The purely imaginative, and the satirists too, have not unfrequently been the faithfulest authors, and the truest historians. Who reads Hume, Gibbon, or Robertson for a true history? Nobody. But who does not read Shakspeare with a saving and a safe faith. He wrote truly of all ages, for he wrote truly of his own, and knew what was in man. To be honest, was not the less unwise in his time, in the construction of a villain, than it is now. futurity, we would class ourselves among the faithful. Sometimes, however, this vast and remote future seems to approach nearer than it should upon the borders of the present, and sometimes our writers and talkers seem to think, and to feel, that it has actually reached us, and that we are now what a few centuries may make us. In this there may be great evil. If our legislators get it, they may legislate for what is not; changing and overturning what belongs to us, to make way for what belongs to nobody. Our financiers may get it, and we may be taxed in advance, and be called wealthy, because every body may be hereafter. It would sometimes seem that the inspiration of our writers was getting transfused into the mass, and that we are living in the future, whether we will or no. We are getting at last at abuses, which have been the protection and happiness of our fathers and ourselves, but which will never be tolerated in the times to come. A strange sort of benefaction is thus to be substituted for present good, the incalculable good of a vast future. There is another class we mean to glance | one original character, developed and varied in this, and while the future continues in at. This embraces writers who are honest, by the operation of a very few agencies. It and writers who are not. We have no con- is a mind, however, of vast capacity, and cern with the purposes or motives of men the causes which are brought to operate when they write or print, for a bad book upon it are of great power. We are not may not have proceeded from a bad motive, surprised to find this character at times a or a useful one from the best. Honest au- wandering misanthrope, feeling deeply the thors are not so to themselves only, but to power of nature, and of man as he now is, their age, and to their country. There is a and man as he has been, in the remote and real weakness in a written bypocrisy. A strange times of antiquity. It is not strange man may walk before us, and talk before us to us that he should now appear deep in the too, and be nothing he seems. But the mind toils of love; now recklessly cruel, and now and the heart of the whole community stir ardently attached. We do not wonder to at the false histories of the writing author. find him grossly licentious and ingenious And this they do, whether the falsehood be in his ribaldry; now discoursing about found in the glozing of sin, in excessive moral distinctions, and now losing or depanegyric, or in caricature vice. spising the whole of them. At one moment he spurns our sympathy, and in the next we should be ashamed of his company. This character has been pronounced to be his own, at least in an early period of its history. This, however, he has denied. But if it be in any measure so, his works to that extent at least are autobiographical, and will go down to succeeding ages for their verisimilitude alone. They are not histories of his time, for they do not give us what an age, especially his own, makes of the mass If this be in any measure true, if we are of men, with whom he was born. They are to realize prophecies, or are realizing them strictly individual, for they all tell us about already, we should look to it, and very sethe same being. Give these works any riously. Human life is getting longer, it is other character, admit for a moment that said, than it used to be, but it will hardly they were intended by the author as a true carry us as far as our writers are disposed history, or a dramatic sketch of his times, to do. We may be losers in the bargain, and and he becomes at once the veriest and what is thus lost to us, will be lost to our vulgarist libeller. As it is, he is the most successors, however remote, or however nuremarkable egotist, if one at all, that has merous. They were safe prophets in the ever lived. He industriously brings to the British parliament, who foretold the liberty surface, and keeps there, what other men and prosperity of America, for we had one more industriously have hidden in the deep- of these already, and could not long want est recesses of their own hearts. This sin- the other. Prophets are not safe now howgle fact explains a thousand anomalies in ever, our prophetic writers; for we have his works; and among these, the strange both liberty and prosperity, and it is for selfishness which could love deeply the in- these, and for these alone, we should give dividual and hate the species; or regard the our minds in the fulness of their best powwhole with one sweeping abhorrence, dis-ers; and if