and acknowledge, but, before the impulses of unrestrained passion, how powerless comes the voice of reason and religion! I must depart.—

To this reverie or warning of Werter I may add a word by way of appendix. So painful is the impression, made by the delusion of "young Werter," as the Germans love to call this character, that I may be pardoned for wishing to change the feeling, and to awaken a more Christian state of mind. I give therefore another picture of NewYear Eve.

We all have a spark of the imaginative in our system. All experience something of reverie. When the sun is going down, and in the twilight of a Sabbath evening, how grateful to view the rosy clouds of the west! and while they flow along the expanse like waves, to pause and listen, as if we might actually receive some breath of their murmuring!

But more often, like the enthusiast of nature, so finely portrayed by Wordsworth, we look upon their motion as without sound and dreamlike; when "the clouds are touched," we "read unutterable love in their silent faces." At moments like these, how many associations, hopes, and remembrances come over the soul! Some emotions of this nature, produced by a remarkably brilliant sunset, I once attempted to embody, and at the very time of my enjoyment of them.

NEW-YEAR EVE.

While waves of light unmurmuring flow
Above yon golden sphere,

I welcome thee, thou holy Eve,
To God and Nature dear.

But lo! the rainbow-waves along
Whose beauteous footsteps glow?
Who spreads that robe of heaven around
Monadnoc's mount of snow?

Th' Eternal One with smile of love
Illumes both mount and sky,
A gleam of heaven unveiling there
To man's believing eye.

Would HE the blight of woe remove?
Our comforts are secure :

O breathe upon our virtues' bloom,
Their bloom to fruit mature.

Still bless our little number, Lord,
With mild composure's charm;
Bright faith bestow, celestial beam,
Untrembling at alarm.

While we implore this light of life,
To soothe, or bliss impart,
The healing ray diffuse afar
To every friendly heart;

And, as they view yon new-year throne,
Where living glories dwell,

Let them, in sweet communions dream,
With warm emotion swell.

All-hallowed Eve! beloved and pure
From heaven's ethereal dome,
Form round their life the atmosphere
Of thine immortal Home.

But ah! thy hues, in wayward lapse,
Pursue their parent sphere!
Farewell to thee, thou holy Eve,
To God and Nature dear.

I cannot close this appendix without making a very obvious reflection. How opposed are the "must depart" of this weak hero of Goëthe and the submission of a Christian! The impulse of the former is the madness of disappointment and despair, while the feeling of the latter is the grateful acknowledgment, that life is a blessing and death is a gain.

The late Mrs. Grant of Laggan, in one of her "Letters from the Mountains," (LVII.) has weighed the faults and the excellences of this work with a delicate hand: I have never seen the fairer and the more exceptionable view so justly exhibited.

In respect to the developement of nature and the finer feelings of the heart, Werter is no doubt a masterly production. The truth of its touches has been felt and acknowledged, not only in imaginative Germany, but in sober New England, and on the wild mountains of Ireland and Scotland. Still I cannot but agree with Mrs. Grant, that this fiction requires to be read with a more discrimin

ating judgment, than the young, the undisciplined, and the impassioned usually possess. Too much of its spirit resembles a species of amiable democracy, the independence and wrongheadedness of inexperience. The pathos and intellectual power, discovered in this little volume, cannot compensate either for its want of principle, or its most insidious example. The general tenour of the book, indeed, is in harmony with the egotism, the reckless selfishness, the popular spirit of the age.

MAURICE;

OR,

AWAY FOR ST. BRANDAN'S.

CHAPTER I.

-How a Bird and a Boat
By night came to me.

"What said they? what did they?"
Come, reader, and see.

SHALL I reveal one of the foibles or peculiarities of my brain? or, to borrow the language of the fashionable vocabulary of the day, shall I reveal one of my idiosyncrasies to the reader? As I wish to secure his confidence, it seems to be no more than discreet to do so. In a halfwhisper, then, I give him the simple truth of my experience.

The fabulous narratives, as they are called, concerning the island of St. Brandan, the many attempts made to reach its shores, and the many glimpses that were believed to have been caught of them, three hundred years ago, have strongly impressed my imagination from earliest childhood. My boyish ardour and credulity used to cause me so much ridicule, that in early youth I became less communicative of my enthusiasm. Still the same feeling clung to me, and, I never doubted, would "cling to me everlastingly." I seldom failed to examine, and most inquisitively too, every blackletter chronicle of this optical illusion, as some considered it, that fell in my way.

One of the effects of this impulse, as a clergyman would say, forms the topic of my present discourse. It was an effect of such force, as to confirm all I had dream

ed of St. Brandan's, and to change the coloring of my whole after life. The event to which I refer, took place in the year 1743,—and in the nineteenth of my age.

It was a late hour one evening, almost the very witching time of night, when I was seated in my library alone. I had just read over, it may have been for the twentieth time, an old account of the island of St. Brandan, and was now musing upon the predisposition of the human mind to ndulge in visionary illusions. Nay more, I exclaimed to myself, almost before I well knew what I was saying, "Would to Heaven I could once view this island of mystery! what are all else, fame, fortune, power, or even the love of woman, - compared with this image of the heart and imagination! One glimpse of its meadows and mountains, its palaces and pavilions, would be worth the whole world beside ;"— when, the moment I expressed this feeling and wish, I heard in my room the humming or whirring of wings. So peculiar was the sound, I was unable to distinguish, whether it most resembled that of a lone humblebee or that of a lost hummingbird; but, my northern window being raised to admit the fresh breeze of a midsummer night, I had no doubt that some little fellow had mistaken his way, and I was on the point of rising to give him his freedom.

That instant I perceived it was a bird, a bird too of the hummingbird tribe, though I could not but observe, when I saw him perch near my lamp, on the top edge of my writing-leaf, that his feathers had much of the downy softness of the bee, and that his beak was more blunt, like that of the Bobo'link. When he alighted, his head happened to be turned from me, but he managed his tiny feet with infinite dexterity, to bring himself round; and while his plumage varied and flashed in the light, I heard him in a sort of recitative, sweet and spiritual as a voice from heaven, thus address me: