them down, while another seated himself across his neck and shoulders. Thus nailed to the ground, the poor fellow, knowing that there was no chance of escape, threw up his feet from the knee-joint, so as to present the soles in a horizontal position. Two men came forward with a pair of long stout bars of wood, attached together by a cord, between which they placed the feet, drawing them together with the cord so as to fix them in their horizontal position, and leave the whole flat surface exposed to the full force of the blow. In the meantime two strong Turks were standing ready, one at each side, armed with long whips much resembling our common cowskin, but longer and thicker, and made of the tough hide of the hippopotamus. While the occupation of the judge was suspended by these preparations, the janizary had presented the consul's letter. My sensibilities are not particularly acute, but they yielded in this instance. I had watched all the preliminary arrangements, nerving myself for what was to come, but when I heard the scourge whizzing through the air, and, when the first blow fell upon the naked feet, saw the convulsive movements of the body, and heard the first loud, piercing shriek, I could stand it no longer; I broke through the crowd, forgetting the governor and everything else, except the agonizing sounds from which I was escaping; but the janizary followed close at my heels, and, laying his hand upon my arm, hauled me back to the governor. If I had consulted merely the impulse of feeling, I should have consigned him, and the governor, and the whole nation of Turks, to the lower regions; but it was all important not to offend this summary dispenser of justice, and I never made a greater sacrifice of feeling to expediency, than when I re-entered his presence. The shrieks of the unhappy criminal were ringing through the chamber, but the governor received me with as calm a smile as if he had been sitting on his own divan, listening only to the strains of some pleasant music, while I stood with my teeth clenched, and felt the hot breath of the victim, and heard the whizzing of the accursed whip, as it fell again and again upon his bleeding feet. I have heard men cry out in agony when the sea was raging, and the drowning man, rising for the last time upon the mountain waves, turned his imploring arms towards us, and with his dying breath called in vain for help; but I never heard such heart-rending sounds as those from the poor bastinadoed wretch before me. I thought the governor would never make an end of reading the letter, when the scribe handed it to him for his signature, although it contained but half a dozen lines; he fumbled in his pocket for his seal, and dipped it in the ink; the impression did not suit him, and he made another, and after a delay that seemed to me eternal, employed in folding it, handed it to me with a most gracious smile. I am sure I grinned horribly in return, and almost snatching the letter, just as the last blow fell, I turned to hasten from the scene. The poor scourged wretch was silent; he had found relief in happy insensibility; I cast one look upon the senseless body, and saw the feet laid open in gashes, and the blood streaming down the legs. that moment the bars were taken away, and the mangled feet fell like lead upon the floor. I had to work my way through the crowd, and before I could escape I saw the fellow revive, and by the first natural impulse rise upon his feet, but fall again as if he had stepped upon red-hot irons. He crawled upon his hands and knees to the door of the hall, and here I rejoiced to see that, miserable, and poor, and degraded as he was, he had yet friends whose hearts yearned towards him; they took him in their arms and carried him away. poor At FREDERIC HENRY HEDGE. FREDERIC H. HEDGE was born at Cambridge, Mass., December 12, 1805. His father, Levi Hedge, was from 1810 to 1827 Professor of Logie and Metaphysics in Harvard University, and in 1818 published a System of Logic, which has been much used as a text-book in colleges, has passed through several editions, and been translated into German. He was the son of a clergyman, and was born in Warwick, Mass., in 1767. He died in Cambridge the last day of 1843. He was a laborious student, and distinguished for his painstaking fidelity as an instructor. Precience R. Hidge His son Frederic was educated in Germany, where in 1818 he was sent under the care of the historian, George Bancroft. He was a pupil of a celebrated teacher, David Ilgen, at the Gymnasium of Schulpforte, where Klopstock, Fichte, and Ranke, were instructed in their youth. He returned to America in 1823, entered Harvard, and was graduated in 1825. He studied theology; was chosen pastor of a Church in Cambridge in 1829; afterwards, in 1835, removed to Bangor in Maine, where he had charge of a congregation, and in 1850 became pastor of the Westminster Church in Providence, R. I. His literary productions have been mostly in the department of speculative and spiritual philosophy. In this province he has been eminent, as an interpreter of the German mind. He has published orations, lectures, discourses, reviews of theology, philosophy, and literature.