TO OUR READERS.

WE beg leave, kind reader, to present to you this, our first number, with the familiar nod of old acquaintanceship, rather than the formal and distant bow. Regarding our Magazine, there is need of saying but little. The history of its success through nearly nine years, is well known to you—the past speaks for itself, the future depends upon our exertions. This truth the experience of the last month has fully proved. To use the figure employed on occasions like this, our good ship" we found well anchored and sea-worthy; but a dead calm prevailing, when the tardy breeze came at length, inexperienced hands made some delay in getting her under sail. This accomplished, we have no doubt of a pleasant and prosperous cruise.

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But leaving for the present, any further attempts at rhetorical address, we simply ask, Fellow Students, the

same kind wishes and assistance which have been bestowed in time past. With the undoubting hope that this reasonable request will be fulfilled, we enter most cheerfully upon the toilsome responsibilities of our of fice; at the same time, taking this opportunity to return our acknowledgments for the honorable trust which you have seen fit to place in our hands.

We remain, Classmates and

Fellow students,

Respectfully,

YOUR EDITORS.

YALE COLLEGE, JUNE 26, 1844

THE American people are far from being disciples of that ancient philosophy which associated the beautiful with the good. Quite in contrast are these bustling and practical times with the age of Pericles, when Beauty ruled in Athens. If we now and then do homage to the superior taste of the old Republic, by bringing from among its shattered, yet noble ruins, some faultless model of architectural elegance, the spirit of our political economy prompts us to daub its fair proportions with untempered mortar, and adorn them with flimsy ornaments of stucco. The great national maxim, of practical, tangible utility, obscuring our nobler perceptions of the spiritual and the beautiful, has fixed our eyes too constantly upon the dust beneath us, where, like the man in "Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress," we grope and rake about, for the useful and the good.' With very many, beauty is considered a worthless commodity, and the culture of good taste, since it produces no marketable fruits, as the peculiar occupation of the idle and effeminate, if not quite contrary to good morals. They seem to believe that the lessons of perfect taste and beauty, with which the garden of Paradise was fraught to its first inhabitants, were not designed by the great Teacher for the race, it being only left for them after the fall literally to fulfill the curse. Perhaps the peculiarities of our political condition may have something to do with these prejudices. It ill suits the ultra spirit of democracy to cherish those refining and elevating influences, which surrounded the original perfection of our being. Its restless and envious disciples would rather blacken the faces of all, than that any dissimilitude should exist in the moral or physical likenesses of the "dear people." Then, again, though we would speak it reverently, the stern and simple faith of our puritan ancestry hardly recognized, in its hatred of a formal church and a kingly court, the doctrine of external beauty, or the alliance of Taste with Religion. The shaven crowns and buff surtouts of Cromwell's court, marked their

dislike of worldly display, and to escape the tainted air of lofty cathedrals, they sought, in this dreary wilderness,

"A Church without a Bishop, and a State without a King."

This peculiar hostility towards every form and symptom of prelacy and royalty, which persecution cherished in the hearts of our ancestors, seems yet to live in the warfare which many among us continue against all the beauties of art, as if they were tainted with some influence of the evil one; as though, since the Devil has in his wisdom found access to the hearts of men through those arts which delight the eye and please the ear, to him only must belong the architecture, the music, and the painting!

What is Taste? Let mental philosophers attempt to define, in their set phrase, its varied and delicate emotions. Such an analysis comes neither within our wishes nor ability.

The view of a beautiful scene once awakened in a highly gifted mind, a strain like this:

"It was the night-and Lara's glassy stream

The stars are studding, each with imaged beam;

So calm, the waters scarcely seem to stray,
And yet they glide like happiness away;
Reflecting far and fairy-like from high
The immortal lights that live along the sky:
All was so still, so soft, in earth and air,
You scarce would start to see a spirit there,
Secure that naught of evil could delight
To walk in such a scene on such a night!
It was a moment only for the good."

Who can read this without emotions kindred to those which gave it birth? These emotions constitute Taste; a word, however, far too feeble to convey to our minds a just idea of that faculty by which we appreciate whatever is glorious and beautiful in the great realms of divine and human creation.

Without usurping, then, the dull prerogative of the mental anatomist, let us consider the objects of Taste to be all comprised in this one term-THE BEAUTIFUL-whether it is found in the works of nature, of art, or in the nobler qualities of the soul. The Cartesian philosopher notes with learned gravity that the objects of taste are always sensations, and have no residence beyond the precincts of the mind. It is sufficient for our purpose, however, to follow the doctrine of our common sense-that beauty exists wherever the hand of the Creator has been. We read this in the creation of the fair world which we inhabit the conception of perfect taste-hung without hands in boundless space, and adorned with all its glorious ornaments; "its ocean of air above, its ocean of water beneath, its zodiac of lights, its tents of dripping clouds, its striped coat of climates, its fourfold year." "Look