hand but abandoned luxury and wantonness, or on the other but extreme madness and despair!

In short, all projects for growing rich by sudden and extraordinary methods, as they operate violently on the passions of men, and encourage them to despise the slow moderate gains that are to be made by an honest industry, must be ruinous to the public, and even the winners themselves will at length be involved in the public ruin.

God grant the time be not near when men shall say, "This island was once inhabited by a religious, brave, sincere people, of plain, uncorrupt manners, respecting inbred worth rather than titles and appearances, assertors of liberty, lovers of their country, jealous of their own rights, and unwilling to infringe the rights of others; improvers of learning and useful arts, enemies to luxury, tender of other men's lives, and prodigal of their own; inferior in nothing to the old Greeks or Romans, and superior to each of those people in the perfections of the other. Such were our ancestors during their rise and greatness; but they degenerated, grew servile flatterers of men in power, adopted Epicurean notions, became venal, corrupt, injurious, which drew upon them the hatred of God and man, and occasioned their final ruin."

"A LION'S HEAD."

G. WEATHERLY.

PON the wall it hung where all might | And then your thoughts took further ground,

see:

A living picture-so the people
said-

A type of grandeur, strength and
majesty-

A lion's head."

Yet, if you gazed awhile, you seemed to see The eyes grow strangely sad, that should have raged;

And, lo! your thoughts took shape unconsciously

"A lion caged."

You saw the living type behind his bars,
His eyes so sad with mute reproach, but
still

A very King, as when beneath the stars
He roved at will,

and ran

From real to ideal, till at length
The lion caged seemed but the type of man
In his best strength;

Man grand, majestic in both word and deed,
A giant in both intellect and will,
Yet trammeled by some force he can but Leed
And cannot still;

Man in his highest attributes, but bound

By chains of circumstance around him cast
Yet nobly living out life's daily round,
Till work be past.

So musing, shadows fall all silently

And swift recall the thoughts that wan dering fled:

The dream has ended, and you can but see

T

THE PURITANS.

T. B. MACAULAY.

HE Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging, in general terms, an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him was with them the great end of existence. They rejected with contempt the ceremonious homage which other sects

worship of the soul.

Instead of catching

substituted for the pure occasional glimpses of the Deity through an obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze full on his intolerable brightness, and to commune with him face to face. Hence originated their contempt for terrestrial distinctions. The difference between the greatest and the meanest of mankind seemed to vanish, when compared with the boundless interval which separated the whole race from him on whom their own eyes were constantly fixed. They recognized no title to superiority but his favor; and, confident of that favor, they despised all the accomplishments and all the dignities of the world. If they were unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the registers of heralds, they were recorded in the Book of Life. If their steps were not accompanied by a splendid train of menials, legions of ministering angels had charge of them.

Their palaces were houses not made with hands; their diadems crowns of glory which should never fade away. On the rich and the eloquent, on nobles and priests, they looked down with contempt: for they esteemed themselves rich in a more precious treasure, and eloquent in a more sublime language-nobles by the right of an earlier creation, and priests by the imposition of a mightier hand. The very meanest of them was a being to whose fate a mysterious and terrible importance belonged, on whose slightest action the spirits of light and darkness looked with anxious interest, who had been destined, before heaven and earth were created, to enjoy a felicity which should continue when heaven and earth should have passed away. Events which short-sighted politicians ascribed to earthly causes, had been ordained on his account. his sake empires had risen, and flourished, and decayed. For his sake the Almighty had proclaimed his will by the pen of the evangelist and the harp of the prophet. He had been wrested by no common deliverer from the grasp of no common foe. He had been ransomed by the sweat of no vulgar agony, by the blood of no earthly sacrifice. It was for him that the sun had been darkened, that the rocks had been rent, that the dead had risen, that all nature had shuddered at the sufferings of her expiring God.

For

Thus the Puritan was made up of two different men,-the one all self-abasement, penitence, gratitude, passion; the other proud, calm, infiexible, sagacious. He prostrated himself in the dust before his Maker; but he set his foot on the neck of his king. In his devotional retirement he prayed with convulsions and groans and tears. He was half-maddened by glorious or terrible illusions. He heard the lyres of angels or the tempting whispers of fiends. He caught a gleam of the Beatific Vision,

184

THE BELL OF "THE ATLANTIC.”

or woke screaming from dreams of fire. Like Vane, he thought himself entrusted with the sceptre of the millennial year. Like Fleetwood, he cried in the bitterness of his soul that God had hid his face from him, But when he took his seat in the council, or girt on his sword for war, these tempestuous workings of the soul had left no perceptible trace behind them. People who saw nothing of the godly but their uncouth visages, and heard nothing from them but their groans and their whining hymns, might laugh at them. But those had little reason to laugh who

encountered them in the hall of debate or in the field of battle.

THE BELL OF "THE ATLANTIC."

OLL, toll, toll, toll!

MRS. SIGOURNEY.

T Thou bell by billows swung,

And, night and day, thy warning
words

Repeat with mournful tongue!
Toll for the queenly boat,

Wrecked on yon rocky shore!
Sea-weed is in her palace halls-
She rides the surge no more.

Toll for the master bold,

The high-souled and the brave,
Who ruled her like a thing of life
Amid the crested wave!
Toll for the hardy crew,

Sons of the storm and blast,
Who long the tyrant ocean dared;
But it vanquished them at last.

Toll for the man of God,

Whose hallowed voice of prayer
Rose calm above the stifled groan
Of that intense despair!
How precious were those tones,
On that sad verge of life,
Amid the fierce and freezing storm,
And the mountain billows' strife!

Toll for the lover, lost

To the summoned bridal train,

Bright glows a picture on his breast,
Beneath the unfathomed main.
One from her casement gazeth

Long o'er the misty sea:
He cometh not, pale maiden-
His heart is cold to thee!

Toll for the absent sire,

Who to his home drew near,
To bless a glad, expecting group--
Fond wife, and children dear!
They heap the blazing hearth,
The festal board is spread,
But a fearful guest is at the gate ;-
Room for the sheeted dead!

Toll for the loved and fair,

The whelmed beneath the tide-
The broken harps around whose strings
The dull sea-monsters glide!
Mother and nursling sweet,

Reft from the household throng;
There's bitter weeping in the nest
Where breathed their soul of song.

Toll for the hearts that bleed
'Neath misery's furrowing trace;
Toll for the hapless orphan left,
The last of all his race!

was one Sunday, as I was traveling through the county of Orange, that my eye was caught by a cluster of horses tied near a ruinous, old, wooden house, in the forest, not far from the roadside. Having frequently seen such objects before, in traveling through these States, I had no difficulty in understanding that this was a place of religious worship. Devotion alone should have stopped me, to join in the duties of the congregation; but I must confess that curiosity to hear the preacher of such a wilderness was not the least of my motives. On entering, I was struck with his preternatural appearance. He was a tall and very spare old man; his head, which was covered with a white linen cap, his shriv eled hands, and his voice, were all shaking under the influence of palsy; and a few moments ascertained to me that he was perfectly blind.

The first emotions which touched my breast were those of mingled