LOVE FOR ALL THINGS. ward; for all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed forever. And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth, so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered! Arise! walk through the land, in the length of it, and in the breadth of it, for I will give it THEE!" What comfort to the mortal hearer, thus admitted to behold immortality! To perceive, by actual sensation, that there is a style of existence, of life, far different from that of flesh and blood. On that glorious brow time writes no wrinkle. There is a life of liberty superior to the elements. And so the great idea of Immortality finds entrance to his soul. It becomes to him a nearer, more tangible reality perchance than it 71 is to us, whose subtler minds have refined and defined until we have sometimes cold abstractions in the place of warm and glowing realities. And hence, when he hears this Immortal promise to him the Mortal, that solid soil on which he treads; how does the mighty argument get hold upon his soul, that there shall be for him a time when this mortal shall put on immortality, this corruptible, incorruption, so that he shall inherit, without being chained upon, the soil where now he is a stranger and a pilgrim! How does he perceive afar off this celestial inheritance; become persuaded of it, and embrace it, and confess that he is a pilgrim seeking a heavenly country! SUNSHINE. We are very fond of sunshine. When we think it gleams through our theories and lights up our castles in the air; when we write, we can scarcely forbear illuminating every page with its golden beams; when we read, the glittering, flashing paragraph fills us with a species of ecstacy; and are not the sun and the sun's rays the emblem of all that is genial, purifying, and healthy for soul and body Christ is the Sun of Righteousness; he carries healing on the wings of his pure religion into the darkest abodes of sorrow and of sin. Good men are the suns of the moral world; their words and works, burning with the ardor of a disinterested benevolence, affect all souls with sympathy, and vivify the germ of good that lies hid in the most barren soil. The sage in advance of his generation is a sun rising in mist and fog, and at first illuminating but a small circle. Years elapse, the clouds of prejudice roll away, and men rejoice in the light of the prophetic beams that gladden all the horizon. Health is sunshine. Under its influence how does everything within and without assume its brightest aspect, while the pulses beat with renewed energy! The air of heaven, the faces of fellow-creatures, the greetings of the commonest acquaintance, all appear delightful to him who has just arisen from a bed of sickness, and, as it were, taken a new lease of life. Amiability is sunshine; under its influence the clouds of pique and anger disperse and vanish, leaving a serene and smiling atmosphere around us. sunshine "Oh! there are looks and tones that dart An instant sunshine through the heart!" Love is And when the noontide heat of passion is past, how gently declines the sun of wedded affection, becoming, in those who have well and honestly chosen, more and more beautiful towards its final setting amid the glorious hopes of a glad futurity! All things need the rays of the great luminary. House-plants must have sunlight on their tender leaves, or they spindle and dwarf, and change their nature altogether, or gradually wither away. Human beings grow deformed and sickly without the influence of the sun. Who has not heard of dark cellars and ruins, haunts of poverty and crime, that have had to be levelled to the ground to prevent the continual efflux of a filthy and diseased population, reared in their deadly shades? The pale student, who pores over his book the livelong day in a small and secluded apartment, or watches when others are sleeping, evinces, by the emaciation of his cheek and the furrows on his brow, the necessity of light and air. How great the contrast between the pallid inhabitant of a city and the rosy dweller amid fields and lanes ! How beautiful are corn-fields in the sunshine "Laden with yellow grain the tall stems wave, Giving glad promise of the coming harvest !" If the golden beams become too ardent, we have but to seek the leafy glade, and then sunshine shows more exquisitely lovely, as it impenetrates the light green foliage, throwing the shadows of each waving bough upon the grass beneath. How soothing to bask the sultry hours away by the side of a clear pool, watching the gambols of the thousand insects that skim its surface or rise ever and anon in bubbles of their own creating! Moonshine is all very well in its way. It is romantic, heavenly, soothing to some minds, but we consider it a morbid light. It clothes objects with an unreal loveliness, and makes one discontented with the honest, rough aspect of the worka-day world. It causes longings for an immediate fruition of the good that is attained but by a struggle, the heaven that is only reached by the cultivation of virtue. So much do we feel this that we abstain from looking long on the moon, lest the vague melancholy which she inspires should unfit us for our common duties. Crime shrinks not from the light of the moon as it does from the gaze of the sun. Comparatively speaking, how few murders, burglaries, seductions, are committed in the face of day! But so soon as night approaches, wickedness stalks forth and overspreads the land, undeterred by the pure beams that speak of another and a holier existSome flowers develope themselves in the moonlight. They open as night approaches, and give their odors to the winds of even; but these are few, and we prefer the healthy blossoms that sleep in nature's hour of repose and awaken with the birds, evolving their brightest hues and richest fragrance to the eye and breeze of morning. The nightingale bestows her sweetest melody upon the night; but how few hearts she ence. LIGHT FROM THE STARS. cheers compared with the lark, daughter of the sun, and the thousand songsters of day! But to