Selections from Catullus, with English notes, Seymour's Mornings' among the Jesuits at Rome, ERRATUM-Page 141, line 33 from top, for from the time of her decease, read from the THE NEW ENGLANDER. No. XXV. FEBRUARY, 1849. ART. I. THE NEW EARTH. The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the year 1849. Boston: Charles C. Little and James Brown. 12mo, pp. 370. THE American Almanac, of which the twentieth volume is now before us, needs no commendation to those who have known its character from the beginning. In addition to the great amount of astronomical information appropriate to an almanac, each successive issue of the work contains a body of statistics and of miscellaneous knowledge which gives it a permanent value. In this volume the elaborate article on "the Coast Survey of the United States;" that on "the Increase of Population in the United States as affected by Immigration;" that on "the Ice trade in the United States ;" and others that might be mentioned, are articles which can not become obsolete. A work enriched with such materials will always be too valuable to be thrown aside as an "old almanac." Το Among the most valuable portions of the volume as a permanent book of reference, are its obituary notices, and its exact and condensed chronicle of the events of the preceding year. our minds there is also an impressive moral in those pages. An almanac, as such, is essentially prophetic. It makes its appearance as the herald of the future year. It comes laden with laborious calculations about months and weeks and days that are as yet in the bosom of eternity. With the precision of science it foretells the day and hour, the degree and duration, of every eclipse the changes of every waxing and waning moon-the time of every ebbing and flowing tide-the moment of every sun rise and every sunset. But to these things, and such as these, its scientific foresight is confined. What great events in the affairs of men the coming year will bring-who that sees the opening will also see the closing of the year which it spreads before us-it can not tell. It can only tell us that in such respects the year that is coming may be expected to resemble the years that have gone. So the years pass on, each with its freight of destiny. The memorable 1848 is "gone with the years before the flood;" but it has left its traces ineffaceable upon millions of immortal minds. It has overturned thrones, and swept away policies and systems, which carried with them the destiny of nations and of unborn ages. It has left its traces also upon the material world which men inhabit. It has furrowed many a sad spot with graves. It has extended the domain and multiplied the material monuments of civilization, building roads and cities, opening mines and quarries, and encroaching on the dark primeval forests. Like every other year since the creation, it has been contributing its part to those great physical changes of which geology is the record, abrading with its frosts and rains the rocky mountain sides, adding to the alluvium of the valleys, extending the deposits that make the deltas of great rivers, and here and there slowly lifting up the deep foundations of the ocean. Thus God is working in the midst of the years." Thus, all along the slow procession of the ages, he to whom a thousand years are as one day, is steadily pursuing and accomplishing his own great plans in nature and in history. "in In the prophetic scriptures, and particularly in the writings of Isaiah, great physical changes are figuratively introduced to set forth the greatness of the spiritual and social changes which God. will bring to pass in the progress and extension of his kingdom among men. "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing." "In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert;—and a high way shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called the way of holiness." The valleys are to be exalted, and the mountains and hills are to be made low; the crooked places are to be made straight, and the rough places plain, and so the glory of Jehovah shall be revealed, and all mankind shall see it together. In the same bold poetic style, God himself is represented as saying, "Behold I create new heavens and a new earth; and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind." There is a fitness in the use of such figures, beyond what would be discovered by a superficial commentator; for the advancement of that great revolution in human affairs, which is to fill the earth with the knowledge and the fear of God, involves certain correlative changes in the aspect of external nature, and in the influences and effects of external nature upon the minds of men. In this sense-different indeed from that simply figurative sense which was in the minds of the prophets, yet involved in the prophetic meaning of the figure-we may say that God, in the progress of this world's history, is creating new heavens and a new earth. The world itself which is the theater of human history, is changed gradually and sometimes rapidly, as by a new creation, while the designs and works of the eternal Providence are advancing toward