Yet these sufferings have their rewards. To bear up against ill health by a sudden and strong effort, to shake off low spirits, and drive away the mist which lies thick and heavy upon the mind, gives a new state of being to the soul cheerful as the light. To sit at home in our easy chair, and send our gay thoughts abroad, as it were on wings, to thousands-to imagine them laughing over the odd fancies and drolleries which had made us vain and happy in secret, multiplies and spreads our sympathies quietly and happily through the world. In this way, too, we can pour out before the world thoughts which had never been laid open even to a friend; and make it feel our melancholy, and bear our griefs, while we still sit in the secret of our souls. The heart tells its story abroad, yet loses not its delicacy; it lays itself bare, but is still sensitive."

The burthen of the complaint is as old as the Rambler, but we have no where seen its joys and its sorrows so beautifully contrasted.

The Son is one of the most pleasing articles, perhaps the most so, of any in the whole collection, and that we may do the work justice, we shall be as copious in our selection from it as our limits will permit. It exemplifies the peculiar character and vein of thought, which we have denoted as pervading the whole work.

"The sun not set yet, Thomas ?" "Not quite, sir. It blazes through the trees on the hill yonder as if their branches were all on fire."

Arthur raised himself heavily forward, and with his hat still over his brow, turned his glazed and dim eyes towards the setting sun. It was only the night before that he had heard his mother was ill, and could survive but a day or two. He had lived nearly apart from society, and being a lad of a thoughtful, dreamy mind, had made a world to himself. His thoughts and feelings were so much in it, that except in relation to his own home, there were the same vague and strange notions in his brain concerning the state of things surrounding him, as we have of a foreign land.

The main feeling which this self-made world excited in him was love, and like most of his age, he had formed to himself a being suited to his own fancies. This was the romance of life, and though men with minds like his make imagination to stand oftentimes in the place of real existence, and to take to itself as deep feeling and concern, yet in domestic relations, which are so near, and usual, and private, they feel longer and more deeply than those who look upon their homes as only a better part of the world which they belong to. Indeed, in affectionate and good men of a visionary cast, it is in some sort only realizing their hopes and de

sires, to turn them homeward. Arthur felt that it was so, and he loved his household the more that they gave him an earnest of one day realizing all his hopes and attachments.

Arthur's mother was peculiarly dear to him, in having a character so much like his own. For though the cares and attachments of life had long ago taken place of a fanciful existence in her, yet her natural turn of mind was strong enough to give to these something of the romance of her disposition. This had led to a more than usual openness and intimacy between Arthur and his mother, and now brought to his remembrance the hours they had sat together by the fire light, when he listened to her mild and melancholy voice, as she spoke of what she had undergone at the loss of her parents and husband. Her gentle rebuke of his faults, her affectionate look of approval when he had done well, her care that he should be a just man, and her motherly anxiety lest the world should go hard with him, all crowded into his mind, and he thought that every worldly attachment was hereafter to be a vain thing.

He had passed the night between violent, tumultuous grief, and numb insensibility. Stepping into the carriage, with a slow, weak motion, like one who was quitting his sick chamber for the first time, he began his journey homeward. As he lifted his eyes upward, the few stars that were here and there over the sky, seemed to look down in pity, and shed a religious and healing light upon him. But they soon went out, one after another, and as the last faded from his imploring sight, it was as if every thing good and holy had forsaken him. The faint tint in the east soon became a ruddy glow, and the sun, shooting upward, burst over every living thing in full glory. The sight went to Arthur's sick heart, as if it were in mockery of his misery.

Leaning back in his carriage, with his hand over his eyes, he was carried along, hardly sensible it was day. The old servant, Thomas, who was sitting by his side, went on talking in a low monotonous tone; but Arthur only heard something sounding in his ears, scarcely heeding that it was a human voice. He had a sense of wearisomeness from the motion of the carriage, but in all things else the day passed as a melancholy dream.

Almost the first words Arthur spoke were those I have mentioned. As he looked out upon the setting sun, he shuddered through his whole frame, and then became sick and pale. He thought he knew the hill near him; and as they wound round it, some peculiar old trees appeared, and he was in a few minutes in the midst of the scenery near his home. The river before him reflecting the rich evening sky, looked as if poured out from a molten mine. The birds, gathering in, were shooting across each other, bursting into short, gay notes, or singing their evening

songs in the trees. It was a bitter thing to find all so bright and cheerful, and so near his own home too. His horses' hoofs struck upon the old wooden bridge. The sound went to his heart. It was here his mother took her last leave of him, and blessed him.

As he passed through the village there was a feeling of strangeness, that every thing should be just as it was when he left it. There was an undefined thought floating in his mind, that his mother's state should produce a visible change in all that he had been familiar with. But the boys were at their noisy games in the street, the laborers returning, talking together, from their work, and the old men sitting quietly at their doors. He concealed himself as well as he could, and bade Thomas hasten on.'

These reflections are singularly beautiful. He finds his mother alive, but drawing near to her last hour, and after a night of anxiety, he returns the following morning to her bedside.

After a little while, she spoke of his father, and said, she had lived with the belief that he was mindful of her, and with the conviction, which grew stronger as death approached, that she should meet him in another world. She said but little more, as she grew weaker and weaker every hour. Arthur sat by in silence holding her hand. He saw that she was sensible he was watching her countenance, for every now and then she opened her dull eye and looked towards him, and endeavored to smile.

