by those who were their owners, I imagine there would be some curious mismatching. What a scramble there would be after a character! And what kind of a character would be most in demand? Sinful and grovelling as many are, and prone as we all are to evil, yet, so strong is the natural love of the heart for the virtues and the holy, that I am inclined strongly to the belief that each would choose and claim a virtuous character. Men do not plunge headlong into sin, any more than they rise at once to a sublime height of virtue. But no one sinks so low that he cannot distinguish and honor high-minded, consistent virtue, and that he would not gladly exchange his evil for good, could he do so by a simple act of the will. But the struggle is long and hard from vice to virtue; his heart fails within, and the world without affords little sympathy or encouragement.-Twenty-one years of my life have gone; more than a quarter, should I live to a 'good old age,' and a much greater part, probably, of what my life will probably be. I do not count upon a long sojourn here, nor do I wish it. I scarcely anticipate another twenty-one years. But how dif ferent the twenty-one years to come from the twentyone years that have passed! These have been spent mostly in the quiet of home; now I am to come out into the broad world. The past is the foundation on which the future is to be built. It is yet to be seen. how it will stand the stormy elements of human society; whether the structure of active life raised thereon will wave hither and thither at every shift of public opinion, and tremble at the blow of the critic's

pen, and fall before the rush of opposition, or whether it will stand firm and unshaken, ever pointing upwards to God as the centre of trust and faith, and as if upheld by the strength of his eternal arm. Principles that I have formed are now to be tested, theories to be practised, opinions to be expressed, and an influence to be thrown out into the mixed, fermenting mass of human materials around me. Am I ready for this? Am I ready for life? To go out into the world, to combat its ills, to withstand its snares, to endure its scorn and meet its opposition? Some dread to die; I rather dread to live. Life is a fearful, awful thing, great in responsibilities, filled with duties. But it must be met. Its responsibilities must be borne; its duties must be performed; and he only who is ready for these, ready to live, is ready to die."

Taunton, July 17, 1850: "Those dreaded days have come and gone, and with them all anxious thoughts and dreary forebodings. To me the result is more than satisfactory. I can scarcely realize it. I am in college and free from all conditions — a thing I dared not dream of. I expected certainly to have two or three deficiencies to make up, and had made up my mind to consider myself lucky even with these. But when, last evening, I took in my hand the proffered paper, hardly daring to look at it, dreading the fate it was to reveal, and saw the announcement actually written out in words that I was a real member of the freshman class in Harvard College, clear of conditions, my mind would scarcely give credit to my senses. But so it was; yet I

could not believe it, until I was assured by Mr. Wheelwright, and others who had passed through the ordeal, that there was no delusion. My joy was irrepressible. It burst through every pore of my skin, lightened every motion of my limbs, could be heard in every sound of my voice. My mind seemed at once relieved of a heavy burden, a burden which for the last six weeks had pressed upon it so unremittingly that my only thought, speech, and act had been in reference to this one thing-college. My spirits at once resumed their wonted elasticity, and with a light heart I leaped upon an omnibus, in company with Mr. W. (who seemed equally joyous at the success of his three candidates), bound for Boston and thence for Roxbury, where I spent the night. An occurrence happened in Boston rather calculated to check the exuberance of my emotions. A gentleman who left the omnibus before myself took my valise instead of his own, which he left for me and bid fair to be as much use to me as mine to him. What made the matter worse for myself, in the ecstasy of feeling with which I left Cambridge, I entirely forgot to take my pocketbook from my valise, which contained all my money, except a little change in my pocket. My sudden depression of spirits was but momentary, however, as Mr. Wheelwright assured me that he knew the man who had taken it, that he was a good honest clergyman, and would probably be in Cambridge at the Commencement to-day, when, if I would go back again, I might make the exchange. Feeling perfectly satisfied that I should get the valise again, I comforted myself for

the night, being without a change of clothing and the indispensables of making a toilet, with the thought of the good minister's ideas when he should find that he had purloined a valise, and was without nightshirt or razor and perhaps minus some of his sermons. This morning I went over to Cambridge, and there learned by inquiry that my valise was left at the omnibus office in Boston. I accordingly went back to Boston, made the exchange, and this afternoon, tired, heated through and through with the burning sun, which I had hardly been in contact with for several weeks, dusty, dirty, sweaty, and sleepy, I found my way back to Taunton again. 'Action and reaction are equal and in opposite directions' is no less a truth of mental than of physical philosophy; hence I am now beginning to experience a vacancy of life and activity corresponding to my fulness and buoyancy of spirits last night. Sleep, perhaps, will restore me, and to sleep I go."

North Dartmouth, June 20, 1851: "Spent last week at Newport- went on with father to the Yearly Meeting, which I had given up all thoughts of ever attending again. This probably is the last time. I find little in the Quaker Society that commends itself to my understanding or my heart. I am no Quaker in doctrine or in spirit. They are too Calvinistic in the former, too sectarian in the latter. I do not like this keeping apart from other societies and the world. We want more of brotherhood among mankind-more of the family union; this the Quakers do not cherish."

Between July 18, 1851, and August 6, 1857, when

he "left home for Europe," Potter seems to have kept no journal; at least, none has been found. On August 9, he sailed from New York for Europe, where he travelled and studied over a year. The following passage from his journal on the outward voyage is of more than usual significance, as marking a phase of his theological thought which was never wholly abandoned in subsequent years, and yet was never logically developed in either its theoretical or its practical aspect a development which, in a mind so conscientious as his, would have led to an early retirement from the ministry. The conception here outlined remained undeveloped even in his own mind; yet I think it was a source of some vagueness and confusion in his preaching, so far as its philosophical side alone was concerned, and would have impaired even its practical value, if his deep religiousness of nature had not come to the rescue and saved him from a too rigorously logical evolution and application of his own conception :

At sea, Aug. 14, 1857: "The lesson that I learned from the ocean was, in fact, the confirmation of my theology, or perhaps more properly its reflection namely, that the Infinite becomes manifest to itself only in the finite,- that the Infinite, Absolute, Eternal, lies as a vast boundless sea, without soundings and without horizon, in perfect, unconscious rest, a great storehouse of powers in perfect harmony and repose; so soon as motion, form, thought appear, so soon as these powers come into activity, there begins the finite. Our ship, too, as she took up the winds, and rode triumphantly over