* His poetical effusions are scattered through various periodicals and annuals. They are mostly translations from the German, of which he published several in the volume with Dr. Furness's version of the Song of the Bell at Philadelphia. One of these, which we print from a corrected copy, is THE ANGELS' SONG-FROM GOETHE'S "FAUST." The sun is still for ever sounding Are grand as in creation's prime. Of the public discourses we may mention a Fourth of July oration delivered to the citizens of Bangor; an Address at the opening of the Bangor Lyceum; Conservatism and Reform, a Phi Beta Kappa oration before the Societies of Harvard and Bowdoin. Among Dr. Hedge's numerous articles to the Christian Examiner, we may refer to a review of Coleridge in March, 1838, noticeable as one of the earliest essays from an American pen on the transcendental philosophy of Germany; an Essay on Swedenborg, November, 1838; an Essay on Schiller, July, 1884; an Essay on Phrenology, November, 1834, which excited much attention, and called forth numerous replies; an Essay on the Genius and Writings of R. W. Emerson, January, 1845; an Essay on Natural Religion, January, 1852; an Ecclesiastical Christendom, July, 1851; Romanism in its worship, January, 1854. The published sermons of Dr. Hedge include, with numerous others, a Discourse before the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company, Boston, June, 1834; a Discourse on the Death of President Harrison, Bangor, 1841; on the Death of William Ellery Channing, Bangor, 1842; a Discourse before the Graduating Class of the Cambridge Divinity School, 1849. Gabriel. And fleetly, thought surpassing, fleetly With night terrific and profound. Michael. And storms with rival fury heaving, There burning Desolation blazes, Precursor of the Thunder's way; But, Lord, thy servants own with praises The milder movement of thy day. The Three. The sight gives angels strength, though greater Are glorious as in Eden's prime. His other translations from the German are chiefly included in the volume from his pen published by Carey and Hart in 1848, The Prose Writers of Germany, which contains biographical notices of the chief authors, with selections from their writings. In the winter of 1853-4 Dr. Hedge delivered a course of Lectures on Mediaval History, before the Lowell Institute at Boston. CONSERVATISM AND REFORM.* Authority is not only a guide to the blind, but a law to the seeing. It is not only a safe-conduct to those (and they constitute the larger portion of mankind) whose dormant sense has no intuitions of its own, but we have also to consider it, as affording the awakened but inconstant mind, a security against itself, a centre of reference in the multitude of its own visions, in the conflict of its own volitions, a centre of rest. Unbounded license is equally an evil, and equally incompatible with true liberty, in thought as in action. In the one as in the other, liberty must bound and bind itself for its own preservation and best effect. It must legalize and determine itself by self-imposed laws. Law and liberty are not adverse, but different sides of one fact. The deeper the law the greater the liberty: as organic life is at once more determinate and more free than unorganized matter, a plant than a stone, a bird than a plant, the intellectual life, like the physical, must bind itself, in order that it may become effective and free. It must organize itself by means of fixed principles which shall protect it equally, against encroachment without, and anarchy within. * The individual is the product of the Past. However he may renounce the connexion, he is always the child of his time. He can never entirely shake off that relation. All the efforts made to outstrip time, to anticipate the natural growth of man by a violent disruption of old ties and total separation from the Past, have hitherto proved useless, or useful, if at all, in the way of caution, rather than of fruit. The experiment has often been tried. Men of ardent temper and lively imagination, impatient of existing evils, from which no period is exempt, have renounced society, broke loose from all their moorings in the actual, and sought in the boundless sea of dis *From a Phi Beta Kappa Oration, 1848. sent the promised land of Reform. They found what they carried; they carried what they were; they were what we all are-the offspring of their time. The aeronaut, who spurns the earth in his puffed balloon, is still indebted to it for his impetus and his wings and still, with his utmost efforts, he cannot escape the sure attraction of the parent sphere. His floating island is a part of her main. He revolves with her orbit, he is sped by her wings. We who stand below and watch his motions, know that he is one of us. He may dally with the clouds