"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods," that cannot be found in books. Angel voices speak to us from the rustling leaves and from the murmuring streams. We hear them in the cascade and in the rushing winds. From the recesses of the forest, nature speaks to us, and teaches to the patient soul lessons of "divine significance."

VI. DM. A PORTRAIT.

(1844.)

HE is a gentleman of intelligence and talent. Though in youth subjected to the wants of life; in manhood, by his industry, he enjoys its comforts. Though in youth deprived of the advantages of education; in manhood, by his efforts, he has secured them. He is a fair example, not of Channing's, but of the world's, self-educated man; and his breeding is in correspondence with the camp, frank, not elegant. Thrown upon his own resources, he has learned well the laws by which they are developed, and the arts by which they are controlled. Standing alone, and compelled to maintain his position unsubsidized by wealth or family, he has mastered the sterner lessons of human nature, and endeavors to conform his actions to their monitions.

He is confessedly a man of superior intellect; and I must add, whatever others may declare, a

man of strong heart. His overweening attachment to law, his devotion to legal right in contradistinction to moral, has blinded his friends; and whenever, therefore, he warms in defense of some cherished point, they almost exclaim against his principles. Mr. M, however, is not exempt from the general curse. His greatest fault, one which quite legitimately springs from the very necessities of the self-bred, is an inflexible obstinacy. He is not to be moved, when he takes his position; thus manifesting an excess of firmness, which may win some admirers, but will repulse many friends.

The only other faults to which I shall at present advert, are extreme sensibility to opinion, and consequent tendency to overbear an opponent. These also are the results of education. Having spent years in the business of teaching, in which, in a most significant sense, the legislative, judicial and executive habit induces him to expect from the world at large the deference of a pupil, an old teacher can never brook contradiction from juniors, and rarely suffers his statements to be questioned by any individual. In either case, the elements of the despot are stirred; and if reason keeps not the supremacy of passion, a storm arises which brandishes if it does not hurl its bolts.

VII. WOMAN'S MISSION.

(1844.)

THE earlier history of woman is but a continued picture of degradation. Yet from the first we behold indications of superior intellect. In the fall of our first parents, we discover it was not idle curiosity, nor any inferior promptings, which seduced Eve. "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil". -was the lofty consideration that Satan presented her. In the very act of plucking the forbidden fruit, she proved herself susceptible of the highest order of impulses. Her instincts urged her to obtain an important knowledge, and her aspirations rose up to kindred with Divinity itself. The mind which could thus conceive was of no mean caste; and though it spoke a "bad ambition," yet it showed its ancestry to be of "the royal line."

The records of woman during the dark ages are scanty. Little is known of her, save when the circumstances of birth placed her by the side of royalty. However, when called to assume the responsibilities of that high station, she often signalized herself in the administration of the affairs of state. But we are not to judge of woman from this elevation, flanked and protected as she must necessarily be by the talent and wisdom of an empire. Who could not wear a diadem, when placed upon the head and held there by others?

Who could not sit upon a throne, when sustained in that position? Fools, madmen and philosophers have alternately occupied that eminence. It is, therefore, when we see her rising superior to her station, when we behold the brilliant flashes of her genius lighting up the gloom of ages, that we are to form our estimate of woman's power and worth.

As winter suspends the growth, without destroying the vitality, of plants; so did the frosts of antiquity benumb, without freezing, the outgushings of female intellect. The genius of woman, like the Alpine flower, that "leans its pale cheek upon the bosom of eternal snow," has occasionally towered, in isolated grandeur, the wonder and admiration of the world. A Sappho, a Corinna, ascended to a path whose meteor course shed a halo around the letters of their times, and has cast its beams forward in undiminished lustre to our own.

At various periods before the days of chivalry, woman appears to have attained to some little influence. Historians inform us that, during the heroic ages of Greece, a respect for the sex obtained, which, however much it conflicts with our modern notions of regard, was sufficient to give her a gratifying position. But for a time thereafter, woman was destined to suffer a retrogression in the scale of public opinion. Rome, in "the fierce democracie" of arms, forgot, amid the pride of her sons and her sciences, that it was the mother who moulded the character of her children, and bade them "bring

back their shields, or be brought back upon them." "They overlooked," to use the language of our countryman, "the moral strength that lay hidden under physical weakness."

The institution of feudalism was a new era in the history of woman. Her importance began to be felt and acknowledged; her sphere of influence, to be extended and legalized. The result was the emancipation of mind. Companionship of the sexes was established, and the social and gentle feelings of sympathy and confidence were cultivated. "It was then," says the historian Crowe, " that a bright charm spread around the hearth, that a genius came to preside over it as far superior to the dumb, dull ladies of antiquity, as the worship of the invisible God was to their pagan sacrifices."

The elevation of woman was characterized by a corresponding elevation of man. The nobler, the finer, the latent sensibilities of his nature were called into action. A spirit of hope, of progress, of protection, was born in the bosom once steeled to sympathy by merciless and brutal feuds.

For her introduction into society, woman owes much to Anne of Brittany, queen of Louis the Twelfth. By her efforts, her influence, and her example, a court was collected and formed around her, consisting of the nobility of the realm, and ladies of the first rank, whose learning and principles she endeavored to mould. That court became a school of morals and manners. The estab