, beneath the sky of heaven,
The birds of fame have flown.

Praise to the man! a nation stood
Beside his coffin with wet eyes,
Her brave, her beautiful, her good,
As when a loved one dies.

Such graves as his are pilgrim-shrines,
Shrines to no code or creed confined-
The Delphian vales, the Palestines,
The Meccas of the mind.

Sages, with Wisdom's garland wreathed,
Crown'd kings, and mitred priests of power,
And warriors with their bright swords sheathed,
The mightiest of the hour;

And lowlier names, whose humble home
Is lit by Fortune's dimmer star,

Are there-o'er wave and mountain come,
From countries near and far;

Pilgrims, whose wandering feet have press'd
The Switzer's snow, the Arab's sand,

Or trod the piled leaves of the West,
My own green forest-land.

All ask the cottage of his birth,

Gaze on the scenes he loved and sung,

And gather feelings not of earth

His fields and streams among.

They linger by the Doon's low trees,
And pastoral Nith, and wooded Ayr,
And round thy sepulchres, Dumfries!
The Poet's tomb is there.

But what to them the sculptor's art,

His funeral columns, wreaths, and urus?
Wear they not graven on the heart
The name of Robert Burns?

THE WORLD IS BRIGHT BEFORE THEE.

The world is bright before thee;
Its summer flowers are thine;
Its calm, blue sky is o'er thee,
Thy bosom pleasure's shrine;
And thine the sunbeam given
To nature's morning hour,
Pure, warm, as when from heaven
It burst on Eden's bower.

There is a song of sorrow,
The death-dirge of the gay,
That tells, ere dawn of morrow,
These charms may melt away-
That sun's bright beam be shaded,
That sky be blue no more,

The summer flowers be faded,

And youth's warm promise o'er.

Believe it not; though lonely
Thy evening home may be ;
Though beauty's bark can only
Float on a summer sea,
Though Time thy bloom is stealing,
There's still, beyond his art,
The wild-flower wreath of feeling,
The sunbeam of the heart.

WILLIAM B. SPRAGUE.

THE life of Dr. Sprague, like the lives of most literary men, has been but little fertile in incidents. He was born in Andover, Connecticut, on the 16th of October, 1795, his father, Benjamin Sprague, having removed thither from Duxbury, Massachusetts. He was fitted for college, chiefly under the Rev. Abiel Abbot, of Coventry, and entered

Yale College in 1811. After receiving his degree, he entered the Theological Seminary at Princeton, and when he had completed his course there, he was invited to become a colleague with the Rev. Dr. Joseph Lathrop, at West Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was settled August 25, 1819. In July, 1829, he resigned his charge there, and on the 26th of the next month (August) was installed pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, Albany, New York, where he has continued to this day, in a life of constant employment, and most extended usefulness.

Dr. Sprague's published works have been very numerous, and all of them are excellent in their kind. The following, I believe, are the chief of them. "Letters to a Daughter," 1822; "Letters from Europe," 1828; "Lectures to Young People," 1831; "Lectures on Revivals," 1832; "Hints on Christian Intercourse," 1834; "Contrast between True and False Religion," 1837; "Life of Rev. Edward Dorr Griffin," 1838; "Life of President Dwight" (in Sparks's American Biography), 1845; "Aids to Early Religion," 1847; " Words to a Young Man's Conscience," 1848; "Letters to Young Men, founded on the Life of Joseph," 1854, of which eight editions have been issued; "European Celebrities," 1855; "Annals of the American Pulpit," 1856. The last work is in two large octavo volumes, comprising the lives of deceased clergymen of the Orthodox Congregational Church, and is a work of great research and value. He is now (1858) engaged in preparing similar works of the Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Methodist, and Baptist churches, which, when completed, will form the most valuable and authentic works upon the subject in our language. Some idea of the elevated character and the pure and wholesome tendency of his writings may be gathered from the following extracts:

VOLTAIRE AND WILBERFORCE.

Let me now, for a moment, show you what the two systems -Atheism and Christianity-can do, have done, for individual character; and I can think of no two names to which I may refer with more confidence, in the way of illustration, than Voltaire and Wilberforce; both of them names which stand out with prominence upon the world's history; and each, in its own way, imperishable.

