steady, earnest labor is, I apprehend, one of our great prepara tions for another state of being. When I see the vast amount of toil required of men, I feel that it must have important connections with their future existence; and that he who has met this discipline manfully, has laid one essential foundation of improvement, exertion, and happiness in the world to come. You will here see that labor has great dignity. It is not merely the grand instrument, by which the earth is overspread with fruitfulness and beauty, and the ocean subdued, and matter wrought into innumerable forms for comfort and ornament. It has a far higher function, which is to give force to the will, efficiency, courage, the capacity of endurance and of persevering devotion to far-reaching plans. Alas, for the man who has not learned to work! He is a poor creature. He does not know himself. He depends on others, with no capacity of making returns for the support they give; and let him not fancy that he has a monopoly of enjoyment. Ease, rest, owes its deliciousness to toil; and no toil is so burdensome as the rest of him who has nothing to task and quicken his powers.

DR. CHANNING.

155. THE DIGNITY OF HUMAN NATURE.

You are a man; you are a rational and religious being; you are an immortal creature. Yes, a glad and glorious existence is yours; your eye is opened to the lovely and majestic vision of nature; the paths of knowledge are around you, and they stretch onward to eternity; and, most of all, the glory of the infinite God, the all-perfect, all-wise, and all-beautiful, is unfolded to you. What now, compared with this, is a little worldly renown? The treasures of infinity and of eternity are heaped upon thy laboring thought;-can that thought be deeply occupied with questions of mortal prudence? It is as if a man were enriched by some generous benefactor almost beyond measure, and should find nothing else to do but vex himself and complain, because another man was made a few thousands richer.

Where, unreasonable complainer, dost thou stand, and what is around thee? The world spreads before thee its sublime mysteries, where the thoughts of sages lose themselves in wonder; the ocean lifts up its eternal anthems to thine ear; the golden sun lights thy path; the wide heavens stretch them

selves above thee, and worlds rise upon worlds, and systems beyond systems, to infinity; and dost thou stand in the centre of all this, to complain of thy lot and place? Pupil of that infinite teaching-minister at nature's great altar-child of heaven's favor-ennobled being-redeemed creature,―must thou pine in sullen and envious melancholy, amidst the plenitude of the whole creation!

In that thou art a man, thou art infinitely exalted above what any man can be, in that he is praised. I would rather be the humblest man in the world, than barely be thought greater than the greatest. The beggar is greater, as a man, than is the man, merely as a king. Not one of the crowds that listened to the eloquence of Demosthenes and Cicero-not one who has bent with admiration over the pages of Homer and Shakspeare -not one who followed in the train of Cæsar or of Napoleon, would part with the humblest power of thought, for all the fame that is echoing over the world and through the ages.

DR. O. DEWEY.

156.

ATTENTION, THE SOUL OF GENIUS.

THE favorite idea of a genius among us is, of one who never. studies, or who studies, nobody can tell when-at midnight, or at odd times and intervals; and now and then strikes out, “at a heat," as the phrase is, some wonderful production. "The young man," it is often said, "has genius enough, if he would only study.' Now, the truth is, that the genius will study; it is that in the mind which does study: that is the very nature of it. I care not to say that it will always use books. All study is not reading, any more than all reading is study.

Attention is the very soul of genius; not the fixed eye, not the poring over a book, but the fixed thought. It is, in fact, an action of the mind, which is steadily concentrated upon one idea, or one series of ideas; which collects, in one point, the rays of the soul, till they search, penetrate, and fire the whole train of its thoughts. And while the fire burns within, the outside may be indeed cold, indifferent, negligent, absent in appearance he may be an idler, or a wanderer, apparently without aim or intent; but still the fire burns within. And what, though "it bursts forth" at length, as has been said, “like volcanic fires, with spontaneous, original, native force?" It only shows the intense action of the elements beneath. What,

though it breaks forth, like lightning from the cloud? The electric fire had been collecting in the firmament, through many a silent, clear, and calm day. What, though the might of genius appears in one decisive blow, struck in some moment of high debate, or at the crisis of a nation's peril! That mighty energy, though it may have heaved in the breast of Demosthenes, was once a feeble, infant thought. A mother's eye watched over its dawnings. A father's care guarded its early youth. It soon trod, with youthful steps, the halls of learning, and found other fathers to wake and to watch for it, even as it finds them here. It went on; but silence was upon its path, and the deep strugglings of the inward soul silently ministered to it. The elements around breathed upon it, and "touched it to finer issues." The golden ray of heaven fell upon it, and ripened its expanding faculties. The slow revolutions of years slowly added to its collected energies and treasures; till, in its hour of glory, it stood forth embodied in the form of living, commanding, irresistible eloquence. The world wonders at the manifestation, and says, "Strange, strange that it should come thus unsought, unpremeditated, unprepared!" But the truth is, there is no more a miracle in it, than there is in the towering of the pre-eminent forest-tree, or in the flowing of the mighty and irresistible river, or in the wealth and waving of the boundless harvest. DR. O. DEWEY.