we are true to our best interests, gust, and contempt. Pope was no traducer of his species as he found it. His age made him, as the age makes every body. His harmonious, and, not unfrequently, grossly indelicate satire, has its quality from his time. It was the current selfishness which made its passage through his heart, and a fine intellect followed in its tide. Pope, however, is temporary and local, for he is confined, and hemmed in by an artificial society both of fashion and letters. We have dispensed with the hoop-petticoat, and pretty much with the heroic couplet. But he is true to what he saw and felt, or to his age, and is o far no libeller. Byron is still more local than Pope. He is almost individual. His variety is more in name than in thing. His writings seem to be the efforts of a very few agencies upon his own vast mind. A review of some of his poems, which by his own title of them, really belong to his infancy, was one, and probably the earliest of these. This review annoyed him dreadfully. He did not consider that he had strayed from his nobility into the republic of letters, and was ignorant that the constitution of this wide republic, guarantees to all its citizens the privilege of abusing, as well as praising each other. His nobility went in company with his genius, a legitimate association enough in his case, and they were equally annoyed by the reception they met. Disgust to the whole British empire soon followed, and the Curse of Minerva appeared a few years after English Bards and Scottish Reviewers. A still more personal annoyance at length drove his lordship from England forever, and then we had Don Juan, or, with other things, English manners, and English society, under the similitude of Eastern sensuality. As an author, and it is in this character Lord Byron now lives, his lordship is almost entirely exclusive. He has given us but We have spoken of authors who have been true to their own character, to their age, and to the world. There are other classes; we have room to speak of but one more. This class is peculiar to our own country. It has in a measure been made by the country, its institutions, and prospects, and deserves to be named. It belongs to us; and however little we have been allowed to appropriate of letters, we may safely claim this. If we should name it, we should call it the prophetic class of authors. This will serve to distinguish them at once from all writers within a reasonable antiquity, and will surely distinguish them from all the moderns. Our writers, whether imaginative or historical, are prophetic. They go habitually before the time. They live in the future of their own minds. They are with a population which cannot be numbered. The blessings of our institutions are upon all. A mass of intellectual power and physical strength occupies the distance, to a degree at times almost oppressive to us, who are comparatively few and powerless. Now there is no harm those which have been long proved, and found so, our posterity will be blessed without prophesy, THE LAY MONASTERY. No. I. The Author. Chorus ex Thyeste. I AM a wayfaring man in the literary world, and in humour and out of humour with its inhabitants, have come and gone from place to place, and as yet have left no memory behind me. I have always shunned ostentation, even in the vehicle that has carried me, and turning aside from the busier marts of literature, have loitered in its green alleys and silent avenues. To men in the higher walks of letters nature has made known the warm intellectual springs, whence issue those vast concep tions, that are too wide for the embrace of inferior minds-and we of bumbler birth are content to sit by their distant waters, he will find them there. If the world cen- From my youth up, my life has been a As the hand of time is continually chang ing the scenes of the world's vast theatre, I cannot help observing how grotesquely mingled in the romance of life are its tragic and comic acts. But to a solitary being like myself, departing years bring but little change. Time's gradual current steals peacefully away, the seasons of life slowly succeed each other, and day after day thought ripens and ripens to its maturity;-but still my pursuits and occupations are the same, and the same communion and fellowship and good feeling exist between myself and my books. It is very silly perhaps to prate now-a-days about the tranquil delight which books assume to him who is happy enough to love them, but I speak from the heart. If any man is sick and tired of the world, and would find those friends who are silent or garrulous, as he is melancholy or cheerful, let him retire to his library, and ter he kept himself close to his harbour. He is now a septuagenary,-a sprightly, hale old man; and though he feels the tide of life beating within him less vigorously day after day, yet having enjoyed the green and flourishing spring of life, and the lustihood of its summer, he sits quietly down