islands for a day, and which we have attempted without exaggeration to describe, disposes the angler to seek, with a deep consciousness of an overruling BENIGNANT POWER, his rural retreat for the night; and having exhibited to his comrade the result of his skill, he selects a few of the fatest bass for his stomach's sake. Having repaired the wants of the inner man, he slumbers on a bed of feathers or hemlock leaves, at his discretion, and sleeps a lord, until the morning sun summons him to another day's renewal of delight:

This is the region that the angler of the present day contemplates with unmixt satisfaction; and if the imaginative principle is active within him he may dwell even with rapture on the perspective which the future may throw around it, when upon several of these numberless isles will doubtless arise villas of simple beauty dedicated to a pastime which time will have more fully developed and ennobled, and where the professional man, the man of the world, the poet, the philosopher and the statesman may find not only a charming release from the entanglements and trammels of life, but a deepening interest in the tie that binds them to Nature. And who knows but at this congress of sages and wits, plans may be devised, principles evolved, and action resolved upon, that may startle the (then) entire continent?

The angler who may then desire to dine on a foreign soil, must cross the ocean to do it. VICTORIA will then be in her grave, and perhaps her country.

How spontaneous is our liking for the man who regularly makes a pilgrimage to these pastoral shrines! Should the cares of home or business press heavily, he does not, like your untravelled, unmountained worldling, become surly, snubby and churlish, for he has been accustomed to forsake his bill-book and ledger for a time, and say to his family: Now I am going to another sphere, where I may see moving objects without tongues, and eloquence without passion; I go to interrogate our dear mother and ally, Nature.' His pulse soon begins to beat quicker and stronger; his cheek assumes a more ruddy hue, his muscles expand, and his vision enlarges to the full orbit of humanity. He reaches an elevation where nothing speaks to him of animated life, except perchance some butterfly borne unduly by the breeze from its parent bed of flowers. And here he has audience with himself; and in this temple where the tormenting passions are dumb he marvels and wonders why his fellow men are so indifferent and dead to Nature's appeals; why it is that communing with her is considered no boon; why that her rugged riches have no temptations, her sleeping beauties no suitors, her torrents so few delineators, her massive everlasting pyramids no votaries, and no sculptor to chisel his way to fame among her interminable quarries?

Such questions, however pertinent, as they enter one ear of the world go out at the other, and no response goes up to the mountain and the

lake better than this: No time, Sir, for such things; I am a married man; have duties to perform thicker than blackberries and longer than rope-walks; have a neighbor who is a little better off than I, and am sore afraid he will be more so if I relax my efforts.'

This we imagine, though put in homely phrase, embodies the truth, and nothing but the truth; and so long as this continues to be the taught gospel of our day, so long will it be necessary to preach another. These are the sentiments that make the study of the professional man a damp rayless cloister, the counting-room a fashionable hospital, and the shop an embroidered hearse; active agents all in repelling whatever favors a manly exercise.

That old, very respectable, but man-killing maxim, 'Time is money,' is too narrowly interpreted. Time is every thing; employment, sensation, pastime, prose, poetry; and he best redeems it who crowds most into it.

The pulpit sends forth without stint its denunciatory voice against undue worldliness, wealth, extravagance and ambition, but the number of their votaries diminishes not. It seems necessary to hold up to men's minds, apart from Holy Writ, something that may outsparkle the gilded lucre that so exclusively controls the energies of our times.

When the Evil One wished to tempt the SAVIOUR, he led him up into the wilderness. Cannot the preacher dwell with effect at frequent intervals on the refreshing, exalting influences locked up in nature's love? Can he not gently remove the bars that press so heavily on many an imprisoned heart, and invite it out to exercise in the propitious redeeming sunlight of bountiful nature? Some of our divines, as well as their hearers, are so transcendental that they would take us clean off the earth; and if they do not consign us to a vacuum, they keep us so long uncomfortably suspended, that our sensations bear a near resemblance to those of the unsuspecting boy who is promised a sight of London if he will consent to be lifted up by the ears.