return to the symbolical view of our subject. In the heart of him who fills each succeeding day with efforts for the honor of God and the good of his fellow-creatures-in the heart of him who has resigned all earthly joys at the bidding of a kind chastiser, and who seeks his happiness in the depths of his own soul-in the heart of him who, disappointed in every effort to obtain an earthly competence for his beloved ones, has learned to live by faith alone, and to trust in that Providence who clothes the lilies and feeds the fowls of the air, for to-morrow's food and raiment--in the heart of him who, careless of selfish pleasures, devotes his life and energies to the well-being of some cherished individual, or sacrifices all worldly delights to a 73 wide cause of truth, of patriotism, or philanthropy-in the hearts of these, and such as these, reigns an eternal sunshine shed from God's own countenance. They may struggle with difficulties and temptations, be harassed by interruptions and disappointments, or wounded by misappreciation or ingratitude, yet still the clear beams sleep upon the transparent surface of their souls, and breathe a perpetual calm. We will not pursue the subject further. Dear reader, come into the sunshine, and give thine utmost efforts to extend its moral influences over the world. Aid the movements of those who are endeavoring to fill the dwellings of the poor with this essential light of virtue and happiness; and wherever thou canst bestow the gentle beam of a kind word or a cheerful smile, withhold it not, and the blessing of the God of light be with thee! LIGHT FROM THE STARS. "Like a star unhasting, unresting."-GOETHE. STARS! bright stars! Oh whither tend ye, Whence your energy unhoary, And your fadeless light its source? Thus to me your voices answer, With a harmony sublime "In thy Spirit read the reflex, Of Eternity in Time. There thou hast the flame undying, And the energy divine; There the power, the love, the beauty, We are tending, upward wending, By the Law pervading nature; Truly if we rest--we die! Human Soul! let outward action, Shadow forth the innate will; Ever pressing calmly onward, Onward and aspiring still." ILL-USED PEOPLE. ers upon their graves, and water them with our tears; and the generous feel that, if their wants had been known, the world would not have denied them household bread. But we do not speak of these in our reflections on the ill-used. They do not come within our cognizance. We talk of the neglected who will not suffer in silence, who would hold society by the collar and shout their wrongs in its ear. OURS is a practical age-an age of feverish excitement and incessant action--an age of wonderful developments and hair-drawn analyses—an age of arrangement, production, and of statistical practicability. Wonder has gone to sleep of late years, and abstract fancy has got a crowbar into her hand, and has now become a sturdy artisan or laborer. How does it happen that, in an age so essentially practical and acute, the world has never been warned of the vast amount of individual dissatisfaction she nurses in her bosom-that the question has never been started as to how many ill-used people there are in this world-not positively huffed and cuffed individuals, but persons who have not got their deserts. The question is a serious and important one; and if every government in the world would send a commission through the length and breadth, and into the depths and up to the heights of its territories to inquire how many Cromwells and Richelieus pine for want of congenial employ-lecting his education, or of supineness in procurment, how many Apollos, Orpheuses, &c. render the vales, groundfloors, hills, and attics vocal with awakening but unappreciated song, the results might be wonderful. How many magnificent schemes and hopes would be brought to light! how many intellectual and mechanical colossi would be raised to glory! The ill-used are an ancient and very numerous family; and, like Hungarian barons, they are to be found in all professions and pursuits. A sparrow might be as easily supposed to illustrate how a vampire bird finds admission into its nest and affections, as ordinary people to tell how the ill-used find a place in every nook of humanity, or get inducted into every social circle. Yet there they are, croaking and grumbling at every fireside, and complaining of every advance their contemporaries make up the ladder of worldly elevation. There are individuals crushed by neglect-the sensitive plants of the world's garden the true aristocrats of humanity, whose glorious natures are withered by the frosts of poverty-the sap of whose lives is dried up by the fevers of exertion and care; but we seldom hear of these, and when we do, it is through self-complainings. Their hearts break silently, and they pass away, like the rose, to be remembered by the perfume they exhale after death. We could scatter flow A very familiar class of the ill-used is your family-looked-down-upon individuals. Their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, kith and kin, despise them, and look upon them as merely light con siderations compared with the other members of the family. They are always advising, directing, interfering with, and watching over their concerns as if they were babies; and, although they do partially feed, clothe, and wholly educate the ill-used's family, still he has deep and stern cause to grumble. He cannot accuse his parents of neg ing him a settlement in life. They have done so for him perhaps a dozen times, and he knows so; but still he is not satisfied with them, for all his brothers are better off than he is, and everybody knows that he is as good as they. True he has been a "little foolish;" but that is no cause why he should be subjected to moral lectures from his father, or why his mother and sisters should advise him before he goes to dine, or his brothers should keep their eyes turning on him while the wine is circulating. These are insulting annoyances which his wife dare not presume to afflict him with, and which his