tion,. Is this the dream of dreamers? One brought to the world the message that it might be reality. But they crucified him between two thieves. Not till it accepts that message can the world have peace. Look over the history of the past. What is it but a record of the woes inflicted by man on man, of wrong producing wrong, and crime fresh crime? It must be so till justice is acknowledged and liberty is law Who is Liberty that we should doubt her; that we should set bounds to her, and say, "Thus far shalt thou come and no farther!" Is she not peace? is she not prosperity? is she not progress? nay, is she not the goal towards which all progress strives? Not here; but yet she cometh! Saints have seen her in their visions; seers have seen her in their trance. To heroes has she spoken, and their hearts were strong; to martyrs, and the flames were cool! She is not here, but yet she cometh. Lo! her feet are on the mountains-the call of her clarions ring on every breeze; the banners of her dawning fret the sky! Who will hear her as she calleth; who will bid her come and welcome? Who will turn to her? who will speak for her? who will stand for her while she yet hath need?-Henry George. I ... F a friend of mine. . . gave a feast, and did not invite me to it, I should not mind a bit. . . . Buf if. a friend of mine had a sorrow and refused to allow me to share it, I should feel it most bitterly. If he shut the doors of the house of mourning against me, I would move back again and again and beg to be admitted, so that I might share in what I was entitled to share. If he thought me unworthy, unfit to weep with him, I should feel it as the most poignant humiliation, as the most terrible mode for which disgrace could be inflicted on me... he who can look on the loveliness of the world and share its sorrow, and realize something of the wonder of both, is in immediate contact with divine things, and has got as near to God's secret as any one can get.-Oscar Wilde. I T has been thought a considerable advance towards establishing the principles of freedom to say, that government is a compact between those who govern and those who are governed: but this can not be true, because it is putting the effect before the cause; for as man must have existed before governments existed, there necessarily was a time when governments did not exist, and consequently there could originally exist no governors to form such a compact with. The fact therefore must be that the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government: and this is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist. HAT Nature is always right, is an assertion, artistically, as untrue, as it is one whose truth is universally taken for granted. Nature is very rarely right, to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that Nature is usually wrong: that is to say, the condition of things that shall bring about the perfection of harmony worthy a picture is rare, and not common at all. This would seem, to even the most intelligent, a doctrine almost blasphemous. So incorporated with our education has the supposed aphorism become, that its belief is held to be part of our moral being, and the words themselves have, in our ear, the ring of religion. Still, seldom does Nature succeed in producing a picture s ** How little this is understood, and how dutifully the casual in Nature is accepted as sublime, may be gathered from the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish * working man and the cultured one, the wise man and the one of pleasure, cease to understand, as they have ceased to see, and Nature, who, for once, has sung in tune, sings her exquisite song to the artist alone, her son and her masterher son in that he loves her, her master in that he knows her. In the dark womb where I began Down in the darkness of the grave, If the grave's gates could be undone, What have I done to keep in mind What have I done, or tried, or said "C. L. M.," by John Masefield. sunset. ¶ And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, and the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before usthen the wayfarer hastens home; the Through his brain, as through the last alembic, is distilled the refined essence of that thought which began with the Gods, and which they left him. to carry out. Set apart by them to complete their works, he produces that wondrous thing called the masterpiece, which surpasses in perfection all that they have contrived in what is called Nature; and the Gods stand by and marvel, and perceive how far away more beautiful is the Venus of Melos than was their own Eve.-Whistler. PASSION is a sort of fever in the mind, which ever leaves us weaker than it found us... It, more than any thing, deprives us of the use of our judgment; for it raises a dust very hard to see through . . . . It may not unfitly be termed the mob of the man, that commits a riot upon his reason.-William Penn. A man is an animal that writes.-Homer. E is fallen! We may now pause before that splendid prodigy, which towered among us like some ancient ruin, whose frown terrified the glance its magnificence attracted Grand, gloomy, and peculiar, he sat upon the throne, a sceptered hermit, wrapped in the solitude of his own originality A mind, bold, independent, and decisive -a will, despotic in its dictates-an energy that distanced expedition, and a conscience pliable to every touch of interest, marked the outline of this extraordinary character-the most extraordinary, perhaps, that, in the annals of this world, ever rose, or reigned, or fell Flung into life, in the midst of a revolution that quickened every energy of a people who acknowledged no superior, he commenced his course, a stranger by birth, and a scholar by charity! With no friend but his sword, and no fortune but his talents, he rushed into the lists where rank, and wealth, and genius had arrayed themselves, and competition fled from him as from the glance of destiny. He knew no motive but interesthe acknowledged no criterion but success he worshiped no God but ambition, and with an Eastern devotion he knelt at the shrine of his idolatry. Subsidiary to this, there was no opinion that he did not promulgate: in the hope of a dynasty, he upheld the crescent; for the sake of a divorce, he bowed before the Cross: the orphan of St. Louis, he became the adopted child of the Republic; and with a paricidal ingratitude, on the ruins both of the throne and the tribune, he reared the throne of despotism. A professed Catholic, he imprisoned the pope; a pretended patriot, he impoverished the country; and in the name of Brutus, he grasped without remorse, and wore without shame, the diademofthe Cæsars! Through this pantomime of his policy, fortune played the clown to his caprices. At his touch, crowns crumbled, beggars reigned, systems vanished, the wildest theories took the color of his whim, and all that was venerable, and