Изображения страниц
PDF
EPUB

them would stagnate into pestilence. In like manner Liberty herself, the last and best gift of God to his creatures, must be taken just as she is, you might shape her into a perfect model of severe scrupulous law, but she would then be Liberty no longer: and you must be content to die under the lash of this inexorable justice which you had exchanged for the banners of freedom. Every human tribunal ought to take care to administer justice, as we look hereafter to have justice administered to us. Upon the principle on which the attorney general prays sentence on my client-God have mercy upon us! Instead of standing

before him with the hopes and consolations of christians, we must call upon the mountains to cover us; for which of us can present, for omniscient examination, a pure, unspotted, and faultless course? But I humbly expect that the benevolent Author of our being will judge us as I have been pointing out for your example.-Holding up the great volume of our lives in his hands, and regarding the general scope of them : if he discovers benevolence, charity, and good-will towards man beating in the heart, where he alone can look; if he finds that our conduct, though often forced out of the path by our infirmities, has been in general well directed: his all searching eye will assuredly never pursue us into those little corners of our lives, much less will he select them for punishment, without the general context of our existence, by which faults may

be sometimes found to have grown out of virtues, and very many of our heaviest offences to have been grafted by human imperfection upon the best and kindest of our affections. This is not the course of divine justice, or, there is no truth in the Gospels of Heaven. If the general tenor of a man's conduct be such as I have represented, he may walk through the shadow of death, with all his faults about him, with as much cheerfulness as in the common paths of life; because he knows that instead of a stern accuser to expose before the Author of his nature those frail passages, which like the scored matter in the book before you, chequers the volume of the brightest and best spent life, his mercy will obscure them from the eye of his purity, and repentance blot them out for ever.

4440

SELF DEVOTION TO SOLITARY STUDIES ACCOUNTED FOR.

"PERCIVAL."

The sun is on the waters, and the air

Breathes with a stirring energy; the plants
Expand their leaves, and swell their buds and blow,

Wooing the eye, and stealing on the soul
With perfume and with beauty. Life awakes;
Its wings are waving, and its fins at play
Glancing from out the streamlets, and the voice
Of love and joy is warbled in the grove ;
And children sport upon the springing turf

With shouts of innocent glee, and youth is fired
With a diviner passion, and the eye

Speaks deeper meaning, and the cheek is filled
At every tender motion of the heart,

With purer flushings; for the boundless power
That rules all living creatures, now has sway;
In man refined to holiness, a flame
That purifies the heart it feeds upon:
And yet the searching spirit will not blend
With this rejoicing, these attractive charms

Of the glad season; but, at wisdom's shrine,
Will draw pure draughts from her unfathom'd well,
And nurse the never-dying lamp, that burns
Brighter and brighter on, as ages roll.
He has his pleasures-he has his reward :
For there is in the company of books,
The living souls of the departed sage,
The bard, and hero; there is in the roll
Of eloquence and history, which speak
The deeds of early and of better days;
In these, and in the visions, that arise
Sublime in midnight musings, and array
Conceptions of the mighty and the good,
There is an everlasting influence,

That snatches us awhile from earth, and lifts
The spirit, in its strong aspirings, where
Superior beings fill the court of heaven.
And thus his fancy wanders, and has talk
With high imaginings, and pictures out

Communion with the worthies of old time;
And then he listens in his passionate dreams
To voices in the silent gloom of night

As of the blind Meonian, when he struck
Wonder from out his harp-strings, and roll'd on
From rhapsody to rhapsody, deep sounds,
That imitate the ocean's boundless roar;
Or tones of horror, which the drama spake,
Reverberated through the hollow mask,

Like sounds, which rend the sepulchres of kings,
And tell of deeds of darkness, which the grave,

Would burst its marble portals to reveal

Or his, who latest in the holy cause

Of freedom, lifted to the heavens his voice
Commanding, and beseeching, and with all
The fervour of his spirit poured abroad
Urging the sluggish souls of self made slaves
To emulate their fathers, and be free;

Or those which in the still and solemn shades
Of Academus, from the wooing tongue

Of Plato, charmed the youth, the man, the sage
The beautiful and holy, till the sound,

That played around his eloquent lips, became

The honey of persuasion, and was heard,

As oracles amid Dodona's groves.

O! there is a pure

A hallowed feeling in these midnight dreams ;

They have the light of heaven around them, breathe

The odour of its sanctity, and are

Those moments taken from the sands of life,

Where guilt makes no intrusion, but they bloom
Like islands flowering on Arabia's wilds.

It is a joy

Ineffable, to dwell upon the lines
That register our feelings, and portray,
In colors always fresh and ever new,
Emotions, that were sanctified, and loved,
As something far too tender and too pure,
For forms so frail and fading.

"ON THE BEAUTY AND HAPPINESS OF AN OPEN BEHAVIOUR."

"KNOX."

A great part of mankind, if they cannot furnish themselves with the courage and generosity of the lion, think themselves equally happy, and much wiser, with the pitiful cunning of the fox. Every word they

speak, however trivial the subject, is weighed before it is uttered. A disgustful silence is observed till somebody of authority has advanced an opinion, and then, with a civil leer, a doubtful and hesitating assent is given, such as may not preclude the opportunity of a subsequent retraction. If the conversation turn only on the common topics of the weather, the news, the play, the opera, they are no less reserved in uttering

[ocr errors]
« ПредыдущаяПродолжить »