There is, we imagine, no fear of making the world too spiritual; but those who are so singularly fortunate as to believe that they have received without measure of this heavenly afflatus, are very apt to use language that freezes hope and darkens knowledge; and so far as we have observed, they neither live nor act better than other folks. We may be perhaps too fastidious in these matters, or too utilitarian; but we are inclined to think that we ripen as fast in sunlight as in moonlight. The material part of our nature is not sufficiently addressed; it is under-fed. The spiritual is over-fed. Instead of fusing the material and spiritual together, thereby promoting a good average for the conduct of life, the clergy for the most part seem mainly anxious to draw off all the material into the spiritual; an attempt quite as likely to be successful as emptying one ocean into another. The antagonistic attitudes thus impelled and established between the two keeps up a sort of 'border warfare,' neither allaying asperities nor bettering the heart, and in which both soul and body are often sacrificed. Every department of nature should furnish texts, and be pioneers or messengers of life-giving truth, carrying the preacher's doctrine home to the heart, and tending to promote as far as possible a union of the visible and

invisible in indissoluble matrimony. This magnificent dowry, the outward world, was bestowed for all time and all people, and it becomes the noble heart, the gifted pencil and the eloquent tongue to recommend and illustrate its manifold and benignant uses.

We are aware that we have stepped upon ground that does not legitimately belong to us; but anglers are accustomed to exercise the largest liberty and to throw their fly with peculiar zest into waters the most unfrequented. We have frequently advocated the propriety of appropriating certain portions of the year to healthful pastimes and manly sports, deeming their indulgence highly conducive to our temporal well-being. Neither pennies nor dollars may be saved thereby, but there will be great gain realized in a series of years, visible in an improved animal frame, a mind freer and more forcible, an imagination readier to receive and transmit, a fancy more vivid and truthful, and a heart enlarged to the full circle of human cares and caresses.

To one not regardless of the physical aspect of the rising generation. it is evident that there is much defective training, or a culpable omission of any. If the Human were as well nurtured and watched as the State Constitution, we should have more sound minds in sound bodies. There are few more sorry sights, and they occur at every turn, than the attenuated form and dropping-away aspect of the ambitious scholar, who, abjuring all manly exercises, hovers like a miller over the midnight lamp, and, like that insect, heedlessly and prematurely perishes in its blaze. As he would wear no armor, Fate was sure to hit him.

The Olympic games were instituted to help both soul and body; the American, to distract the one and weaken the other. Those who can do a world of good, thinking and writing on a small physical capital, are few and far between. Children of our day are either pampered or pinched; the larger part we believe are permitted to select their own schools and teachers, and inclined to frown on any thing that looks like subjection; the idea of being consigned to any specific system of training, either physical or mental, is as unwelcome as the sting of a wasp. The gentler sex, especially of the rich, too often bear about them the marks of premature decay. Survey the clustering groups at any of our summer resorts, and those of a sound body and healthful air peer up and are as unmistakeably prominent as a fresh-descended Juno would be.

This disregard to physical training is almost exclusively a parental affair. The delinquencies of parents in this respect stand out in monstrously bold and killing relief; daughters especially find out before long that their constitutions are broken and their life-inheritance jeopardized; and most of them inclined to do little else than consult doctors, nourish a passion for fine furniture, rich personal adornings and eyecatching jewels, repose nowhere to their mind but on satin embossed chairs, or sleep-inspiring couches, tolerate no books less exciting than French novels, and even find fault with the breath of heaven if it is not charged with cologne. If such are to be the future mothers of our race, the race may ere long call in vain for fathers.

There are few more sublime spectacles on this earth than the matron

who, amidst the dust and din, the asperities and impertinences, the cares and caresses that more or less centre in every home, exhibits an activity neither forced nor unnatural, a composure neither assumed nor insulting, and a dignity so easy and unconstrained that she seems like a living gospel of charity and peace; but we fear that the customs and habits of our times are peculiarly unfriendly to their increase.

Society, as now constructed, with its captivating, consuming refinements, hardly permits a young lady to survive the period of blossoming:

'A VIOLET in the youth of primy nature,
Forward, not permanent; sweet, not lasting,
The perfume and suppliance of a minute.'

If the probationary period allotted to man is three score years and ten, why is it that the monuments of the early dead' in our cemeteries form so large a majority? This fact is invested with a double significance by commemorating what death has done, and what parental ignorance or neglect has unconsciously aided in doing. The times require a great physical reformer; one combining in his person the captivating qualities of an Apollo, and in his heart the ardor and eloquence of a Paul.