in the cheerfulness of its autumn, like one that rejoices in the full fruits of early toil. When my uncle beheld my childish admiration for his venerable black-letter tome, he fondly thought that he beheld the germ of an antique genius already shooting out within my mind, and from that day I became with him as a favoured vine. Time has been long on the wing, and his affection for me grew in strength as I in years; until at length he has bequeathed to me the peculiar care of his library, which consists of a multitude of huge old volumes, and some ancient and modern manuscripts. The apartment which contains this treasure is the cloister of my frequent and studious musings. It is a curious little chamber, in a remote corner of the house, finished all round with painted pannelings, and boasting but one tali, narrow Venetian window, that lets in upon my studies a "dim, religious light," which is quite appropriate to them. When I was a boy, my earliest attention was excited by the brass clasps of an antiquated, worm-eaten tome, that an old uncle of mine, sadly given to antiquarian research, had left upon my mother's table. No sooner was the event of my birth, which forms an epoch in our family history, announced, than the kind-hearted old man came posting down from his country residence. He was a virtuoso in thought, word, and deed. He was a rusty old fellow, and, like one of his own coin, had the features of antiquity indelibly stamped upon him; and the gradual wastes of time, by rendering the relievo less distinct, placed the antiquity beyond a doubt. His countenance very much resembled that of Cosmo, on the medallions of the Medici; and though the severity of his eye indicated deep thought, yet there was something about the mouth that declared his subtle vein of shrewdness and grotesque humour. He was deeply versed in alchemy and oldschool chemistry, and very vain of his knowledge;-it I borrow a simile from his Every thing about the apartment is old pursuits, he thought that the halo of his and decaying. The table, of oak inlaid own glory was increasing like the circular with maple, is worm-eaten and somewhat corona of vapour that arose from a certain loose in the joints; the chairs are massive chemical combination of his, which, as it es- and curiously carved, but the sharper edges caped from his alembic, widened and widen- of the figures are breaking away; and the ed whilst ascending; but, unfortunately for solemn line of portraits, that cover the him, his fame, like that vapour, grew thin-walls, hang faded from black, melancholy ner and thinner, and at length lost itself in frames, and declare their intention of soon air. He was an inveterate old bachelor; leaving them forever. In a deep niche but kind-hearted and extremely benevo stands a heavy iron clock, that rings the lent; and charity, which was written upon hours with a hoarse and sullen voice; and his countenance, was written more deeply opposite, in a similar niche, is deposited a upon his heart. I have heard it whispere gloomy figure in antique bronze. A recess, in the family,—but very cautiously, for the curtained with a tapestry of faded green, has old man's feelings are sensitive upon the become the cemetery of departed genius, subject,-that, like sundry other good old and, gathered in the embrace of this little bachelors, he had been in his younger days sepulchre, the works of good and great men a chevalier d'amour; but shivering long in of ancient days are gradually mouldering the frowns of unrelenting beauty, he grew away to dust again. desperately cold towards the whole female sex,-as slighted woers sometimes will, and even in the heyday of life forgot "love's charming cares.' A few days ago, as I was turning over some neglected papers in his library, I found several desperate looking love verses, and a French Valentine on gilt-edged paper, with altars and torches in the corners, which go far to corroborate the oral tradition of his early love. This is indeed exactly what I should have expected from his sanguine temperament; and time never effaced every vestige of this gallant feeling; on great occasions he was apt to wear a highly ornamented broach of amber, containing in its centre a little animal that strikingly resembles a lady-bug; and sometimes figured in a brocade vest of faded damask, with large sprigs and roses. One serious love adventure of this kind was enough for him; he was lost on a sea of troubles in his first voyage, and ever af-own thoughts. My retirement to this solitary place arose from a love of seclusion, and was not, as retirement often is, a desperate after-game in the affairs of life. A strong attachment to a still and quiet existence has brought mne here;-and if I seem to have slighted the world too soon, I can urge in my own defence, that I am one of those, who may depart from society whenever they will, and none ask-Where are they? I would not forget the world, and would not be forgotten by it; but I would