awhile, but his home is not there. Earth he is, and to earth he must return. * Find "Stand The most air-blown reformer cannot overcome the moral gravitation which connects him with his time. He owes to existing institutions the whole philosophy of his dissent, and draws, from Church and State, the very ideas by which he would fight against them, or rise above them. The individual may withdraw from society, he may spurn at all the uses of civilized life, dash the golden cup of tradition from his lips, and flee to the wilderness "where the wild asses quench their thirst." He may find others who will accompany him in his flight; but let him not fancy that the course of reform will follow him there, that any permanent organization can be based on dissent,-that society will relinquish the hard conquests of so many years and return again to original nature, wipe out the old civilization, and-with rasa tabula-begin the world anew. There is no stand-point out of society, from which society can be reformed. "Give me where to stand," was the ancient postulate. where to stand," says modern Dissent. where you are," says Goethe," and move the world.” The scholar must not coquet, in imagination, with the dowered and titled institutions of the old world, and feel it a mischance which has matched him with a portionless Republic. Let him, rather, esteem it a privilege to be so connected, and glory in the popular character of his own government, as a genuine fruit of human progress, and the nearest approximation yet made to that divine right which all governments claim. Let him not think it a shame to be with and of the people, in every genuine impulse of the popular mind: not suffering the scholar to extinguish the citizen, but remembering that the citizen is before the scholar-the elder and higher category of the two. He shall find himself to have gained intellectually, as well as socially, by free and frequent intercourse with the people, whose instincts, in many things, anticipate his reflective wisdom, and in whose unconscious movements a fact is often forefelt before it is seen by reason; as the physical changes of our globe are felt by the lower animals before they appear to man. * * the Nothing is more natural, than that men, who have contributed something in their day to illustrate or extend the path of discovery in any direction, should cling with avidity to those conclusions which they have established for themselves, and which represent the natural boundaries of their own mind butt and sea-mark of its utmost sail,"-nothing more natural than that they, for their part, should feel a disinclination to farther inquiry. But it ill becomes them to deny the possibility of farther discoveryto maintain that they have found the bottom of the well where truth lies hid, because they have reached the limits of their own specific gravity. One sees at once, that in some branches of inquiry this position is not only untenable, but the very enunciation of it absurd. It would require something more than the authority of Herschel to make us believe that creation stops with the limits of his forty feet reflector. Nor would the assertion of Sir Humphrey Davy be sufficient to convince us that all the properties of matter have been catalogued in his report. By what statute of limitations are we forbidden to indulge the same hope of indefinite progress in every other direction, which remains to us in these? MATTHEW F. MAURY. MATTHEW FONTAINE MAURY, a descendant of the Rev. James Fontaine, an eminent Huguenot preacher (the founder of a large and influential American family, and author of an autobiography which has recently for the second time been republished in connexion with a highly interesting sketch of the worthy and his descendants, by one of their number, Miss Ann Maury of New York), was born in Spottsylvania county, Virginia, January 14, 1806. His parents removed to Tennessee in his fourth year. One of a family of nine children, in a newly settled country, he would have received few of the advantages of education had it not been for the care of the bishop of the diocese, the Rev. James H. Otey, who, forming a high opinion of his intellectual promise, did much to fit him for a life of future usefulness. In 1824 he obtained a midshipman's commission, was placed on board the Brandywine, and sailed with General Lafayette to France. On his return he accompanied the frigate to the Pacific, was transferred to the Vincennes, and in that vessel completed the circumnavigation of the globe. He again sailed, as passed-midshipman, to the Pacific, where he was transferred as lieutenant to the Potomac. While at sea he devoted his leisure time to the study of mathematics, a branch of knowledge in which he at first found himself unequal to the requirements of his profession. For the purpose of extending at the same time his knowledge of modern languages he made use of Spanish mathematical works. As he pursued his investigations he became greatly inconvenienced by the