we live in times so auspicious, and to do what we can in patience and love, to guide the erring and check the extravagant.

When the car rushes with swift motion, he who looks only downward upon the track, to catch if he can some glimpses of the glowing wheel, or to watch the rocks by the wayside, that seem whirling from their places, soon grows sick and faint. Look up, man! Look abroad! The earth is not dissolved, not yet dissolving. Look on the tranquil heavens, and the blue mountains. Look on all that fills the range of vision-the bright, glad river, the-smooth meadow, the village spire with the clustering homes around it, and yonder lonely, quiet farmhouse, far up among the hills. You are safe; all is safe; and the power that carries you is neither earthquake nor tempest, but a power than which the gentlest palfrey that ever bore a timid maiden, is not more obedient to the will that guides it.

What age, since the country was planted, has been more favorable to happiness or to virtue than the present? Would you rather have lived in the age of the revolution? If in this age you are frightened, in that age you would have died with terror. Would you rather have lived in the age of the old French wars, when religious enthusiasm and religious contention ran so high, that ruin seemed impending? How would your sensibilities have been tortured in such an age! Would you rather have lived in those earlier times, when the savage still built his wigwam in the woody valleys, and the wolf prowled on our hills? Those days, so Arcadian to your fancy, were days of darkness and tribulation. The "temptations in the wilderness" were as real and as terrible as any which your virtue is called to encounter.

The scheme of Divine Providence is one, from the beginning to the end, and is ever in progressive development. Every succeeding age helps to unfold the mighty plan. There are, indeed, times of darkness; but even then it is light to faith, and lighter to the eye of God; and even then there is progress, though to sense and fear all motion seems retrograde. To despond now, is not cowardice merely, but atheism; for now, as the world in its swift progress brings us nearer and nearer to the latter day, faith, instructed by the signs of the times, and looking up in devotion, sees on the blushing sky the promise of the morning.

CHRISTIANITY IN HISTORY.

The more we study Christ and the influence of Christianity in history, the deeper, also, and more cheering will be our conviction that Christianity, as one of the forces that control the progress of nations and of the human race, has never demonstrated all its efficacy. In the ages past, the various and complicated moral forces that move the world have been in opposition to its influence, or have acted to corrupt it. Its mission in the world is to work itself free from the corruptions that have soiled its purity and impaired its efficacy, and mingling itself with all that acts on human character--literature, art, philosophy, education, law, statesmanship, commerce-to bring all things into subordination to itself, and to sway all the complicated elements of power for the renovation of the world.

We, brethren in the commonwealth of letters, all of us, from the most gifted to the humblest, are workers in history. Christianity, if we are true to our position and our nurture, is working through us upon the destinies of our country and of our race. Not the missionary only who goes forth, in the calm glow of apostolic zeal, to labor and to die in barbarous lands for the extension of Christ's empire-not the theologian only who devotes himself to the learned investigation and the scientific exposition of the Christian faith-not the preacher and the pastor only-but all who act in any manner, or in any measure, on the character and moral destiny of their fellowmen, are privileged to be the organs and the functionaries of Christianity. The senator, whose fearless voice and vote turn back from the yet uncontaminated soil of his country the polluting and blighting barbarism of slavery, and consecrate that soil eternally to freedom-the patriot statesman, who, in defiance of the ardor civium prava jubentium, lifts up his voice like a prophet's cry against the barbarous and pagan policy of war and conquest-the jurist, who, like Granville Sharp, by long and patient years of toil, forces the law to recognize at last some disregarded principle of justice-the teacher, the author, the artist, the physician, and the man of business, who, in their various places of duty and of influence, are serving their generation under the influence of Christian principlesthese all are in their several functions the anointed ministers of Christianity, "kings and priests to God."