live in the hearts of men as well as in their memories, and leave that quiet recollection behind me, which mankind will cherish for its very gentleness. And yet, whilst, like a timid bark, I woo the breath of others to give me motion on fame's still waters, my chief joy is in seclusion and solitary musing; though I would live in part for others, yet I would not in so doing become a stranger to my Having been thus minute in delineating my own character, let me put on my masking-habit, and, as the Lay Monk, speak a few words to the reader in reference to my proposed writings. The severer studies which are proper to manhood, leave me sufficient leisure for that frequent reverie and rambling thought which are well suited to miscellaneous essays; and in all my papers I shall claim the customary privileges of essayists, and note down my loose thoughts without regularity or any certain order. In the choice of subjects for my speculations, I shall be guided by my own fancy; and that no one may accuse me of failing in what I have never attempted, I would be explicit in stating, that my aim is rather to amuse the courteous reader and help him pass away a tedious hour, than eloquently to instruct him by deep thought or high philosophy. THE LAY MONK. POETRY. SONG OF THE STARS. When the radiant morn of creation broke, And orbs of beauty, and spheres of flame, And this was the song the bright ones sung. Away, away, through the wide, wide sky, For the source of glory uncovers his face, Look, look, through our glittering ranks afar, How they brighten and bloom as they swiftly pass! And see, where the brighter day-beams pour, Away, away!-in our blossoming bowers, Glide on in the glory and gladness sent FAREWELL TO CASTLES IN THE AIR. O many an hour could I employ, When rose the storms of grief and care, I sought my Castles in the Air, For which the storm was given, A refuge sure in Heaven. B. Here Hope, though cheated o'er and o'er, And deemed, of all her various store, Such gift the best and surest. While Fancy strove, with magic glass, Still whispered Hope, though this may pass, Thus, in the fields of wild romance, But still, at every change and chance, I raised my eyes from all beneath, SUMMER MUSINGS. A. C. H. When a languor soft the sense invades, So life is passing, though pleasure's dream That aged beech-where I carved a name And I, when a few short summers are o'er, Shall muse in these lonely scenes no more;— Yet when I pass to eternity May virtue my strength and beauty be- INTELLIGENCE. SOUTHEY AND BYRON. S. H. The following is the conclusion of Mr Southey's late letter on Lord Byron. "It was because Lord Byron had brought a stigma upon English literature, that I accused him; because he had perverted great talents to the worst purposes; because he had set up for pander-general to the youth of Great Britain, as long as his writings O should endure; because he had committed a high crime and misdemeanor against society, by sending forth a work, in which mockery was mingled with horrors, filth with impiety, profligacy with sedition and slander. For these offences, I came forward to arraign him. The accusation was not made darkly; it was not insinuated; it was not advanced under the cover of a review. I attacked him openly in my own name, and only not by his, because he had not then publicly avowed the flagitious production, by which he will be remembered for lasting infamy. He replied in a manner altogether worthy of himself and his cause. Contention with a generous and honourable opponent leads naturally to esteem, and probably to friendship; but next to such an antagonist, an enemy like Lord Byron is to be desired; one who by his conduct in the contest, divests himself of every claim to respect; one whose baseness is such as to sanctify the vindictive feeling it provokes; and upon whom the act of taking vengeance is that of administering justice. I answered him as he deserved to be answered, and the effect which that answer produced upon his lordship, has been described by his faithful chronicler, Captain Medwin. This is the real history of what the purveyors of scandal for the public, are pleased sometimes to announce in their advertisements, as 'Byron's Controversy with Southey.' What there was dark or devilish in it belongs to his lordship; and had I been compelled to resume it during his life, he, who played the monster in literature, and aimed his blows at women, should have been treated accordingly. The republican trio,' says Lord Byron, when they began to publish in common, were to have had a community of all things, like the ancient Britons-to have lived in a state of nature, like savages-and peopled some island of the blest, with children in common, like A Here I dismiss the subject. It might have been thought that Lord Byron had attained the last degree of disgrace, when his head was set up for a sign at one of those preparatory schools for the brothel and the gallows, where obscenity, sedition, and