necessity of referring to a number of different volumes, and with a view to save others a like difculty prepared, amid the annoyances and interruptions of life at sea, a work on navigation. It was commenced in the steerage of the Vincennes, concluded in the Potomac, and published about the year 1835, when it met with general acceptance. In the same year he was appointed astronomer to the South Sea Exploring Expedition, but, on the withdrawal of Commodore Jones from the chief command, declined the appointment. In 1839 he contributed an article to the Southern Literary Messenger, entitled A Scheme for rebuilding Southern Commerce, containing observations on the Gulf Stream and Great Circle Sailing, which were afterwards more fully developed. A few months later, in October, 1839, while on his way from Tennessee to join a surveying vessel in the harbor of New York, the stage-coach in which he was passing through Ohio was overturned, and the traveller broke a leg, dislocated a knee, and suffered other injuries, which, after several months' weary confinement, resulted in a permanent lameness, which disabled him for the active pursuit of his profession. He amused himself by writing, during the long period of imprisonment in a wretched wayside tavern to which his bandaged limb subjected him, a series of articles on various abuses in the Navy, which were published in the Southern Literary Messenger, under the pleasant title of Scraps from the Lucky Bag, by Harry Bluff. On his retirement from the Exploring Expedition, Lieutenant Maury was placed in charge of the collection of books and charts belonging to the government, which has since expanded into the National Observatory and Hydrographical office, now known as the Naval Observatory, the change of title having been made in 1855. Lieutenant Maury is at the head of both of these institutions, which owe their extent and efficiency mainly to his efforts. In 1842 he first proposed the plan for a system of uniform observations of winds and currents, which form the basis of his celebrated and valuable charts and sailing-directions. In 1853 he attended a convention of maritime nations at Brussels to carry out his suggestions for a conference to determine upon a uniform system of observations at sea. Plans were adopted by which ships, under all the great flags of Christendom, are engaged in adding to the resources of science, mapping out roads on the ocean with the precision of engineers on terra firma, and striving to obtain with equal exactness the laws of the clouds above and the depths below. In 1855 he published The Physical Geography of the Sea, a work in which he has embodied the results of his varied investigations in a narrative of remarkable clearness and interest. His descriptions of natural phenomena, and of the voyages of rival vessels, sailing at the same dates to the same ports, along his sea lines, possess dramatic interest. A pleasant vein of humor shows itself now and then as he speaks of the rummaging of garrets and sea chests for old log-books which his investigations, naturally exciting the enthusiasm of others as well as himself, called forth. This quality of humor finds a wider scope in the magazine papers of the writer, and is a pleasant characteristic of his correspondence and conversation. 8vo. pp. 274. A second edition, revised and enlarged, immediately appeared. In addition to this volume and the letter-press accompanying his various charts, Lieutenant Maury is the author of several addresses delivered in various parts of the country, among which we may mention those before the Geological and Mineralogical Society of Fredericksburg, May, 1836; before the Southern Scientific Convention at Memphis in 1849 on the Pacific railway, and at most of the other meetings of the same body; and at the first anniversary of the American Geographical and Statistical Society in the city of New York, 1854. LAW OF COMPENSATION IN THE ATMOSPHERE.' Whenever I turn to contemplate the works of nature, I am struck with the admirable system of compensation, with the beauty and nicety with which every department is poised by the others; things and principles are meted out in directions the most opposite, but in proportions so exactly balanced and nicely adjusted, that results the most harmonious are produced. It is by the action of opposite and compensating forces that the earth is kept in its orbit, and the stars are held suspended in the azure vault of heaven; and these forces are so exquisitely adjusted, that, at the end of a thousand years, the earth, the sun, and moon, and every star in the firmament, is found to come to its proper place at the proper moment. Nay, philosophy teaches us, when the little snowdrop, which in our garden walks we see raising its beautiful head to remind us that spring is at hand, was created, that the whole mass of the earth, from pole to pole, and from circumference to centre, must have been taken into account and weighed, in order that the proper degree of strength