Muscle must be more considered and developed in connexion with mind, else the latter, which is a sharp, sensitive blade, may eat through its scabbard, and be turned on itself.

Our sensibilities and our censures are sadly taxed in daily viewing the conflicts and struggles of the aspiring mind with the young but enfeebled body:

'CUT is the branch that might have grown full straight,

And burned is APOLLO's laurel bough.'

It is somewhat surprising how few are the professional gentlemen that have crossed our piscatorial path. Among the clergy only two stand out on memory's record possessing the needful courage to make the wilderness a place of mirthful joy, and at the same time exhibiting a Peter-like zeal in the cause of conversion, and a martyr's devotion to the line of duty, run where it may. We have occasionally met lawyers who had temporarily relinquished the brief for Walton's breviary, bestowing gracefully their patronage on cold-water sports; but for the most part they instinctively incline to intimacies with those who live near and in hot water. They are a decidedly domestic biped, and mainly anxious for good fees and fat feed. Among the doctors we can recall but two who appeared to have taken the pledge,' and both possessing a just appreciation of the claims of Nature and of man. It is, after all, the merchant who pulls a plum out of every thing, and redeems the time, being literally minister, lawyer and doctor, and who does more by his unpatronizing, incidental communings with the hardworking, uncomplaining or complaining inmates of the log-house, in communicating intelligence and inculcating contentment, than a regiment of missionaries, specially armed and equipped to teach and reprove!

Statesmen sometimes bend to the rod, but more frequently under it. We apprehend that they are more inclined to court the ocean shore than the inland lake; a fitter emblem perhaps of the surge-like life to

which they are ordained. We confess no peculiar partiality for saltwater sports, for our suspicions never slumber or cease to torment with 'fear of coming change; but he who is fond of a long pull, and a strong pull, and unmindful of skinless fingers, may find excitement enough and to spare in taking the yanking, hauling, jumping 'blue fish.'

Even that illustrious man, the 'Great Expounder,' marvelled when he saw how those sea Satans were wooed and won by our tempting 'spoon victuals.'

Fancy for a moment the gladdening effect of the angler's return to his home. Joyful notes herald his approach, and ready arms cradle and embrace him at the threshold; young eyes look up to him as a nut to be cracked; faces radiant as the sun thicken about him, wishing that time would move with redoubled speed evening-ward, when the gates of his memory are to be unlocked, and the narrative to gush forth, fertilizing the fancies of the young and regaling the declining senses of the old! And while the dear delighted ones are hanging with enraptured ear on what comes fresh and spontaneous from the heart, he escapes for a while from the otherwise broad but now too-confining path of prose, and with a sweet compelling eloquence challenges afresh their admiration by rehearsing from some favorite poet 'thoughts that breathe and words that burn:'

'CALM-BOUND is the form of the water-bird there,
And the spear of the rush stands erect in the air,
And the dragon-fly roams in the lily bud gay,
Where walk the bold pike in the sun-smitten bay.

"O waken, winds! waken wherever asleep,
In the cloud, in the mountain, or down in the deep;
For the angler is watching beside the green springs
For the low welcome sound of your wandering wings.'

"Owaken, winds, waken! the waters are still,
And in silence the sun-light reclines on the hill,
While the angler is watching beside the green springs
For the low welcome sound of your wandering wings.

"His rod lies beside him, his tackle unfreed,
And his withe-covered pannier is flung on the mead,
As he looks on the lake through the fane of green trees,
And sighs for the curl of the soft southern breeze.'

Those who are sick of doing, acting, or even hoping, and those too of bruised hopes and stained lives, may discover, if they choose, that Nature distils the most precious remedies; and those who partake most largely of them will be soonest cured or relieved.

To all who are competing for the world's honors, and overlaid with accomplishments, and conceits to match, we would urge them to climb the everlasting mountains and witness the dawn of a single day, on

which so many eyes will open and close for the first and last time; reäscend

them at set of sun, and suppress, if ye can, the mingled emotions which the scene inspires! Here you seem to stand above and beyond the life you have lived, and with perceptions clarified and enlarged, the map of your past existence becomes vivid and luminous, errors stand revealed in forms not to be mistaken, and good works loom up as light-houses against the sky.

If from such a spot, where the feeling of your own insignificance im