blasphemy are retailed in drams for the vulgar. There remained one further shame there remained this exposure of his private conversations, which has compelled his lordship's friends, in their own defence, to compare his oral declarations with his written words, and thereby demonstrate that he was as regardless of truth as he was incapable of sustaining those feelings suited to his birth, station, and high endowments, which sometimes came across his better mind. John Quin; seven hanks of yarn, the property of the widow Scott; and one petticoat and one apron, the property of the widow Gallagher, seized under and by virtue of a levying warrant, for tithe due to the Rev. John Usher. Dated this 12th day of May, 1824." CONTINUATION of laplace's MECANIQUE CELESTE. very pretty Arcadian nation!' I may be domes; the magnificent Wladimir, the luxuexcused for wishing that Lord Byron had rious Bojars, the valiant heroes, and the published this himself; but though he is re- bards of those times. The subject of the sponsible for the atrocious falsehood, he is poem, in six cantos, is the carrying off of not for its posthumous publication. I shall the princess Ljudmilla by the magician only observe, therefore, that the slander is Tschernomor, and her deliverance to her as worthy of his lordship as the scheme it- husband Russlau, a valiant knight. The self would have been. Nor would I have plan is adinirable, the execution masterly, condescended to notice it even thus, were and, notwithstanding the numerous characit not to show how little this calumniator ters introduced, and the episodes and events knew concerning the objects of his uneasy which cross each other, the narrative is and restless hatred. Mr Wordsworth and I rapid, the characters well drawn, the deThose who have read the Mécanique were strangers to each other, even by name, scriptions animated, and the language ex- Céleste, are aware, that upwards of twenwhen he represents us as engaged in a sa- cellent. Russlau was soon succeeded by ty years ago M. Laplace promised to tertanic confederacy, and we never published" Kaw Koskoi Plennik," a smaller, though minate this great work by an exposé of the any thing in common. not less excellent, poein; which describes labours of geometers on the system of the the rude manners of the banditti of Cauca- world, and by assigning to each the share sus, their mode of life, and the peculiarity which he had contributed towards elucidatof the country and its inhabitants, in the ing its wonderful mechanism. The faithmost lively colours. This poem is gener-ful execution of this task would have im. ally known to the German public, through posed on the illustrious author of the Méa masterly translation by M. Wulfert, canique Céleste, the necessity of making which is inferior to the original only in very ample acknowledgments to Lagrange, the inimitable melody of the Russian lan- and it would almost appear that some reguage. pugnance arising out of this conviction had retarded the completion of this part of his labours. The name of Laplace occurs only once in the second edition of the Mécanique Analytique, a circumstance which seems to intimate, that Lagrange had felt some displeasure at the unacknowledged appropriation of his investigations and discoveries. M. Laplace is, however, at length slowly redeeming his pledge in the fifth volume of his work, which is in a course of publication. The thirteenth Book, which has recently appeared, treats on one of the most difficult problems in physical astronomy, that of the oscillations of the fluids which cover the planets. The first chapter contains a rapid sketch of the principal views and discoveries of geometers, on the theory of the tides, from Newton to Laplace. No branch of the history of science presents more interest, than this view of the progress of mathematical analysis in one of the greatest questions of natural philosophy. It is the peculiar privilege of the inventors of the principal theories to show their origin, their difficulties, and their most important features. The ancient geometry has transmitted to us nothing more exact and beautiful than the few words by which Archimedes has prefaced his works. ROBERT SOUTHEY." RUSSIAN POETRY. Puschkin's new poem, "The Fountain of Baktschissarai," is in many respects superior to his former productions. The subject is very simple: Ġhiräj, Khan of the Crimea, in one of his predatory excursions, takes prisoner a Polish princess, Maria. She is in his harem; the charms of the beautiful christian make a deep impression upon the heart of the rude monarch. He forsakes his former favourite, Sarema, a passionate Georgian; she knows indeed that Maria persists in rejecting his love, but, tormented by jealousy, she murders her innocent rival. Ghiraj, inconsolable, sentences the Georgian to death; and dedicates to the memory of Maria, in a solitary part of his garden, a fountain, the cold drops of which, falling, even to this day, into the marble