melodious and vigorous utterance, not to a peculiar vein of imagina tion, like Shelley, nor a mystical attachment to nature, like Wordsworth, nor an egotistic personality, like Byron; but to a love of freedom and truth which political events had caused to glow with unwonted fervor in the bosoms of his noblest contemporaries, and to the native sentiment of domestic and social life, rendered more dear and sacred by their recent unhallowed desecration. It was not by ingenuity, egotism, or artifice that he thus chanted, but honestly, earnestly, from the impulse of youthful ardor and tenderness moulded by scholarship. It is now the fashion to relish verse more intricate, sentiment less defined, ideas of a metaphysical cast, and a rhythm less modulated by simple and grand cadences; yet to a manly intellect, to a heart yet alive with fresh, brave, unperverted instincts, the intelligible, glowing, and noble tone of Campbell's verse is yet fraught with cheerful augury. It has outlived, in current literature and in individual remembrance, the diffuse metrical tales of Scott and Southey; finds a more prolonged response, from its general adaptation, than the ever-recurring key-note of Byron; and lingers on the lips and in the hearts of those who only muse over the elaborate pages of those minstrels whose golden ore is either beaten out to intangible thinness, or largely mixed with the alloy of less precious metal. Indeed, nothing evinces a greater want of just appreciation in regard to the art or gift of poetry, than the frequent complaints of such a poet as Campbell because of the limited quantity of his verse. It would be as rational to expect the height of animal spirits, the exquisite sensation of convalescence, the rapture of an exalted mood, the perfect content of gratified love, the tension of profound thought, or any other state the very law of which is rarity, to become permanent. Campbell's best verse was born of emotion, not from idle reverie or verbal experiment; that emotion was heroic or tender, sympathetic or devotional,-the exception to the everyday, the commonplace, and the mechanical; accordingly, in its very nature, it was "like angels' visits," and no more to be summoned at will than the glow of affection or the spirit of prayer. MARY. What though the name is old and oft repeated, And yon bright star we hail, although its looming As starry beams o'er troubled billows stealing, Like patriot music or affection's tone,- The sweetest tales of human weal and sorrow, And marvel not I thus call my ideal,- Both angels must the same blest title own. What spirits round my weary way are flying, Hang o'er me when the chord of life is riven, Be my dear household word, and my last accent here. HENRY WARD BEECHER. THIS very eminent preacher and eloquent lecturer was born in Litchfield, Connecticut, on the 24th of June, 1813. He was graduated at Amherst College in 1834, and studied theology at Lane Seminary, Cincinnati, when it was under the direction of his father. He was first settled in the Presbyterian Church at Lawrenceburg, Dearborn County, Indiana, in 1837, where he remained two years. Thence he removed to Indianapolis, where he continued till he was called to the new congregation-the Plymouth Church-at Brooklyn, New York, in 1847, where he has since remained, acquiring for himself and giving to his church a position and a fame known throughout the land. It may be safely said, indeed, that as a pulpit and a platform orator he has no superior. Nothing is studied, nothing artificial, about his oratory: all is natural, frank, cordial, hearty, fear less. One great secret of his power is, that he feels deeply himself the great truths that he utters, and therefore makes his audience feel them too.1 Mr. Beecher was married in 1837 to Miss Bullard, sister of the late Rev. Dr. Bullard, of St. Louis, and of Rev. Asa Bullard, Boston. Mr. Beecher's only publications are Letters to Young Men, and Star Papers, or Experiences of Art and Nature. But there have been published for him two very remarkable books, Life Thoughts gathered from the Extemporaneous Discourses of Henry Ward Beecher, by Edna Dean Proctor; and Notes from Plymouth Pulpit: Collection of Memorable Passages from the Discourses of Henry Ward Beecher, by Augusta Moore. Few books can be found containing such rich gems of deep thought, brilliant fancy, and devotional feeling. It is impossible to do Mr. Beecher justice by any extracts from his sermons or essays. One must hear him preach or lecture to feel his power, or to understand it. The following selections, however, will give some idea of his style, sentiments, and inexhaustible wealth of thought and illustration. THE TRUE OBJECT OF PREACHING. A sermon that is dry, cold, dull, soporific, is a pulpit monster, and is just as great a violation of the sanctity of the pulpit, as the other absurd extreme of profane levity. Men may hide or forsake God's living truth by the way of stupid dulness, just as much as by pert imagination. A solemn nothing is just as wicked as a witty nothing. Men confound earnestness with solemnity. A man may be eagerly earnest, and not be very solemn. They may also be awfully solemn, without a particle of earnestness. But solemnity has a reputation. A man may be a repeater of endless distinctions, a lecturer in the pulpit of mere philosophical niceties, or he may be a repeater of stale truisms; he may smother living truths by conventional forms and phrases, and if he put on a very solemn face, use a very solemn tone, employ very solemn gestures, and roll along his vamped-up sermon with professional solemnity above an audience of sound men; men, at least, soundly asleep,that will pass for decorous handling of God's truth. The old pharisaism is not dead yet. The difference between Christ and In 1850, Mr. Beecher made a brief trip to Europe; and the impression he proluced is described in the following spirited paragraph in the "British Banner," written by Dr. Campbell :-" Mr. Henry Ward Beecher is by far the most amusing and fascinating American it has ever been our lot to meet. He is a mass of flaming fire, restless, fearless, brilliant,-a mixture of the poet, the orator, and the philosopher, such as we have seldom, if ever, found in any other man to the same extent." For a good notice of Mr. Beecher, see "Fowler's American Pulpit." 