Voltaire was perhaps the master spirit in the school of French Atheism; and though he was not alive to participate in the

I am not aware that Voltaire ever formally professed himself an Atheist; and I well know that his writings contain some things which would seem in

horrors of the revolution, probably he did more by his writings to combine the elements for that tremendous tempest than any other man. And now I undertake to say that you may draw a character in which there shall be as much of the blackness of moral turpitude as your imagination can supply, and yet you shall not have exceeded the reality as it was found in the character of this apostle of Atheism. You may throw into it the darkest shades of selfishness, making the man a perfect idolater of himself; you may paint the serpent in his most wily form to represent deceit and cunning; you may let sensuality stand forth in all the loathsomeness of a beast in the mire; you may bring out envy, and malice, and all the baser, and all the darker passions, drawing nutriment from the pit; and when you have done this, you may contemplate the character of Voltaire, and exclaim, "Here is the monstrons original!" The fires of his genius kindled only to wither and consume; he stood, for almost a century, a great tree of poison, not only cumbering the ground, but infusing death into the atmosphere; and though its foliage has long since dropped off, and its branches have withered, and its trunk fallen, under the hand of time, its deadly root still remains; and the very earth that nourishes it is cursed for its sake.

And now I will speak of Wilberforce; and I do it with gratitude and triumph-gratitude to the God who made him. what he was; triumph that there is that in his very name which ought to make Atheism turn pale. Wilberforce was the friend of man. Wilberforce was the friend of enslaved and wretched man. Wilberforce (for I love to repeat his name) consecrated the energies of his whole life to one of the noblest objects of benevolence; it was in the cause of injured Africa that he often passed the night in intense and wakeful thought; that he counselled with the wise, and reasoned with the unbelieving, and expostulated with the unmerciful; that his heart burst forth with all its melting tenderness, and his genius with all its electric fire; that he turned the most accidental meeting into a conference for the relief of human woe, and converted even the Senate House into a theatre of benevolent action. Though his zeal had at one time almost eaten him up, and the vigor of his frame was so far gone that he stooped over and looked into

consistent with atheistical opinions. But not only are many of his works deeply pervaded by the spirit of Atheism, but there is scarcely a doctrine of natural religion which he has not somewhere directly and bitterly assailed; so that I cannot doubt that he falls fairly into the ranks of those who say, "there is no God."

his own grave, yet his faith failed not; his fortitude failed not; and blessed be God, the vital spark was kindled up anew, and he kept on laboring through a long succession of years; and at length, just as his friends were gathering around him to receive his last whisper, and the angels were gathering around. to receive his departing spirit, the news, worthy to be borne by angels, was brought to him, that the great object to which his life had been given was gained; and then, Simeon-like, he clasped his hands to die, and went off to Heaven with the sound of deliverance to the captive vibrating sweetly upon his ear.

Both Voltaire and Wilberforce are dead; but each of them lives in the character he has left behind him. And now who does not delight to honor the character of the one; who does not shudder to contemplate the character of the other? Contrast between True and False Religion.

VIRTUE CROWNED WITH USEFULNESS.

What a noble example of usefulness was Joseph in every relation which he sustained-in every condition in which he was placed! Of what he was to the Midianitish merchants, previous to his being sold to Potiphar, we have no account; but, from that period to the close of his life, the monuments of his benevolent activity are continually rising before us. It was the disposition which he manifested to render himself useful that caused him to be advanced in the house of Potiphar; and there he was most heartily and zealously devoted to his master's interests. During his confinement in prison-though he was conscious that it was a most unjust and cruel confinement-yet he was constantly occupied in some useful way, and very soon was intrusted with the general oversight of all his fellow-prisoners. And then when he became governor of the land-who can calculate the amount of good that he accomplished? The single precaution that he took for saving the land of Egypt from the threatening famine was the means of averting an amount of distress which it is not easy to calculate; and not merely from the people of Egypt, but, as it turned out, from his own immediate family. All the public concerns of the country he seems to have managed with the utmost skill and success; and no doubt the period of his administration was unprecedented in respect to both public and private happiness. But doubtless we must reckon his greatest usefulness as connected with the immediate fortunes of his own