bason, remind feeling hearts of Maria's innocence and Ghiräj's grief, and the young girls in the neighbourhood still call it the fountain of tears! IRELAND. The young poet Puschkin, has completed a new production, which, though of no great extent, surpasses, in the unanimous opinion of the critics, all his former productions. The title is, "The Fountain of Baktschissarai ;" and Mr Ponamarew, a bookseller of Moscow, has given him three thousand roubles for the copy-right. The poem contains about six hundred lines, so that five roubles per line have been paid for it, a thing quite unheard of in Russia. Puschkin is a literary phenomenon, endowed by nature with all the qualifications of an excellent poet; he has begun his career in a It appears, by a late census of the popu. manner in which many would be happy to lation of Ireland, that the number of males conclude. In his thirteenth year, when he is 3,341,926-of females 3,459,901. Those was still a pupil in the Lyceum at Zarskoe- employed in agriculture are 1,138,069,Selo, he composed his first distinguished in trades, manufactures, or handicraft, poem, "Wospominanie O Zarskom Selo," 1,170,044. Dublin is supposed to contain Remembrances of Zarskoe-Selo; this piece 227,335. The state of the whole country was, perhaps, too loudly and generally ad- is represented as very precarious. There mired; the boy aimed henceforward only at are now public theological disputations, in the Muses' wreath, and neglected the more which the zeal on each side is quite equal serious studies which are essential to the to the christianity displayed. No doubt, if poet. However, up to this time, when he each party could for a season enjoy the is about twenty-five years of age, he has pure, unmixed ascendancy of the primitive composed, besides a number of charming times, neither would want a fine crop of little pieces, which have been received with martyrs. The following document is an great approbation by the literary journals, amusing instance of real distress; and in- A late visitor at St Helena, says, that the three more considerable poems, which are dicates pretty well the degree of probabili-house inhabited by Napoleon in that island real ornaments of the Russian Parnassus; ty which exists for an amelioration in the is now converted into a barn, and that there and what is a particular merit in these days state of feeling upon the subject of re- is actually a threshing machine in the chamof translation, they are quite original. ligion. ber in which he breathed his last! Surely this residence, so much vaunted by Lowe and Co., could not have been very valuable, if it is thus considered fit only for such "vile uses." What a tell-tale time is! The first of them is "Russlau and Ljudmilla," which carries us back into the ancient days of chivalry and fable in Russia, and places before us Kiow, with its gilded "To be sold by public cant, in the town ENGLISH BOOKS. The number of works published, during the month of December, in Great Britain, was sixty-three. The number of distinct volumes, eighty-one. LONGWOOD. The Darien (Geo.) Gazette gives the following account of some specimens of the POETICAL WORKS OF WILLIAM ingenuity and industry of the beaver, which are in the possession of the editor. WORDSWORTH. JUST PUBLISHED, BY CUMMINGS, HILLIARD, & Co., and for sale at their Bookstore, No. 1, Cornhill, Elements of Astronomy, illustrated with JUST published, the Poetical Works of Plates, for the use of Schools and Acade"Roswell King, jr. Esq. has politely sent William Wordsworth, complete in four mies, with questions. By John H. Wil us a few specimens of the beaver's ingenuity, perseverance, and wonderful powers of architecture. These specimens consist in several logs of hard wood, cut by the beaver for the construction of a house: one of these logs measures two feet in length, girts sixteen inches, and weighs fourteen pounds; this was one of the side logs of the house; another of the same girt, is half the length of the former, and was one of the end logs of the building; the others are smaller, and were used as rafters. It is evident from the marks at the ends of them, that they have all been cut through with the teeth; and cut in a manner so as to lock, when laid upon each other, the same as logs formed by human industry for the construction of loghouses, so often met with in this state. But where these animals found strength, or how they raised purchase to lift the logs, is a question that we cannot solve. The house being two stories high, each story being eighteen inches, must have cost no little labour to the architects in placing these heavy logs one upon the other. The logs may be seen at this office." PERKINS' STEAM ENGINE. The New York Daily Advertiser contains a short description of a steam-boat, constructed by Mr Perkins, to exhibit the powers of his engine. This description was furnished by a gentleman, lately arrived from England, who was a witness of the first experiment