2 This is composed of the communications he has given to the "Independent," his signature in that paper being a star (*). He continues to write for it; and his contributions are one of the many attractions of that admirable journal. His contemporary teachers was, that He spake life-truth in lifeforms, with the power of His own life in their utterance. The rabbis spake old orthodoxy, dead as a mummy;-but they spake it very reverendly. They might not do any good, but they never violated professional propriety. Nobody lived, everybody died about them. But, then, their faces were sober, their robes exact, their manner mostly of the Temple and the Altar. They never forgot how to look, nor how to speak guttural solemnities, nor how to maintain professional dignity. They forgot nothing except living truths and living souls. And fifty years of ministration without any fruit in true godliness gave them no pain. It was charged to the account of Divine Sovereignty. Nothing can more sharply exhibit the miserable imbecility. which has come upon us, than the inability of men to perceive the difference between preaching "politics," "social reform," &c., and preaching God's truth in such a way that it shall sit in judgment upon these things, and every other deed of men, to try them, to explore and analyze them, and to set them forth, as upon the background of eternity, in their moral character, and in their relation to man's duty and God's requirements. Shall the whole army of human deeds go roaring along the public thoroughfares, and Christian men be whelmed in the general rush, and no man be found to speak the real moral nature of human conduct? Is the pulpit too holy, and the Sabbath too sacred, to bring individual courses and developments of society to the bar of God's Word for trial? Those who think so, and are crying out about the desecration of the pulpit with secular themes, are the lineal descendants of those Jews who thought the Sabbath so sacred that our Saviour desecrated it by healing the withered hand. Would to God that the Saviour would visit His Church and heal withered hearts! RELIGION. Religion-it is the bread of life. I wish that we appreciated more livingly the force of such expressions. Why! I remember when I was a boy, I could not wait till I was dressed in the morning, but ran and cut a slice from the loaf, and all round the loaf, too, in order to keep me till breakfast; and at breakfast—if diligence earned wages, I should have been well paid; and then I could not wait till dinner, but had to eat again, and again before tea, and then at tea, and lucky if I did not eat again after that. It was bread, bread, all the time, which I ate, and lived on, and got strength from. And so religion is the bread of life. You make it the cake. You put it away in your cupboards, and you never have it but when you have company, and then you cut it up into little pieces and pass it round on your best plates, instead of treating it as bread, to be used every day and every hour. GOD'S FORGIVENESS. Every one must come to Christ and say, "If you will not take me with all my failings, I cannot be saved!" And why does God forgive us? For the same reason that the mother forgives her child,-because she loves it. Just as the sun shines on decaying flowers and shrivelled fruit, because it is his nature -the sun, which never asks a question, but says, "If any thing wants to be shined on, let it hold itself up.' And so God says, "I will forgive you, for your repeated transgressions." Do you ask what becomes of them? What becomes of the hasty words you spoke yesterday to her you love? "I don't know where they are," says the wife. "I am sure I do not," says the husband. They are gone. They are sunk to the bottom of her heart. No! not to the bottom, for there she keeps her love. There is only one thing that can be annihilated, and that is wrong-doing to one who loves you. The following selections are from that remarkable book-Life Thoughts-so full of the richest gems that one hardly knows which to take. PARENTAL INDULGENCE.-I heard a man who had failed in business, and whose furniture was sold at auction, say that when the cradle and the crib and the piano went, tears would come, and he had to leave the house to be a man. Now, there are thousands of men who have lost their pianos, but who have found better music in the sound of their children's voices and footsteps going cheerfully down with them to poverty, than any harmony of chorded instruments. Oh, how blessed is bankruptcy when it saves a man's children! I see many men who are bringing up their children as I should bring up mine, if, when they were ten years old, I should lay them on a dissecting-table, and cut the sinews of their arms and legs, so that they could neither walk nor use their hands, but only sit still and be fed. Thus rich men put the kaife of indolence and luxury to their children's energies, and they grow up fatted, lazy calves, fitted for nothing, at twenty-five, but to drink deep and squander wide; and the father must be a slave all his life, in order to make beasts of his children. How blessed, then, is the stroke of disaster which sets the children free, and gives them over to the hard but kind bosom of Poverty, who says to them, "Work!" and, working, makes them men! |