O part them never! If Hope prostrate lie,
Love too will sink and die.

But Love is subtle, and doth proof derive
From her own life that Hope is yet alive;
And bending o'er, with soul-transfusing eyes,
And the soft murmurs of the mother dove,
Woos back the fleeting spirit, and half supplies;

Thus Love repays to Hope what Hope first gave to Love.
Yet haply there will come a weary day,

Ah, cease thy tears and sobs, my little life!
I did but snatch away the unclasped knife:
Some safer toy will soon arrest thine eye,
And to quick laughter change this peevish cry.
Poor stumbler on the rocky coast of woe,
Tutored by pain each source of pain to know!
Alike the foodful fruit and scorching fire
Awake thy eager grasp and young desire;
Alike the good, the ill offend thy sight,
And rouse the stormy sense of shrill affright!
Untaught, yet wise, 'mid all thy brief alarms
Thou closely clingest to thy mother's arms,
Nestling thy little face in that fond breast
Whose anxious heavings lull thee to thy rest!
Man's breathing miniature! thou mak'st me sigh-
A babe thou art-and such a thing am I!

To anger rapid, and as soon appeased

For trifles mourning, and by trifles pleased

Break friendship's mirror with a tetchy blow,

Yet snatch what coals of fire on pleasure's altar glow! O thou that rearest, with celestial aim,

The future seraph in my mortal frame,

Thrice holy faith! whatever thorns I meet,

As on I totter with unpractised feet,

Still let me stretch my arms and cling to thee,

Meek nurse of souls through their long infancy!

Low was our pretty cot: our tallest rose

Peep'd at the chamber-window. We could hear

At silent noon, and eve, and early morn,
The sea's faint murmur. In the open air
Our myrtles blossom'd; and across the porch
Thick jasmins twined; the little landscape round
Was green and woody, and refreshed the eye.
It was a spot which you might aptly call
The Valley of Seclusion! once I saw
(Hallowing his Sabbath-day by quietness)
A wealthy son of commerce saunter by,
Bristowa's citizen: methought it calmed
His thirst of idle gold, and made him muse
With wiser feelings: for he paused and looked
With a pleased sadness, and gazed all around,
Then eyed our cottage and gazed round again,
And sighed, and said it was a blessed place.
And we were blessed. Oft with patient ear
Long-listening to the viewless skylark's note,
(Viewless, or haply for a moment seen,
Gleaming on sunny wing,) in whisper'd tones
I've said to my beloved, "Such, sweet girl!
The inobtrusive song of happiness,
Unearthly minstrelsy! then only heard

When the soul seeks to hear; when all is hush'd
And the heart listens."

But the time, when first,

From that low dell, steep up the stony mount

I climb'd with perilous toil and reach'd the top,
Oh! what a goodly scene! Here the bleak mount,
The bare bleak mountain speckled thin with sheep;
Gray clouds, that shadowing spot the sunny fields;
And river, now with bushy rocks o'erbrow'd,
Now winding bright and full, with naked banks;
And seats, and lawns, the abbey, and the wood,
And cots, and hamlets, and faint city spire;
The channel there, the islands and white sails,
Dim coasts and cloud-like hills and shoreless ocean-
It seem'd like Omnipresence! God, methought,
Had built him there a temple: the whole world
Seem'd imag'd in its vast circumference.
No wish profan'd my overwhelmed heart.
Blest hour! It was a luxury-to be!

Ah! quiet dell! dear cot! and mount sublime!
I was constrain'd to quit you. Was it right,
While my unnumber'd brethren toil'd and bled,
That I should dream away the intrusted hours,
On rose-leaf beds, pampering the coward heart
With feelings all too delicate for use?

Sweet is the tear that from some Howard's eye
Drops on the cheek of one he lifts from earth:
And he that works me good with unmov'd face
Does it but half; he chills me while he aids;
My benefactor, not my brother man.

Yet even this, this cold beneficence

Praise, praise it, O my soul! oft as thou scann'st
The Sluggard Pity's vision-weaving tribe!

Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched,
Nursing in some delicious solitude

Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies;
I therefore go, and join, head, heart, and hand,
Active and firm, to fight the bloodless fight
Of science, freedom, and the truth in Christ.

Yet oft when, after honorable toil,

Rests the tired mind, and, waking, loves to dream,
My spirit shall revisit thee, dear cot!

Thy jasmin and thy window-peeping rose,
And myrtles, fearless of the mild sea air.
And I shall sigh fond wishes-sweet abode !
Ah! had none greater! And that all had such!
It might be so-but the time is not yet.
Speed it, O Father! Let thy kingdom come!

IMPORTANCE OF THE CORRECT USE OF TERMS.

