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whose patriotism is partisanship, and whose principal aim is to serve themselves and their friends, and use the people for accomplishing their purposes. No greater fiction was ever conceived than the pleasant one that the people of America govern America. The people of America, except in certain political revolutions, have always been governed by a company of self-appointed and irresponsible men, whose principal work was to grind axes for themselves. The poetry of American politics is then the severest standard by which to judge the reality of American politics.

Religious freedom is another poetical idea in which the American glories. It is essentially a poetical thought that every man is free to worship God according to the dictates of his own conscience-that there is no Church to domineer over the State, and no State to domineer over the Church, that the Bible is free, and that each individual soul is responsible only to its Maker. This great and beautiful liberty stirs us when we think of it as music would stir us, breathed from heaven itself. It is grand, God-begotten, belonging in the eternal system of things, full of inspiration. This religious freedom we claim as Americans. Some of us enjoy it; but the number is not large. The freedom of the sect is not greatly circumscribed, but the freedom of the individual is hardly greater in America than it is in those countries where an established church

lays its finger upon every man. I would as soon be the slave of the Pope or the Archbishop as the slave of a sect. I would as readily put my neck under the yoke of a national church as under the yoke of a sect. It does not mend the matter that the multitude are willing slaves, and it certainly mars the matter that the sects themselves do what they can, in too many instances, to circumscribe each the other's liberty. Sects are religiously and socially proscribed by sects. Take any town in America that contains half a dozen churches, representing the same number of religious denominations, and it will be found that, with one, and that probably the dominant sect, it will be all that a man's reputation and position are worth to belong to another sect. Perfect religious freedom in America there undoubtedly is; but it is the possession of only here and there an individual. Prevalent uncharitableness and bigotry are incompatible with the existence of religious liberty anywhere.

It is thus that the poetic instinct grasps at truth and beauty, and fitness and harmony, wherever it sees it, and it is thus that it furnishes us (subordinate only to special, divine revelation) with the most delicate tests of human institutions, customs, and actions. Litmus-paper does not more faithfully detect the presence of an acid than the poetic instinct detects the false and foul in all that makes up human life. All that is grand

and good, all that is heroic and unselfish, all that is pure and true, all that is firm and strong, all that is beautiful and harmonious, is essentially poetical, and the opposite of all these is at once rejected by the unsophisticated poetic instinct.

Verily the poets of the world are the prophets of humanity! They forever reach after and foresee the ultimate good. They are evermore building the paradise that is to be, painting the millennium that is to come, restoring the lost image of God in the human soul. When the world shall reach the poet's ideal, it will arrive at perfection; and much good will it do the world to measure itself by this ideal, and struggle to lift the real to its lofty level.

A

LESSON XXIII.

THE FOOD OF LIFE.

"To the soul time doth perfection give,
And adds fresh lustre to her beauty still;

And makes her in eternal youth to live

Like her which nectar to the Gods doth fill.

The more she lives, the more she feeds on truth;

The more she feeds, the strength doth more increase;

And what is strength, but an effect in youth

Which, if time nurse, how can it ever cease?"

SIR J. DAVIES.

HORSE can live, and do a good deal of dull

work, on hay; but spirit and speed require grain. There is no self-supplied, perennial fountain within the animal that enables him to expend more in the way of muscular power than he receives in the way of muscular stimulus and nourishment. Food, in its quality and amount, up to the limit of healthful digestion, is set over against, and exactly measures, under ordinary circumstances, the quality and amount of labor

of which a horse is capable. So, a cow can live on straw and corn-stalks; but it would not be reasonable to suppose that she would give any considerable amount of milk upon so slender a diet. We do not expect rich milk, in large quantities, to be yielded by a cow that is not bountifully fed with the most nutricious food. The same fact attaches to land. not get out of land more than there is in it; and having once exhausted it, we are obliged to put into it, in fertilizers, all we wish to take from it in the form of vegetable growths. Wherever there is an outgo, there must be an equal income, or exhaustion will be the inevitable consequence.

We can

The principle which these familiar facts so forcibly illustrate is a very important one, in its connection with human life. We cannot get any more out of human life than we put into it. All civilization is an illustration of what can be accomplished by feeding the human mind. All barbaric and savage life is an illustration of mental and moral starvation. The differences among mankind are the results of differences in the nourishment upon which their minds are fed. Eunice Williams, who was taken captive by the savages of Canada a hundred and fifty years ago, was the daughter of a most godly minister, of the old Puritan stamp; but a very few years of savage feeding made h.r a savage. Her mind was cut off from all other varieties

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