nicate their meditations: perhaps they cannot; they have not meditated by rule, and according to form; but they have contracted the habit of descending to the depths of their own hearts with perfect uprightness. They have not been turned from the study of themselves, by the distractions of vanity, and by the tumult of the world. They have learned much in a short time, under the teaching of the great instructor of men. They have learned enough to know excellence, and to love it.

SELF DEVOTION

To solitary studies accounted for.

AND wherefore does the student trim his lamp,
And watch his lonely taper, when the stars
Are holding their high festival in heav'n,
And worshipping around the midnight throne?
And wherefore does he spend so patiently,

In deep and voiceless thought, the blooming hours
Of youth and joyance, when the blood is warm,
And the heart full of buoyancy and fire?

The sun is on the waters, and the air
Breathes with a stirring energy; the plants
Expand their leaves, and swell their buds and blow,
Wooing the eye, and stealing on the soul
With perfume and with beauty. Life awakes;
Its wings are waving, and its fins at play
Glancing from out the streamlets, and the voice
Of love and joy is warbled in the grove;
And children sport upon the springing turf,
With shouts of innocent glee, and youth is fir'd
With a diviner passion, and the eye

Speaks deeper meaning, and the cheek is fill'd,
At every tender motion of the heart,

With purer flushings; for the boundless power,
That rules all living creatures, now has sway;
In man refin'd to holiness, a flame,
That purifies the heart it feeds upon:
And yet the searching spirit will not blend
With this rejoicing, these attractive charms
Of the glad season; but, at wisdom's shrine,

Will draw pure draughts from her unfathom'd well,
And nurse the never-dying lamp, that burns
Brighter and brighter on, as ages roll.

He has his pleasures-he has his reward:
For there is in the company of books;
The living souls of the departed sage,
And bard, and hero; there is in the roll
Of eloquence and history, which speak
The deeds of early and of better days;
In these, and in the visions, that arise
Sublime in midnight musings, and array
Conceptions of the mighty and the good,
There is an elevating influence,

That snatches us awhile from earth, and lifts
The spirit in its strong aspirings, where
Superior beings fill the court of heaven.
And thus his fancy wanders, and has talk
With high imaginings, and pictures out
Communion with the worthies of old time:
And then he listens in his passionate dreams,
To voices in the silent gloom of night,
As of the blind Mæonian, when he struck
Wonder from out his harp-strings, and roll'd on,
From rhapsody to rhapsody, deep sounds,
That imitate the ocean's boundless roar;
Or tones of horror, which the drama spake,
Reverberated through the hollow mask,

Like sounds, which rend the sepulchres of kings,
And tell of deeds of darkness, which the grave
Would burst its marble portals to reveal;
Or his, who latest in the holy cause
Of freedom, lifted to the heavens his voice,
Commanding, and beseeching, and with all
The fervor of his spirit pour'd abroad,
Urging the sluggish souls of self-made slaves
To emulate their fathers, and be free;
Or those, which in the still and solemn shades
Of Academus, from the wooing tongue
Of Plato, charmed the youth, the man, the
Discoursing of the perfect and the pure,
The beautiful and holy, till the sound,
That play'd around his eloquent lips, became
The honey of persuasion, and was heard,

sage,

As oracles amid Dodona's groves.

With eye upturn'd watching the many stars,
And ear in deep attention fix'd, he sits,
Communing with himself, and with the world,
The universe around him, and with all
The beings of his memory, and his hopes;
Till past becomes reality, and joys,
That beckon in the future, nearer draw,
And ask fruition. O! there is a pure,

A hallow'd feeling in these midnight dreams;

They have the light of heaven around them, breathe
The odour of its sanctity, and are

Those moments taken from the sands of life,
Where guilt makes no intrusion, but they bloom,
Like islands flow'ring on Arabia's wild.
And there is pleasure in the utterance
Of pleasant images in pleasant words,
Melting like melody into the ear,
And stealing on in one continual flow,
Unruffled and unbroken. It is joy
Ineffable, to dwell upon the lines,
That register our feelings, and portray,
In colors always fresh and ever new,
Emotions, that were sanctified, and lov'd,
As something far too tender and too pure,
For forms so frail and fading. I have sat,
In days, when sensibility was young,
And the heart beat responsive to the sight,
The touch, and music of the lovely one;
Yes, I have sat, entranc'd, enraptur'd, till
The spirit would have utterance, and words
Flow'd full of hope, and love, and melody,
The gushings of an overburden'd heart-
Drunk with enchantment, bursting freely forth,
Like fountains in the early days of spring.