all that was novel, changed places with the rapidity of a drama. Even apparent defeat assumed the appearance of victory-his flight from Egypt confirmed his destinyruin itself only elevated him to empire. But if this fortune was great, his genius was transcendent; decision flashed upon his counsels; and it was the same to decide and to perform. To inferior intellects, his combinations appeared perfectly impossible, his plans perfectly impracticable; but, in his hands, simplicity marked their development, and success vindicated their adoption. His person partook the character of his mind-if the one never yielded in the cabinet, the other never bent in the field. Nature had no obstacles that he did not surmount-space no opposition that he did not spurn; and whether amid Alpine rocks, Arabian sands, or polar snows, he seemed proof against peril, and empowered with ubiquity! The whole continent of Europe trembled at beholding the audacity of his designs, and the miracle of their execution. Skepticism bowed to the prodigies of his performance; romance assumed the air of history; nor was there aught too incredible for belief, or too fanciful for expectation, when the world saw a subaltern of Corsica waving his imperial flag over her most ancient capitals. All the visions of antiquity became common places in his contemplation; kings were his people -nations were his outposts; and he disposed of courts, and crowns, and camps, and churches, and cabinets, as if they were the titular dignitaries of the chessboard! s Amid all these changes he stood immutable as adamant. It mattered little whether in the field or the drawing-room -with the mob or the levee-wearing the jacobin bonnet or the iron crownbanishing a Braganza, or espousing a Hapsburg-dictating peace on a raft to the Czar of Russia, or contemplating defeat at the gallows of Leipsic he was still the same military despot! Cradled in the camp, he was to the last hour the darling of the army; and whether in the camp or the cabinet, he never forsook a friend or forgot a favor. Of all his soldiers, not one abandoned him, till affection was useless; and their first stipulation was for the safety of their favorite and a Tyrant-a Christian and an Infidel -he was, through all his vicissitudes, the same stern, impatient, inflexible original -the same mysterious, incomprehensible self-the man without a model, and without a shadow. His fall, like his life, baffled all specula They knew well, if he was lavish of them, I write. He sits beside my chair, And scribbles, too, in hushed delight, What is it he pretends to write? He toils and toils; the paper gives No clue to aught he thinks. What then? The poems that he can not pen. Strange fancies throng that baby brain, He stops-reflects—and now again It seems a satire on myself,— These dreamy nothings scrawled in air, Despair! Ah, no; the heart, the mind Presists in hoping-schemes and strives Some memory of our little lives. Beneath his rock in the early world Smiling the naked hunter lay, Like him I strive in hope my rhymes May keep my name a little while- his academic prize to the philosopher of England se Such a medley of contradictions, and at the same time such an individual consistency, were never united in the same character. A Royalist-a Republican and an Emperor-a Mohammedan-a Catholic and a Patron of the Synagogue-a Subaltern and a Sovereign-a Traitor tion. In short, his whole history was like a dream to the world, and no man can tell how or why he was awakened from the reverie. Such is a faint and feeble picture of Napoleon Bonaparte, the first (and it is to be hoped the last) emperor of the French. That he has done much evil there is little doubt; that he has been the origin of much good there is just as little. Through his means, intentional or not, Spain, Portugal, and France have arisen to the blessings of a free constitution; superstition has found her grave in the ruins of the Inquisition and the feudal system, with its whole train of tyrannic satellites, has fled forever s Kings may learn. from him that their safest study, as well as their noblest, is the interest of the people; the people are taught by him that there is no despotism, so stupendous against which they have not a resource; and to those who would rise upon the ruins of both, he is a living lesson, that if ambition can raise them from the lowest station, it can also prostrate them from the highest.-Charles Phillips. AM inclined to believe that the intention of the Sacred Scriptures is to give to mankind the information necessary for their salvation. But I do not hold it necessary to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, with speech, with intellect, intended that we should neglect the use of these, and seek by other means for knowledge which these are sufficient to procure for us; especially in a science like astronomy, of which so little notice is taken by the Scriptures that none of the planets, except the sun and moon and once or twice only Venus, by the name of Lucifer, are so much as named at all. This therefore being granted, methinks that in the discussion of natural problems we ought not to begin at the authority of texts of Scriptures, but at sensible experiments and necessary demonstrations.-Galileo. HEREVER one goes one immediately comes upon this incorrigible mob of humanity. It exists everywhere in legions; crowding and soiling everything, like flies in summer. Hence the numberless bad books, those rank weeds of literature which extract nourishment from the corn, and choke it. They monopolize the time, money and attention which really belongs to good books and their noble aims; they are written merely with a view to making money or procuring places. They are not only useless, but they do positive harm. Nine-tenths of the whole of our present literature aims solely at taking a few shillings out of the public's pocket, and to accomplish this, author, publisher and reviewer have joined forces.-Schopenhauer. the other night, late at night, a light in a cottage-window, and heard the loom busily at work, the shuttle flying rapidly. It ought to have a cheerful sound, but it is at work near midnight, when there is care upon the brow of the workmanlest he should not be able to secure that which will maintain his wife and children -then there is a foretaste of what is meant by the word "famine.” Oh, if these men who made the Corn Laws, if these men who step in between the Creator and His creatures, could for only one short twelvemonth-I would inflict upon them no harder punishment for their guilt-if they for one single twelvemonth might sit at the loom and throw the shuttle! I will not ask that they should have the rest of the evils; I will not ask that they shall be torn by the harrowing feelings which must exist when a beloved wife and helpless children are suffering the horrors which these Corn Laws have inflicted upon millions. -John Bright. |