We will not follow him in all his wanderings. He wrote, and studied and thought: he indited letters fragrant with patriotism and with hope: and, more than all, he loved Henrietta Muhlenfels, who was to become his wife. At last, all these troubles came to an end: Napoleon lost his sway: Germany had its old rights and power again, and when the day had fairly broken, William von Humboldt founded the University of Berlin, and Schleiermacher was at once appointed to a professorship. So again Berlin received back its former child. He soon married, and that rich domestic life, for which none was more fitted than he, began its peaceful course, only to be ended by his premature death. Soon Schleiermacher was elected preacher in the Trinity Church of Berlin, and here and in the University began the great activities of his life. His lecture room was soon crowded; his spacious church was soon filled. Schleiermacher was no longer the preacher to a handful of poor sick people, he was the admired orator of the day. He did not anticipate great success in the pulpit; he thought that one or two hundred of the most cultivated men and women of the city might come to hear him, but it was not so to be. All classes, all conditions thronged to hear him. It only hightened the general popularity that he was short and slender, with one shoulder above the other; with these disad vantages he had a piercing eye, and a rich, rolling utterance which carried away all hearts. There are great anomalies in the success of eminent preachers. As a general thing, coarse preachers draw coarse auditors; boisterous preachers draw rough auditors; refined preachers draw cultured auditors. But as the classic, ornate, and delicately suggestive Robertson drew throngs of serving men and waiting maids to mingle with the gay and with the thoughtful at Brighton chapel, so Schleiermacher, ponderous in thought, involved in style, condensed in expression, almost without precedent, was followed by crowds, in which prince jostled peasant. We have worked for hours over the sermons preached there, with almost vain efforts to penetrate the obscurity of that hard style; we have read it to the blank faces of the tolerably well imformed, and seen that it met no intelligent reception, and we have wondered

that from the lips of Schleiermacher it went home to such varied minds. Yet in Schleiermacher, the known patriot, with face glowing, with eye kindling, with gesture never vehement, but always effective, that style, so dark on the printed page, found a grand interpreter, and it needed no other comment to make it intelligible. He always preached extempore, and wrote his discourses, as Cicero did his orations, after they were delivered.

We

Here Schleiermacher worked twelve long, busy years. do not hear from him much at Berlin; there was no longer a father, a sister, or a betrothed to write to; he was in his home, and he had little leisure to continue a full correspondence with friends. He was a public man; a minister in the Government, a friend of education, a devoted preacher, a laborious professor, a true father and husband. He died in 1834, a little more than fifty years of age, and few men have been more lamented. All Berlin came to do him honor. His theological position, as the reconciler of evangelicals and rationalists, the bridge between the old unbelief and the new faith, made his system not unacceptable to either, while his worth as a man, his modesty, his candor, and his simplicity made him beloved as widely as he was known. And every year, on his birthday in November, a large company meet in Berlin to celebrate his memory and keep alive the tradition of his virtues. As a theologian he has done his work, a great and needed work; he was the foundation on which Neander, Müller, and Tholuck have builded; and so let him be remembered and honored; but as a good man, his work goes on, and no one can read the record of his life without catching a measure of the soul, which breathed through it. The man was greater than his works; and the theological student even, gets a better lesson from the letters of Schleiermacher than even the ponderous thought of the Glaubenslehre itself can teach him.

ARTICLE IV.-THE COUNTRY PARSON IN TOWN.

Leisure Hours in Town. By the Author of the Recreations of a Country Parson. One Volume, with Portrait. 16mo. Pp. 437.

It is now several years since a "certain quiet Scotch minister," as he described himself, first sat down to write an essay for "Fraser," as a relief from his solid work of sermonizing. This was followed, month after month, by successive papers of "simple thoughts, only sincere and not unconsidered," that soon won their way to thousands of hearts, and came to be leading attractions of the magazine to which they were originally contributed. There is a quiet assurance in our author's manner; and yet no one seems to have taken his seat less ambitiously at that famous round-table on the Strand, where Carlyle, Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, and others, well-known to fame, had sat before him. How he found his way in that particular direction does not appear; but no essayist of the kind could have wished a heartier welcome when he fairly came before the public. Yet his success has evidently taken him by surprise, while his wide circle of admirers on both sides of the water may find themselves somewhat puzzled to explain just how and why their hearts were won. There is no disputing the fact, however, and it was a grateful task for us to record in a former number of this Quarterly our pleasant impressions of the "Recreations.”