MAN'S NOBLER ATTRIButes.

IN exact proportion as the brutal parts of our nature are enthralled by the nobler attributes of humanity, we are dissatisfied with the littleness and worthlessness of all things about us, and, refusing to regard the objects of this life, as an

adequate end to our endeavors, or the pleasure this world offers, as enough, we lift ourselves in imagination and in hope to heaven. There are moments in the life of most men, when there is a feeling, as if darkness and chains had broken away; when the affections are pure and peaceful, and the thoughts are ranging free and high; when the existence, the love, and the presence of God are borne in upon our souls, with a power, that will not be withstood, and the heart is swelling, as if it would open to receive the whole influence of the Deity. We may well believe it is at such times, that man is most like to that which his spirit may be; and how idle would it seem to him, or rather what a loathing horror would it excite to tell him then, that his mind could not wander beyond the grave, and must rest satisfied with the belief, that they, whom he had loved and lost, were spiritual essences, without form or substance, which his hands might as well lay hold of, as his imagination or his faith attempt to approach. Every thing in his heart and in his mind would rise up to refute the falsehood; there would be a voice within him too loud and too distinct to be misunderstood or disregarded, and it would tell him, that the world of spirits is not an unimaginable abyss of nothingness, but the home of sentient, active beings, as conscious of individuality, and as full of thought and of affection, as they were before they went from time into eternity.

The doctrines of a future state are not to be proved by logical deductions from the truths our senses teach. It was well said by the author of the 'Light of Nature,' that not one in a hundred was ever satisfied with the arguments brought to prove the existence of God and another life, unless he was convinced, that these propositions were true, before he began to reason about them; because they, whose hearts and intellects are shrouded in a darkness, which is not penetrated by the higher proof to be derived from the direct perception of these first truths-from the intuition of the soul-can scarcely be enlightened by the feebler ray of reason. knowledge and all belief rests, of course, upon intuition, as its first and necessary foundation; but is it therefore true, that the belief of spiritual truths must be referred to sensual perceptions, as its only primary source? There is an intuition of the soul, as of the eye. Man does not believe in his Maker, because he can institute a train of reasoning, a series of exact and logical inferences, and then feel his mird per

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suaded by his own arguments; but because he sees him;— 'sees him in clouds, and hears him in the wind;' and though argument and inference may afterwards sustain and confirm him in this belief, it could scarcely have originated from them, for it is only to those who already believe and feel, that there is a God, that his power and love are borne upon every sunbeam, and uttered in the breathing of every wind.

It is scarcely too much to say, that human reasoning can do no more to prove the reality of the sanctions of a future state, than is done in Butler's Analogy; yet all that is done there is to show, that the probability of this truth is sufficiently strong to warrant our acting upon it. Reasoning, mere argument, can do no more; but is there not in the heart of every man, who has any religion, a deep conviction, that far more than this is true? When infidelity denies the infinite and eternal attributes of God, and urges, that the power, and wisdom, and love manifested in the universe prove the existence and operation of a cause adequate to the effects that appear; that is, of a God, if we please to say so, clothed with enough of divine attributes to make the world as it is, but that they do not prove, that there is one with sufficient love, or wisdom, or power, to make the world better than it is, it is not reason, but something higher than reason, it is not the head, but the heart that replies, for all the sin and suffering, the weakness and the wretchedness of man, and for all the disorder and desolation, which man has inflicted like a curse upon the world, we know that he who made it is love and wisdom.

We know then that God is illimitable, and that we live again, not because we can go back logically from effects through causes to a first cause, and not because we can gather from a world of senseless change, where every change of every thing is but a step towards decay and dissolution, proof of a coming state, which shall be eternal and absolute, but because, whenever earthly feelings do not so close around us, as to shut out every glimpse of heaven, we can see and feel, that there is a power somewhere, which can be limited and controlled by no other power, and that, while our bodies perish, the life that is in us dieth not. This is the highest proof of the highest truth; but this evidence asserts with as much force the character and condition of the eternal world, as its existence. We are driven by the necessity of our nature, to give a form and an individual existence to every thing,