In the all-embracing scheme of the eternal Providence, no act, or effort, or aspiration of goodness shall be in vain. No rain-drop mingles with the ocean, or falls upon the desert sand, no particle of dew moistens the loneliest and baldest cliff, but God sees it and saves it for the uses of his own beneficence. The vanished aspirations of the youth who fell and was forgotten-whose early promise sparkled for a moment and exhaled-are not wholly lost; he has not lived nor died in vain. Let these thoughts cheer us as we labor, and bear us up in our discouragements.

"Not enjoyment, and not sorrow

Is our destined end or way,
But to act that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

"Let us then be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait."

RALPH WALDO EMERSON.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON, one of the most original writers in our country, was born in Boston in the year 1803, and graduated at Harvard College in 1821. On leaving college, he devoted his time to theological studies, and was settled as pastor of the second Unitarian church in his native city. But his views respecting some of the Christian ordinances undergoing a change, he gave up the ministry, and retired to the quiet village of Concord, Mass., devoting himself to his favorite studies-the nature of man and his relations to the universe.

The following are Mr. Emerson's chief publications: "Man Thinking," an oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 1837; "Literary Ethics," an oration; and "Nature-an Essay," in 1838; "The Dial," a magazine of literature, philosophy, and history, which he commenced in 1840, and continued for four years; "The Method of Nature," "Man the Reformer," three lectures on the times, and the first series of his essays, in 1841; a volume of poems, in 1846, and the lectures, delivered during his visit to England in 1849, which form the volume called "Representative Men."

Such are Mr. Emerson's principal writings. As an author he never can be popular, for he is too abstruse and too metaphysical, and has too little of human sympathy to reach the heart; while he is at times so quaint or so obscure, that one is no little puzzled to find out his exact meaning.'

THE COMPENSATIONS OF CALAMITY.

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not see that they only go out, that archangels may come in. We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, "Up and onward for evermore!" We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters who look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occu

An English critic thus speaks of him: "Mr. Emerson possesses so many characteristics of genius that his want of universality is the more to be regretted; the leading feature of his mind is intensity; he is deficient in heart sympathy. Full to overflowing with intellectual appreciation, he is incapable of that embracing reception of impulses which gives to Byron so large a measure of influence and fame. Emerson is elevated, but not expansive; his flight is high, but not extensive. He has a magnificent vein of the purest gold; but it is not a mine. To vary our illustration somewhat, he is not a world, but a district; a lofty and commanding eminence we admit, but only a very small portion of the true poet's universe. What, however, he has done is permanent, and America will always in after times be proud of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and consider him one of her noblest sons."

pation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener, is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of

men.

TRAVELLING.

I have no churlish objection to the circumnavigation of the globe, for the purposes of art, of study, and benevolence, so that the man is first domesticated, or does not go abroad with the hope of finding somewhat greater than he knows. He who travels to be amused, or to get somewhat which he does not carry, travels away from himself, and grows old even in youth among old things. In Thebes, in Palmyra, his will and mind have become old and dilapidated as they. He carries ruins to ruins.

Travelling is a fool's paradise. We owe to our first journeys the discovery that place is nothing. At home I dream that at Naples, at Rome, I can be intoxicated with beauty, and lose my sadness. I pack my trunk, embrace my friends, embark on the sea, and at last wake up at Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from. I seek the Vatican, and the palaces. I affect to be intoxicated with sights and suggestions, but I am not intoxicated. My giant goes with me wherever I go.

But the rage of travelling is itself only a symptom of a deeper unsoundness affecting the whole intellectual action. The intellect is vagabond, and the universal system of education fosters restlessness. Our minds travel when our bodies are forced to stay at home. We imitate; and what is imitation but the travelling of the mind? Our houses are built with foreign taste; our shelves are garnished with foreign ornaments; our opinions, our tastes, our whole minds lean, and follow the past and the distant, as the eyes of a maid follow her mistress. The soul created the arts wherever they have flourished. It was in his own mind that the artist sought his model. It was an application of his own thought to the thing to be done and the conditions to be observed. And why need