The day wore slowly away. The sun went down, and the melancholy and still twilight came on. Nothing was heard but the ticking of the watch, telling him with a resistless power, that the hour was drawing nigh. He gasped, as if under some invisible, gigantic grasp, which it was not for human strength to struggle against.

It was now quite dark, and by the pale light of the night-lamp in the chimney corner, the furniture in the room threw huge and uncouth figures over the walls. All was unsubstantial and visionary, and the shadowy ministers of death appeared gathering round, waiting the duty of the hour appointed them. Arthur shuddered for a moment with superstitious awe; but the solemn elevation which a good man feels at the sight of the dying, took possession of him, and he became calm again.

The approach of death has so much which is exalting, that our grief is, for the time, forgotten. And could one who had seen Arthur a few hours before, now have looked upon the grave and grand repose of his countenance, he would hardly have known him.

The livid hue of death was fast spreading over his mother's face. He stooped forward to catch the sound of her breathing. It grew quick and faint.-" My mother."-She opened her eyes, for the last time upon him-a faint flush passed over her cheek

there was the serenity of an angel in her look-her hand just pressed his. It was all over.

His spirit had endured to its utmost. It sunk down from its unearthly height; and with his face upon his mother's pillow, he wept like a child.'

This is the eloquent language of genuine feeling, and the mysterious indefinite horrors conjured up by his clouded imagination are touched with a masterly hand.

In Musings,' he indulges a vein of sentiment which termin-. ates in the following high contemplations.

When such an one,' speaking of the man of a refined and feeling soul, when such an one turns away from men, and is left alone in silent communion with nature and his own thoughts, and there are no bonds on the movements of the feelings, and nothing on which he would shut his eyes, but God's own hand has made all before him as it is, he feels his spirit opening upon a new existence-becoming as broad as the sun and air-as various as the earth over which it spreads itself, and touched with that love which God has imaged in all he has formed. His senses take a quicker life-his whole frame becomes one refined and exquisite emotion, and the etherealized body is made as it were a spirit in bliss. His soul grows stronger and more active within him as he sees life intense and working throughout nature; and that which is passing away links itself with the eternal, when he finds new life beginning even with decay and hastening to put forth in some other form of beauty, and become a sharer in some new delight. His spirit is ever awake with happy sensations, and cheerful and innocent and easy thoughts. Soul and body are blending into one-the senses and thoughts mix in one delight-he sees a universe of order and beauty and joy and life, of which he becomes a part, and he finds himself carried along in the eternal going on of nature. Sudden and short-lived passions of men take no hola upon him, for he has sat in holy thought by the roar and hurry of the stream, which has rushed on from the beginning of things; and he is quiet in the tumult of the multitude, for he has watched the tracery of leaves playing safely over the foam.

The innocent face of nature gives him an open and fair mindpain and death seem passing away, for all about him is cheerful and in its spring. His virtues are not taught him as lessons, but are shed upon him, and enter into him like the light and warmth of the sun. Amidst all the variety of the earth, he sees a fitness which frees him from the formalities of rule, and lets him abroad to find a pleasure in all things, and order becomes a simple feeling of the soul.

'Religion to such an one has thoughts and visions and sensaNew Series, No. 10.

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tions, tinged as it were with a holier and brighter light than falls on other men. The love and reverence of the Creator make their abode in his imagination, and he gathers about them the earth and air and ideal worlds. His heart is made glad with the perfectness in the works of God, when he considers that even of the multitude of things that are growing up and decaying, and of those which have come and gone, on which the eye of man has never rested, each was as fair and complete as if made to live forever for our instruction and delight.

Freedom and order and beauty and grandeur are in accordance in his mind, and give largeness and height to his thoughts-he moves amongst the bright clouds, he wanders away into the measureless depths of the stars, and is touched by the fire with which God has lighted them-all that is made partakes of the eternal, and religion becomes a perpetual pleasure."

The preceding extracts, short and mutilated as they have necessarily been, give but an imperfect notion of the merits of the whole work, yet they sufficiently develop that delicate feature which predominates in the moral and in the intellectual character of the writer, and produces a beautiful harmony between both. His descriptions of scenery derive such attraction from this moral delicacy, that we regret he has not indulged more unreservedly in them. The work abounds in those speculations, or more properly reveries, which would naturally grow out of a frequent communion between a man of this temper and his own heart. And if we have sometimes thought him extravagant in building strong emotions upon trifling causes, and sometimes querulous in his disgust at the impertinence and vanities of the world, we must pardon these as the natural excesses of a sensibility which forms the peculiar beauty of his mind. Indeed, we become almost reconciled to a similar alienation from the heartless occupations of the world, when we enter the magic circle of serene and simple pleasures, which he has drawn around the threshold of domestic life. When he steps beyond these precincts, and ventures upon the brisk repartee and mixed wit of social or fashionable intercourse, the quaint and forced vivacity of his manner shows that he is not in his natural element.

We wish we could end with the enumeration of these amiable beauties; but we feel it our duty to point out a defect, which is the more dangerous from its association with these beauties. We mean an affectation of style, which disfigures some portions of the work much more than others; but which