them would stagnate into pestilence. In like manner Liberty herself, the last and best gift of God to his creatures, must be taken just as she is, you might shape her into a perfect model of severe scrupulous law, but she would then be Liberty no longer: and you must be content to die under the lash of this inexorable justice which you had exchanged for the banners of freedom. Every human tribunal ought to take care to administer justice, as we look hereafter to have justice administered to us. Upon the principle on which the attorney general prays sentence on my client-God have mercy upon us! Instead of standing before him with the hopes and consolations of christians, we must call upon the mountains to cover us; for which of us can present, for omniscient examination, a pure, unspotted, and faultless course? But I humbly expect that the benevolent Author of our being will judge us as I have been pointing out for your example.-Holding up the great volume of our lives in his hands, and regarding the general scope of them : if he discovers benevolence, charity, and good-will towards man beating in the heart, where he alone can look; if he finds that our conduct, though often forced out of the path by our infirmities, has been in general well directed: his all searching eye will assuredly never pursue us into those little corners of our lives, much less will he select them for punishment, without the general context of our existence, by which faults may be sometimes found to have grown out of virtues, and very many of our heaviest offences to have been grafted by human imperfection upon the best and kindest of our affections. This is not the course of divine justice, or, there is no truth in the Gospels of Heaven. If the general tenor of a man's conduct be such as I have represented, he may walk through the shadow of death, with all his faults about him, with as much cheerfulness as in the common paths of life; because he knows that instead of a stern accuser to expose before the Author of his nature those frail passages, which like the scored matter in the book before you, chequers the volume of the brightest and best spent life, his mercy will obscure them from the eye of his purity, and repentance blot them out for ever. 4440 SELF DEVOTION TO SOLITARY STUDIES ACCOUNTED FOR. "PERCIVAL." The sun is on the waters, and the air Breathes with a stirring energy; the plants Wooing the eye, and stealing on the soul With shouts of innocent glee, and youth is fired Speaks deeper meaning, and the cheek is filled With purer flushings; for the boundless power Of the glad season; but, at wisdom's shrine, That snatches us awhile from earth, and lifts Communion with the worthies of old time; As of the blind Meonian, when he struck Like sounds, which rend the sepulchres of kings, Would burst its marble portals to reveal Or his, who latest in the holy cause Of freedom, lifted to the heavens his voice Or those which in the still and solemn shades Of Plato, charmed the youth, the man, the sage That played around his eloquent lips, became The honey of persuasion, and was heard, As oracles amid Dodona's groves. O! there is a pure A hallowed feeling in these midnight dreams ; They have the light of heaven around them, breathe The odour of its sanctity, and are Those moments taken from the sands of life, Where guilt makes no intrusion, but they bloom It is a joy Ineffable, to dwell upon the lines "ON THE BEAUTY AND HAPPINESS OF AN OPEN BEHAVIOUR." "KNOX." A great part of mankind, if they cannot furnish themselves with the courage and generosity of the lion, think themselves equally happy, and much wiser, with the pitiful cunning of the fox. Every word they speak, however trivial the subject, is weighed before it is uttered. A disgustful silence is observed till somebody of authority has advanced an opinion, and then, with a civil leer, a doubtful and hesitating assent is given, such as may not preclude the opportunity of a subsequent retraction. If the conversation turn only on the common topics of the weather, the news, the play, the opera, they are no less reserved in uttering |