relations attempt merely because they think his obligations to them warrant such a course of procedure. The world has gone against him a little, but things will take a turn, and then! There the ill-used closes his teeth and shakes his head, and the portentous aspect he assumes augurs ill for the comfort of his kindred, should fortune ever bless him as it blessed Ali Baba. They are all pure, unimpeachable people, your family-looked-down-upon persons. They never did anything that they need be ashamed of. Nobody but themselves and families have suffered, if they have been guilty of any light folly; and though their relations have expended a small fortune upon them, it was well their part to assist their own. The brothers of the looked-down-upon grumbler are men of high ILL-USED PEOPLE. probity, perhaps-of patient, industrious habits, whose hearts bleed at the sufferings of a foolish brother's wife and children. They try to awaken his sense of duty, of honor, and of shame, and their parents, with tender solicitude, assist and encourage them to reclaim their brother; but he, wrapt in the mantle of self-esteem, sees not his own derelictions and shortcomings, but looks upon all their anxious advices and attentions as so many insults, and himself as an ill-used, despised man. Then there is a large family of ill-used people, with brilliant capabilities, but who have been neglected and scorned by those who ought to have advanced them. They do not complain for themselves, but what has not the world lost through its own folly and stupidity? Miss Stichet the mantua-maker is lost in her present sphere. She should have been leading an opera or receiving bouquets from applauding audiences, like another Malibran. Her voice, she is confident, is the loveliest contralto in nature, and yet the envious, ignorant world will never suffer her to get higher than mantua-making. How many latent, inglorious Phidiases and Raphaels have bachelor uncles refused to develope! How many mothers have observed the infant manifestations of genius in their children, as they fashioned putty or bread dough into miniature anacondas, or traced some untraceable lines with chalk or burned wood! And yet these uncles or grandfathers, and others interested, have refused to foster and nurse those feeble scintillations of glory into fires that might have scorched and irradiated a zone. These ill-used, non-developed geniuses are never developed to be sure; but that, of course, is not their fault. The awful responsibility lies on some of the world's children for not nursing into a world's wonder the unappreciable glories that lie bid in a mop-covered skull. We hear of intellectual gaints, who heave the millstone of depression from their heads, and expand and shoot upward, despite of conventional impediments and the lack of accessories, to smoothen their paths. We hear of self-taught, dauntless, noble, unfaltering genius, which breasts the steep of fame, and with a steady, heavenillumined eye still shouts "Excelsior!" but our ill-used genius is only so to himself. There is no evidence of brilliancy of fancy or radiancy of wit about him; in truth, his whole life is a progressive refutation of any such absurd chimera, but he thinks otherwise, and he commits to himself a warrant to be ranked amongst the world's most ill-used and neglected children. There is that countless throng of ill-understood and highly indignant members of the ill-used 75 community-the Corianders and Arabellinas of the muses-those patriotic and disinterested children of Apollo, who burn with a quenchless desire to shed a poetic lustre on the literature of our age and country. The editors of annuals, quarterlies, monthlies, weeklies, and all the other hosts of periodical or transitory literary vehicles, can well attest the devotion and importunate ardor of these gifted sons and daughters of song. They are generally careful to let it be understood that they lack those useless attributes usually comprised in the word education, and that their compositions are truly all "out of their own heads;" and yet the editors, who are merely the media of communication between these Corydons and Terpsychores and the public, constitute themselves ruthless censors, and dismiss the coruscations of their fancy with such absurd reflections and intimations as Arabellina should cultivate knitting and white seam instead of rhyme," or "the Monody on the Death of a Green Beetle won't do." " We cannot close our remarks, however, without dipping our pen in serious, sober earnest, and addressing a few words to any of our young readers of either sex, who may have begun to get it into their heads to be out of sorts with the world, not for wrongs it has inflicted, but for the refusal of rights which it has neither conceded nor recognized. We know that a man may be an excellent judge of his own powers and deservings, and that he should have perfect liberty to exercise the former in every legitimate manner that he may deem fit, and to enforce the latter by all the moral appliances which he can call into action. But he must allow that the world, callous and niggardly as he may deem it, is the tribunal to which he appeals, and that, though adverse, it has many chances against his one of being right in all its estimates. Instead of railing, complaining, and diffusely speculating on improbable probabilities, let the ill-used work. If there are hidden springs of greatness in their souls, they are not too deep for the instruments of selfculture to reach them, and to deepen, vivify, and purify their channels. If the rough diamond is in their natures, abrasion will smooth its excrescences and develope its beauties. Let them seek to create and embody the elements of progressto transform traditional abstractions into present guides and agents of improvement; and although they may neither gain mural crowns nor laurel bays, they will gain respect-they will win sweet reflections drawn from the font of usefulness, and thus will have something better to do than "fret their little hour," and call themselves ill-used. |