157. THE NOBILITY OF LABOR.

WHY, in the great scale of things, is labor ordained for us? Easily, had it so pleased the great Ordainer, might it have been dispensed with. The world itself might have been a mighty machinery for producing all that man wants. Houses might have risen like an exhalation,

"With the sound

Of dulcet symphonies, and voices sweet,
Built like a temple."

Gorgeous furniture might have been placed in them, and soft couches and luxurious banquets spread, by hands unseen; and man, clothed with fabrics of nature's weaving, rather than with imperial purple, might have been sent to disport himself in those Elysian palaces.

But where, then, had been human energy, perseverance,

DR. O. DEWEY.- -DR. F. WAYLAND.

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patience, virtue, heroism? Cut off labor with one blow from the world, and mankind had sunk to a crowd of Asiatic voluptuaries.

Better that the earth be given to man as a dark mass, whereupon to labor. Better that rude and unsightly materials be provided in the ore-bed, and in the forest, for him to fashion in splendor and beauty. Better, not because of that splendor and beauty, but because the act of creating them is better than the things themselves; because exertion is nobler than enjoyment; because the laborer is greater and more worthy of honor than the idler.

Labor is heaven's great ordinance for human improvement. Let not the great ordinance be broken down. What do I say ? It is broken down; and it has been broken down for ages. Let it, then, be built again; here, if any where, on the shores of a new world-of a new civilization.

But how, it may be asked, is it broken down? Do not men toil? it may be said. They do, indeed, toil; but they too generally do, because they must. Many submit to it, as in some sort a degrading necessity; and they desire nothing so much on earth as an escape from it. This way of thinking is the heritage of the absurd and unjust feudal system, under which serfs labored, and gentlemen spent their lives in fighting and feasting. It is time that this opprobrium of toil were done away.

Ashamed to toil! Ashamed of thy dingy workshop and dusty labor-field; of thy hard hand, scarred with service more honorable than that of war; of thy soiled and weather-stained garments, on which mother Nature has embroidered mist, sun, and rain, fire and steam-her own heraldic honors! Ashamed of those tokens and titles, and envious of the flaunting robes of imbecile idleness and vanity! It is treason to nature; it is impiety to heaven: it is breaking heaven's great ordinance. Toil-toil, either of the brain, of the heart, or of the handis the only true manhood, the only true nobility!

DR. O. DEWEY.

158. HOWARD, THE PHILANTHROPIST.

It is not in the field of patriotism alone that deeds have been achieved, to which history has awarded the palm of moral sublimity. There have lived men in whom the name of patriot has been merged in that of philanthropist; who, looking with

an eye of compassion over the face of the earth, have felt for the miseries of our race, and have put forth their calm might to wipe off one blot from the marred and stained escutcheon of human nature, to strike off one form of suffering from the catalogue of human woe. Such a man was Howard. Surveying our world like a spirit of the blessed, he beheld the misery of the captive-he heard the groaning of the prisoner. His determination was fixed. He resolved, single-handed, to gauge and to measure one form of unpitied, unheeded wretchedness, and, bringing it out to the sunshine of public observation, to work its utter extermination. And he well knew what this undertaking would cost him. He knew what he had to hazard from the infection of dungeons, to endure from the fatigues of inhospitable travel, and to brook from the insolence of legalized oppression. He knew that he was devoting himself to the altar of philanthropy; and he willingly devoted himself. He had marked out his destiny, and he hasted forward to its accomplishment, with an intensity "which the nature of the human mind forbade to be more, and the character of the individual forbade to be less." Thus he commenced a new era in the history of benevolence. And hence, the name of Howard will be associated with all that is sublime in mercy, until the final consummation of all things. DR. F. WAYLAND.

159. THE EMPTINESS OF HUMAN GLORY.

THE crumbling tombstone and the gorgeous mausoleum, the sculptured marble and the venerable cathedral, all bear witness to the instinctive desire within us to be remembered by coming generations. But how short-lived is the immortality which the works of our hands can confer! The noblest monuments of art that the world has ever seen are covered with the soil of twenty centuries. The works of the age of Pericles lie at the foot of the Acropolis in indiscriminate ruin. The ploughshare turns up the marble which the hand of Phidias had chiselled into beauty; and the Mussulman has folded his flock beneath the falling columns of the temple of Minerva.

Neither sculptured marble nor stately column can reveal to other ages the lineaments of the spirit; and these alone can embalm our memory in the hearts of a grateful posterity. As the stranger stands beneath the dome of St. Paul's, or treads,