early in November last. Its form is long and narrow, to accommodate it to the Regent's Canal, where it is kept and frequently worked for exhibition. It is seventy-one feet in length, seven feet in breadth, and carries twenty-two tons; it has an iron paddle at the stern, seven feet in diameter, with wings eighteen inches broad at the ends; the generator contains three gallons of water, and the furnace half a bushel of coal; the heat is usually raised in fifteen minutes; the piston has thirteen inches stroke, and the whole engine occupies only one-fifth of the space of one of Watt and Bolton's, and weighs only one-fifth as much. With the temperature raised to only one half the proper number of atmospheres, it moved at the rate of six miles an hour. All publishers of books throughout the United States, are very earnestly requested to forward to us, regularly and seasonably, the names of all works of every kind, preparing for publication, in the press, or recently published. As they will be inserted in the Gazette, it is particularly desired that the exact titles be stated at length. **The proprietors of Newspapers, for which this Gazette is exchanged, and of which the price is less than that of the Gazette, are expected to pay the differC. H. & Co. ence. volumes. This edition is beautifully and correctly printed, and afforded at less than half the price of the London copy. kins, A. M. Third Edition. RECOMMENDATIOMS. Dear Sir, I HAVE examined your treatise on astronomy, and I think that subject is better explained, and that more matter is contained in this, than any other book of the kind, with which I am acquainted; I therefore cheerfully recommend it to the patronage of the public. With respect, sir, your obe dient servant, WARREN COLBURN. Extract from the North American Review. "THE great distinction and glory of Wordsworth's Poetry is the intimate converse which it holds with nature. He sees her face to face; he is her friend, her confidential counsellor, her high priest; and he comes from her inmost temple to reveal to us her mysteries, and unravel those secret influences which he had always felt, but hardly understood. It is not merely that he admires her beauties with enthusiasm, and describes them with the nicest Wilkins' Elements of Astronomy, by accuracy, but he gives them voice, lan- presenting in a concise, but perspicuous and guage, passion, power, sympathy; he causes familiar manner, the descriptive and physithem to live, breathe, feel. We acknowl-cal branches of the science, and rejecting edge that even this has been done by gifted what is merely mechanical, exhibits to the bards before him; but never so thoroughly student all that is most valuable and interas by him; they lifted up corners of the esting to the youthful mind in this sublime veil, and he has drawn it aside; he has department of human knowledge. established new relationships, and detected hitherto unexplored affinities, and made the connexion still closer than ever between this goodly universe and the heart of man. Every person of susceptibility has been affected with more or less distinctness, by the various forms of natural beauty, and the associations and remembrances connected with them by the progress of a storm, the expanse of ocean, the gladness of a sunny field, WALTER R. JOHNSON, Principal of the Academy, Germantown. Germantown, (Penn.) 5th June, 1823. Having examined the work above described, I unite in opinion with Walter R. Johnson concerning its merits. ROBERTS VAUX. The silence that is in the starry sky, Having been partially engaged in giving The sleep that is among the lonely hills. instruction to youth, for the last fifteen Wordsworth has taught these sentiments years, it has been necessary for me to exand impulses a language, and has given amine all the treatises on education which them a law and a rule. Our intercourse came within my reach. Among other treawith nature becomes permanent; we ac- tises examined, there have been several on quire a habit of transferring human feel- astronomy. Of these, the "Elements of Asings to the growth of earth, the elements, tronomy, by John H. Wilkins, A. M.," rethe lights of heaven, and a capacity of re-cently published by you, is, in my opinion, ceiving rich modifications and improve- decidedly the best. I have accordingly inments of those feelings in return. We are troduced it into my Seminary, and find it convinced that there is more mind, more well calculated to answer its intended pursoul about us, wherever we look, and wher- pose, by plain illustrations to lead young ever we move; and there is-for we have persons to a knowledge of that most interestimparted both to the material world; there ing science. J. L. BLAKE, is no longer any dullness or death in our habitation; but a sweet music, and an in- Principal of Lit. Sem. for Young Ladies. Boston, Jan. 5, 1825. ENGLISH TEACHER AND EXER- CUMMINGS, HILLIARD, & Co. No. 134 Wash- For sale by Cummings, Hilliard, & Co. |