more ardent. Imaginary representations, more even than real objects stimulate our desires; and our passions administering fuel to themselves are immoderately inflamed. Joy is in this manner enlivened; anger more keenly exasperated; envy burns with additional malice; and melancholy, brooding over her ideas of misery and disappointment, is tortured with anguish and plunges into despair. A PROVISION FOR THE POOR. Nature, whatever shape thou wearest, whether on the mountains of Nova Zembla, or on the parched soil of the torrid tropics, still thou art amiable! still shalt thou guide my footsteps! with thy help the life allotted to this weak, this tender fabric, shall be rational and just. Those gentle emotions, which thou inspirest by an organized congeniality in all thy parts, teach me to feel; instruct me to participate another's woes, to sympathize at distress, and find an uncommon glow of satisfaction at felicity. How then can the temporary, transient misfortunes of an hour cloud this brow, where serenity was wont to fix her reign ? no; avaunt ye wayward jaundice spleens! seize on the hypocrite, whose heart recoils at every forged puritanic face; assail the miser, who sighs even when he beholds his treasures, and thinks of the instability of bolts and locks. Reflect wretch! on the still greater instability of life itself; calculate, caitiff, the days thou hast to live; some ten years or less; allot the portion thou now spendest for that period, and give the rest to the truly needy. Could my prayers prevail, with zeal and reason joined, misery would be banished from earth, and every month be a vintage to the poor. GOLDEN AGE. Absurdities in speculative opinion are commonly considered as innocent things; and we are told every G day that they are not worth refuting. So far as opinions are sure to rest merely in speculation and cannot in any degree become practical, this is doubtless the proper way of treating them. But there are few opinions of this dormant and indifferent kind, especially among those that become general and classical among the nations. The activity of such, though imperceptible, is extensive. They get wrought into our intellectual existence and govern our modes of acting as well as thinking. The interest of society therefore requires that they should be scrutinized, and that such as are erroneous should be exposed, in order to be rejected; when their place may be supplied by truth and reason, which nourish the mind and accelerate the progress of improvement. Among the absurd notions which early turned the heads of the teachers of mankind, and which are so ridiculous as generally to escape our censure, is that of a Golden Age; or the idea that men were more perfect, more moral, and more happy in some early stage of their intercourse, before they cultivated the earth and formed great societies. The author of Don Quixote has played his artillery upon this doctrine to very good effect; he has summoned against it all the force of our contempt by making it the text of one of the greatest discourses of his hero. But my sensibility is such on moral and political errors, as rarely to be satisfied with the weapon of ridicule; though I know it to be one of the most mortal of intellectual weapons. The notion that the social state of men cannot meliorate, that they have formerly been better than they now are, and that they are continually growing worse, is pregnant with infinite mischief. I know no doctrine in the whole labyrinth of imposture that has a more immoral tendency. It discourages the efforts of all political virtue; it is a constant and practical apology for oppression, tyranny, despotism, in every shape, in every corner of society, as well as from the throne, the tribunal and the camp. It inculcates the belief that ignorance is better than knowledge; that war and violence are more natural than industry and peace; that deserts and tombs are more glorious than joyful cities and cultivated fields. One of the most operative means of bringing forward our improvements and of making mankind wiser, and better than they are, is to convince them that they are capable of becoming so. Without this conviction they may indeed improve slowly, unsteadily and almost imperceptibly, as they have done within the period in which our histories are able to trace them. But this conviction, impressed on the minds of the chiefs and teachers of nations, and inculcated in their schools, would greatly expedite our advancement in public happiness and virtue. Perhaps it would in a great measure insure the world against any future shocks and retrograde steps, such as heretofore it has often experienced. RESPONSIBILITY OF MEN OF GENIUS. He to whom nature has dealt her favors with a liberal hand, upon whom she has bestowed a ready conception, an unclouded judgment, a happy expression, youth and health, has very important duties in life to fulfil; he is placed in a most critical station, and he has no right to desert it. Such a man will ever be surrounded by a circle which, whether it be a large or a small one, must have claims upon him that he may not refuse to satisfy. Indolence in him becomes a positive crime; and if indolence be criminal in such a character, what name shall we give to the misapplication of his powers? The man of genius, then, is not to live for himself alone; he is bound to exert his talents for the public good: still it must be in his proper sphere. Mankind would be but little benefited by the abilities of great men, if they were all legislators or all soldiers. Nature has decreed a secret division of the mental powers; and to discover and mark that division is a rare and a happy faculty; to exercise it, is nevertheless, within the compass of human wisdom. GENERAL CORRECTNESS OF THE PUBLIC ESTIMATE OF TALENTS. Talents, wherever they have had a suitable theatre, have never failed to emerge from obscurity and assume their proper rank in the estimation of the world. The celebrated Camden is said to have been the tenant of a garret. Yet from the darkness, poverty and ignominy of this residence, he advanced to distinction and wealth, and graced the first offices and titles of our island. It is impossible to turn over the British Biography without being struck and charmed by the multitude of correspondent examples; a venerable group of men, who from the lowest depths of obscurity and want, and without even the influence of a patron, have risen to the first honors of their country, and founded their own families anew. In every nation and in every age, great talents, thrown fairly into the point of public observation, will invariably produce the same ultimate effect. The jealous pride of power may attempt to repress and crush them; the base and malignant rancor of impotent spleen and envy, may strive to embarrass and retard their flight; but these efforts, so far from achieving their ignoble purpose, so far from producing a discernible obliquity in the ascent of genuine and vigorous talents, will serve only to increase their momentum and mark their transit with an additional stream of glory. It is true there always are and always will be in ev. ery society, individuals who will fancy themselves examples of genius overlooked, underrated, or invidiously oppressed. But the misfortune of such persons is imputable to their own vanity, and not to the public opinion which has weighed and graduated them. We remember many of our schoolmates whose geniuses bloomed and died within the walls of the university; but whose bodies still live, the moving monuments of departed splendor, the animated and affecting remembrances of the extreme fragility of the human intellect. -We remember others who have entered on public life with the most exulting promise; have flown from the earth, like rockets; and after a short and brilliant flight, have burst with one or two explosions-to blaze no more. Others, by a few premature scintillations of thought, have led themselves and their partial friends to hope that they were fast advancing to a dawn of soft and beauteous light and a meridian of bright and gorgeous effulgence. But their day has never yet broken, and never will it break. They are doomed forever to that dim light which surrounds the frozen poles, when the sun has retreated to the opposite circle of the heavens. Their's is the eternal glimmering of the brain; and their most luminous displays are the faint twinklings of the glow-worm. We have seen others, who, at their start, gain a casual projectility which raises them above their proper grade; but by the just operation of their specific gravity, they are made to subside again and settle ultimately in the sphere to which they properly belong. All these characters, and many others who have had even slighter bases for their once sanguine, but now blasted hopes, forma querulous and melancholy band of moonstruck declaimers against the injustice of the world, the agency of envy and the force of destiny; charging their misfortunes on every thing but the true cause: their own want of intrinsic, sterling merit: their want of that copious, perennial spring of great and useful thought, without which a man may hope in vain for growing reputation. Nor are they always satisfied with wailing their own destiny, pouring out the bitterest imprecations of their souls on the cruel stars which presided at their birth, and aspersing the justice of the public opinion which has sealed them: too often in the contortions and pangs of disappointed ambition, they cast a scowling eye over the world of man-start back, and blanche at the lustre of superior merit. But it is all in vain.In spite of every thing, the public opinion will finally { |