face of a heated cook. Strange to say, they are painted red, blocked off with white compartments, as numerous as Protestant sects, and as unlovely in their narrowness. What an expenditure for ugliness and discomfort to the eye! To paint bricks their own colour, resembles the great outlay of time and money in theological schools, to enable dismal, arbitrary souls to give an approved image of themselves in their ideas of Deity.

After all, the God within us is the God we really believe in, whatever we may have learned in catechisms or creeds.

Hence to some, the divine image presents itself habitually as a dark, solemn shadow, saddening the gladsomeness of earth, like thunder-clouds reflected on the fair mirror of the sea. To others, the religious sentiment is to the soul what Spring is in the seasons, flowers to the eye, and music to the ear. In the greatest proportion of minds these sentiments are mixed, and therefore two images are reflected, one to be worshipped with love, the other with fear.

Hence, in Catholic countries, you meet at one corner of the road frightfully painted hell-fires, into which poor struggling human souls are sinking; and at another, the sweet Madonna, with her eye of pity and her lip of love. Whenever God appears to the eye of faith, as terrible in power, and stern in vengeance, the soul craves some form of mediation, and satisfies its want. As the reprobate college-boy trusts to a mother's persuasive love to intercede for him with an angry father, so does the Catholic, terrified with visions of torment, look up trustingly to the 'Blessed mother, Virgin mild.'

Not lightly, or scornfully, would I speak of any such manifestations of faith, childish as they may appear to the eye of reason. The Jewish dispensation was announced in thunder and lightning; the Christian, by a chorus of love, from angel voices. The dark shadow of the one has fearfully thrown it

self across the mild radiance of the other. Those old superstitious times could not well do otherwise than mix their dim theology with the new-born glorious hope. Well may we rejoice that they could not transmit the blessed Idea completely veiled in gloom. Since the Past will overlap upon the Present, and therefore Christianity must slowly evolve itself from Judaism, let us at least be thankful that,

'From the same grim turret fell

The shadow and the song.'

Whence came all this digression? It has as little to do with New-York, as a seraph has to do with Banks and Markets. Yet in good truth, it all came from a painted brick wall staring in at my chamber window. What a strange thing is the mind! How marvellously is the infinite embodied in the smallest fragment of the finite!

It was ungrateful in me to complain of those walls, for I am more blest in my prospect than most inhabitants of cities; even without allowing for the fact that, more than most others, I always see much within a landscape a light and a revealing' everywhere.

Opposite to me is a little, little, patch of garden, trimly kept, and neatly white-washed. In the absence of rippling brooks and blooming laurel, I am thankful for its marigolds and poppies,

'side by side,

And at each end a hollyhock,

With an edge of London Pride.'

And then between me and the sectarian brick wall, there are, moreover, two beautiful young trees. An Ailanthus, twisting its arms lovingly within its smaller sister Catalpa. One might almost imagine them two lovely nymphs suddenly transformed to trees, in the midst of a graceful, twining dance. I should be half-reluctant to cut a cluster of the beautiful crimson seed-vessels, lest I should wound the finger of some Hamadryad,

Those simple crown-twisters,

Who of one favourite tree in some sweet spot

Make home and leave it not.'.

But I must quit this strain; or you will say the fair, floating Grecian shadow casts itself too obviously over my Christianity. Perchance, you will even call me 'transcendental;' that being a word of most elastic signification, used to denote every thing that has no name in particular, and that does not especially relate to pigs and poultry.

Have patience with me, and I will come straight back from the Ilissus to New-York-thus.

You too would worship two little trees and a sunflower, if you had gone with me to the neighbourhood of the Five Points the other day. Morally and physically, the breathing air was like an open tomb. How souls or bodies could live there, I could not imagine. If you want to see something worse than Hogarth's Gin Lane, go there in a warm afternoon, when the poor wretches have come to what they call home, and are not yet driven within doors, by darkness and constables. There you will see nearly every form of human misery, every sign of human degradation. The leer of the licentious, the dull sensualism of the drunkard, the sly glance of the thief-oh, it made my heart ache for many a day. I regretted the errand of kindness that drew me there; for it stunned my senses with the amount of evil, and fell upon the strong hopefulness of my character, like a stroke of the palsy. What a place to ask one's self, 'Will the millenium ever come!'

And there were multitudes of children-of little girls. Where were their guardian angels? God be praised, the wilfully-committed sin alone shuts out their influence; and therefore into the young child's soul they may always enter.

Mournfully, I looked upon these young creatures, as I said within myself, And this is the education society gives her children-the morality of myrmi

dons, the charity of constables!' Yet in the far-off Future I saw a gleam. For these, too, Christ has died. For these was the chorus sung over the hills of Judea; and the heavenly music will yet find an echo deep in their hearts.

It is said a spacious pond of sweet, soft water, once occupied the place where Five Points stands. It might have furnished half the city with the purifying element; but it was filled up at incredible expensea million loads of earth being thrown in, before perceivable progress was made. Now, they have to supply the city with water from a distance, by the prodigious expense of the Croton Water Works.

This is a good illustration of the policy of society towards crime. Thus does it choke up nature, and then seek to protect itself from the result, by the incalculable expense of bolts, bars, the gallows, watchhouses, police courts, constables, and 'Egyptian tombs,' as they call one of the principal prisons here. If viewed only as a blunder, Satan might well laugh at the short-sightedness of the world, all the while toiling to build the edifice it thinks it is demolishing. Destroying violence by violence, cunning by cunning, is Sisyphus' work, and must be so to the end. Never shall we bring the angels among us, by 'setting one devil up to knock another devil down;' as the old woman said, in homely but expressive phrase.

LETTER IV.

September 9, 1841.

New-York enjoys a great privilege, in facility and cheapness of communication with many beautiful places in the vicinity. For six cents one can exchange the hot and dusty city, for Staten Island, Jersey, or Hoboken; three cents will convey you to

Brooklyn, and twelve and a half cents pays for a most beautiful sail of ten miles, to Fort Lee. In addition to the charm of rural beauty, all these places are bathed by deep waters.

The Indians named the most beautiful lake of New England Win-ne-pe-sauk-ey, (by corruption, Winnepiseogee,) which means, the Smile of the Great Spirit. I always think of this name, so expressively poetic, whenever I see sunbeams or moonbeams glancing on the waves.

Because this feature is wanting in the landscape, I think our beautiful Massachusetts Brookline,with its graceful, feathery elms, its majestic old oaks, its innumerable hidden nooks of greenery, and Jamaica pond, that lovely, lucid mirror of the water nymphs, is scarcely equal to Hoboken. I saw it for the first time in the early verdure of spring, and under the mild light of a declining sun. A small open glade, with natural groves in the rear, and the broad river at its foot, bears the imposing name of Elysian Fields. The scene is one where a poet's disembodied spirit might be well content to wander; but, alas, the city intrudes her vices into this beautiful sanctuary of nature. There stands a public house, with its bar room, and bowling alley, a place of resort for the idle and profligate; kept within the bounds of decorum, however, by the constant presence of respectable visiters.

Near this house, I found two tents of Indians. These children of the forest, like the monks of olden time, always had a fine eye for the picturesque. Wherever you find a ruined monastery, or the remains of an Indian encampment, you may be sure you have discovered the loveliest site in all the surrounding landscape.

A fat little pappoose, round as a tub, with eyes like black beads, attracted my attention by the comical awkwardness of its tumbling movements. I entered into conversation with the parents, and found