that final sabbath when God resting again from his completed work shall pronounce that all is good. This terrestrial world, as it is discovered and exploredas its resources for the happiness of its human population are brought into use-as the hidden agencies in the working of its elements are detected and subdued and made productive—as its surface is beautified with culture, and adorned with habitations, monuments, temples, and all the constructions of human art-is becoming a new earth. Nay the very heavens, though to the uninstructed eye they remain the same as when our first parents went forth from Eden, are changed in respect to human apprehension, and in respect to their influence on the minds and the welfare of men. Already it may be said that those ancient heavens to which the Pagan looked with superstitious awe, paying his adorations to the sun and moon and starry host-those heavens to which the astrologer looked up, through so many ages, hoping to read there the decrees of destiny, have passed away. Those heavens which seemed of old to encircle the earth with the blue concave of a solid firmament, are no longer what they once were. At the invention of the instruments of discovery with which God in the progress of his plans has enriched mankind for the purposes of modern science, "those narrow inflexible heavens," as another has well said, "suddenly opened, and discovered a perspective of immeasurable extent. All the accustomed images of the heavens rolled out like a tent, of the firmament stretched out like a scroll, ceased to express and embrace the truth. The reality carried it over poetry; men were accustomed to a universe bound up within certain limits, suddenly the horizon increases-falls back-extends itself to infinitude." These heavens which we behold, are in that sense new heavens. So the earth which we inhabit in these last days, is, in comparison with that in which the nations dwelt of old, a new earth. What was the earth as Isaiah and his contemporaries conceived of it? It was comparatively a narrow world.. The King of Egypt and the King of Babylon were contending, as they thought, for its universal empire; while not only America and the vast realms of Eastern Asia, but also Britain and all Northern Europe, and even the tribes that dwelt upon the streams of the Danube, had never heard of the Euphrates or the Nile. Long afterwards, the king of a country on the opposite side of the Mediterranean, almost beyond the boundaries of the earth as Isaiah knew it, marched with his Macedonian phalanx from Greece to the Euphrates, conquering as he went, and thence went on, still conquering, to beyond the Indus; and there supposing himself to have conquered the world, he wept that he had not another world to conquer. As the ages rolled on, and the plans of God's providence unfolded themselves, the earth grew larger. Cities arose where once were barbarous wildernesses. Commerce extended itself into regions before unknown. Conquest and military domination checkered the earth, as then known, with great roads for the march of armies and the conveyance of the means of war, thus binding discordant nations into one great empire; and then those roads became the highways of peaceful commerce and of humanizing intercourse. The earth, when Rome had built up her mighty dominion, and had gathered her marvelous riches, and had constructed, on her own seven hills and in all her provinces, the monuments of her imperial magnificence and power-was, in no unimportant sense, a new earth. The physical changes which were made on the earth in the progress of the Roman empire-changes distinguishable from the mere fact of conquest and dominion-the cities and fortifications that were built, the roads and aqueducts that were constructed, the progress that was made in the building of ships and the art of navigation, the communications that were established for commerce, making distant climes and races mutually dependenthave never ceased to affect the condition of mankind, and never will. By those and the like changes, the earth, considered as the habitation of mankind, was in no insignificant degree, renovated and prepared for new manifestations of God's glory,-as a dwelling house is renovated when the architect opens new doors and windows, cuts new passages through old partitions, provides new conveniences for the inmates, and puts a new face of order and beauty on the whole. But God's work of creating a new earth, in the view which we are now taking of it, was not completed when the earth had been brought into that condition in which it was fit that the gospel should be revealed, and the church of the new dispensation set up. That work must still go on, partly as subordinate to, and partly as resulting from those moral and spiritual changes in which the kingdom of God is manifested. The invention of the mariner's compass, and the application of astronomy to geography and navigation, revealed the earth to man as the telescope revealed the heavens, and brought all the regions of the globe into new relations. Under the light of these inventions and improvements, commerce and maritime adventure, instead of creeping |