Felicity, in its proper sense, is but another word for fortunateness, or happiness; and I can see no advantage in the improper use of words, when proper terms are to be found, but, on the contrary, much mischief. For, by familiarizing the mind to equivocal expressions, that is, such as may be taken in two or more different meanings, we introduce confusion of thought, and furnish the sophist with his best and handiest tools. For the juggle of sophistry consists, for the greater part, in using a word in one sense in the premise, and in another sense in the conclusion. We should accustom ourselves to think and reason in precise and steadfast terms, even when custom, or the deficiency or the corruption of the language, will not permit the same strictness in speaking. The mathematician finds this so necessary to the truths which he is seeking, that his science begins with, and is founded on, the definition of his terms. The botanist, the chemist, the anatomist, &c., feel and submit to this necessity at all costs, even at the risk of exposing their several pursuits to the ridicule of the many, by technical terms, hard to be remembered, and alike quarrelsome to the ear and the tongue. In the business of moral and religious reflection, in the acquisition of clear and distinct conceptions of our duties, and of the relations in which we stand to God, our neighbor, and ourselves, no such difficulties occur. At the utmost, we have only to rescue words, already existing and familiar, from the false or vague meanings imposed on them

by carelessness, or by the clipping and debasing misusage of the market. And surely happiness, duty, faith, truth, and final blessedness, are matters of deeper and dearer interest for all men than circles to the geometrician, or the characters of plants to the botanist, or the affinities and combining principle of the elements of bodies to the chemist, or even than the mechanism (fearful and wonderful though it be !) of the perishable Tabernacle of the Soul can be to the anatomist. Among the aids to reflection, place the following maxim prominent: Let distinctness in expression advance side by side with distinction in thought. For one useless subtlety in our elder divines and moralists, I will produce ten sophisms of equivocation in the writings of our modern preceptors; and for one error resulting from excess in distinguishing the indifferent, I would show ten mischievous delusions from the habit of confounding the diverse.

Aids to Reflection.

THE DEPTH OF THE CONSCIENCE.1

How deeply seated the conscience is in the human soul is seen in the effect which sudden calamities produce on guilty men, even when unaided by any determinate notion or fears of punishment after death. The wretched criminal, as one rudely awakened from a long sleep, bewildered with the new light, and half recollecting, half striving to recollect a fearful something, he knows not what, but which he will recognize as soon as he hears the name, already interprets the calamities into judgments, executions of a sentence passed by an invisible judge, as if the vast pyre of the last judgment were already kindled in an unknown distance, and some flashes of it, darting forth at intervals beyond the rest, were flying and lighting upon the face of his soul. The calamity may consist in loss of fortune, or character, or reputation; but you hear no regrets from him. Remorse extinguishes all regret, and remorse is the implicit creed of the guilty.

Aids to Reflection.

"To set the outward actions right, though with an honest intention, and not so to regard and find out the inward disorder of the heart, whence that in the actions flows, is but to be still putting the index of a clock right with your finger, while it is foul, or out of order within, which is a continual business, and does no good. Oh! but a purified conscience, a soul renewed and refined in its temper and affections, will make things go right without, in all the duties and acts of our callings."

Leighton.

TRUTH MUST AND WILL PREVAIL.

Monsters and madmen canonized, and Galileo blind in a dungeon! It is not so in our times. Heaven be praised that in this respect, at least, we are, if not better, yet better off than our forefathers. But to what, and to whom (under Providence) do we owe the improvement? To any radical change in the moral affections of mankind in general? In order to answer this question in the affirmative, I must forget the infamous empirics whose advertisements pollute and disgrace all our newspapers, and almost paper the walls of our cities; and the vending of whose poisons and poisonous drams (with shame and anguish be it spoken) supports a shop in every market-town! I must forget. that other opprobrium of the nation, that mother vice, the lottery! I must forget that a numerous class plead prudence for keeping their fellow-men ignorant and incapable of intellectual enjoyments, and the revenue for upholding such temptations as men so ignorant will not withstand-yes! that even senators and officers of state hold forth the revenue as a sufficient plea for upholding, at every fiftieth door throughout the kingdom, temptations to the most pernicious vices. No! Let us not deceive ourselves. Like the man who used to pull off his hat with great demonstration of respect whenever he spoke of himself, we are fond of styling our own the enlightened age, though, as Jortin, I think, has wittily remarked, the golden age would be more appropriate. To whom, then, do we owe our ameliorated condition? To the successive few in every age (more, indeed, in one generation than in another, but relatively to the mass of mankind always few), who, by the intensity and permanence of their action, have compensated for the limited sphere within which it is at any one time intelligible, and whose good deeds posterity reverence in their results, though the mode in which we repair the inevitable waste of time, and the style of our additions, too generally furnish a sad proof how little we understand the principles.

* *

Still, however, there are truths so self-evident, or so immediately and palpably deduced from those that are, or are acknowledged for such, that they are at once intelligible to all men who possess the common advantages of the social state; although by sophistry, by evil habits, by the neglect, false persuasions, and impostures of an anti-christian priesthood, joined in one conspiracy with the violence of tyrannical governors, the understandings of men may become so darkened, and their consciences so lethargic,