What we shall always retain of them is the charm they threw about our country life. Some were veritable bucolics, and mirrored as faithfully the locality that inspired them, as any poem of the "Lake school." No wonder that our author is still announced as the "country parson." He has turned his back on his little parish and quiet manse, it is true, and we almost doubted the sincerity of his old attachment when he said he never regretted the step. But, after all, the old ties may only

be loosed a little, not broken, and every now and then he will go back in thought to where he was first settled in the minis. try. We know that he is not the man to ignore, when high up the ladder, his humble starting point; and if his love for the country is what we still believe, his heart will never be weaned from it. He takes pains in fact to tell us that he is living now where there is no danger of such a result. Edinburgh is especially attractive to him, for its blending of country and town. He finds there pleasant reminders of former surroundings,-"green gardens, fields, and trees: shady places into which you may turn from the glaring streets, into verdure as cool and quiet as ever, and where your little children can roll upon the grass, and string daisies as of old." We are glad to know of this, for it gives promise of an occasional essay yet, fragrant with the old aroma.

Nobody of course was surprised at his accepting a call to the city. Such popularity would have unsettled any country parson and wafted him up higher. To have persisted in his humble rustic cure, under all this outside pressure, would have been an anomaly, unless under the operation of that ancient rule which settled pastors only once, and that for life. And yet if any of us this side of the ocean had been consulted as to our essayist's claims as a theologian and preacher, the response must have been provokingly vague and indefinite.

We have never yet sat under his pulpit ministrations, though we have frequently encountered him the days immediately before and after, and sometimes just as he had finished his sermons for the Sabbath. We mean no disparagement in conjecturing that he discourses on "things heavenly and divine," in very much the same style that he writes about things sublunary ;-in fact in one place he quotes a friend's criticism that his essays are only "sermons in polka time."

The only extract of a sermon of his own that he ever gave his readers was that they "might compare their notion of them with the fact." It is the conclusion of a discourse against penance and asceticism, whether of Papist or Puritan, and what hearer could resist the melody and sunshine of these closing periods?

"Take, then, brethren, without a scruple or a misgiving, the innocent enjoyment of life. Let your heart beat gladly and thankfully by your quiet fireside, and never dream that there is anything of sinful self-indulgence in that pure delight with which you watch your children's sports and hear their prattle. Look out upon green spring fields and blossoms, upon summer woods and streams: gladden in the bright sunshine as well as muse in the softening twilight; and never fancy that though these things cheer you amid the many cares of life, you are falling short of the ideal sketched by that kindly Teacher of self-denial who said, 'If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily.'"

His characteristic geniality must make the Rev. Mr. Boyd equally winning as preacher and essayist; and no reader would hesitate to class him among the most liberal of Scotch divines. Once indeed he departed from his usual tenor in venting prejudices as a minister of the Establishment against the “Free Church;" and, at another time, his admiration of the chaste but impassioned oratory of a "great Scotch preacher" in the person of Caird, constrains him to join in the old cry of claptrap and buffoonery about Spurgeon. Perhaps he meant to hit with this one stone two birds of the same feather, but he upsets the "dignity of dullness" in his profession, and shakes Dr. Dryasdust, et id omne genus, with as keen a relish as would our own Beecher. He pronounces without hesitation certain American divines as stupid and uncharitable who scented heresy in "Elsie Venner," though he admits that the phraseology demurred at by them "may be a mystic Shibboleth indicating far more than it asserts." Yet he finds favor with them allwith men of antagonistic views and sympathies-old school and new, high church and low.

Our author bears with becoming meekness his flattering promotion from country to city; and yet this, or his previous popularity, has emboldened him to lift the veil from his real name and features. So the many friends that were strangers to the country parson personally, and curious to penetrate his incognito, are privileged now to look upon the face and read the autograph of A. K. H. Boyd, prefixed to his latest volume. The countenance corresponds very nearly to the image mirrored in his style—the same honest, open look, and easy, placid expression; the same eyes that have beamed out so kindly yet unquailing from his pages, and brow above as clear and calm.