might be given to the fibres of even this little plant. Botanists tell us that the constitution of this plant is such as to require that, at a certain stage of its growth, the stalk should bend, and the flower should bow its head, that an operation may take place which is necessary in order that the herb should produce seed after its kind; and that, after this, its vegetable health requires that it should lift its head again and stand erect. Now, if the mass of the earth had been greater or less, the force of gravity would have been different; in that case, the strength of fibre in the snow-drop, as it is, would have been too much or too little; the plant could not bow or raise its head at the right time, fecundation could not take place, and its family would have become extinct with the first individual that was planted, because its "seed" would not have been in "itself," and therefore it could not reproduce itself. Now, if we see such perfect adaptation, such exquisite adjustment, in the case of one of the smallest flowers of the field, how much more may we not expect "compensation" in the atmosphere and the ocean, upon the right adjustment and due performance of which depends not only the life of that plant, but the well-being of every individual that is found in the entire vegetable and animal kingdoms of the world? When the east winds blow along the Atlantic coast for a little while, they bring us air saturated with moisture from the Gulf Stream, and we complain of the sultry, oppressive, heavy atmosphere; the invalid grows worse, and the well man feels ill, because, when he takes this atmosphere into his lungs, it is already so charged with moisture that it cannot take up and carry off that which encumbers his lungs, From the Physical Geography of the Sea. and which nature has caused his blood to bring and leave there, that respiration may take up and carry off. At other times the air is dry and hot; he feels that it is conveying off matter from the lungs too fast; he realizes the idea that it is consuming him, and he calls the sensation parching. Therefore, in considering the general laws which govern the physical agents of the universe, and regulate them in the due performance of their offices, I have felt myself constrained to set out with the assumption that, if the atmosphere had had a greater or less capacity for moisture, or if the proportion of land and water had been different-if the earth, air, and water had not been in exact counterpoise-the whole arrangement of the animal and vegetable kingdoms would have varied from their present state. But God chose to make those kingdoms what they are; for this purpose it was neces sary, in his judgment, to establish the proportions between the land and water, and the desert, just as they are, and to make the capacity of the air to circulate heat and moisture just what it is, and to have it do all its work in obedience to law and in subservience to order. If it were not so, why was power given to the winds to lift up and transport moisture, or the property given to the sea by which its waters may become first vapor, and then fruitful showers or gentle dews? If the proportions and properties of land, sea, and air were not adjusted according to the reciprocal capacities of all to perform the functions required by each, why should we be told that he "measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and comprehended the dust in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance?" Why did he span the heavens, but that he might mete out the atmosphere in exact proportion to all the rest, and impart to it those properties and powers which it was necessary for it to have, in order that it might perform all those offices and duties for which he designed it? Harmonious in their action, the air and sea are obedient to law and subject to order in all their movements; when we consult them in the perform ance of their offices, they teach us lessons concerning the wonders of the deep, the mysteries of the sky, the greatness, and the wisdom, and goodness of the Creator. The investigations into the broad-spreading circle of phenomena connected with the winds of heaven and the waves of the sea are second to none for the good which they do and the lessons which they teach. The astronomer is said to see the hand of God in the sky; but does not the rightminded mariner, who looks aloft as he ponders over these things, hear his voice in every wave of the sea that "claps its hands," and feel his presence in every breeze that blows? HERMAN HOOKER, A BOOKSELLER of Philadelphia, who began life as a student of divinity at Princeton, and subsequently became a clergyman of the Protestant Episcopal Church, the active duties of which he was compelled to relinquish by ill health, was born at Poultney, Vermont, about the year 1806. He is the author of several works esteemed for their Christian philosophy; of these the chief are The Portion of the Soul, or Thoughts on its Attributes and Tendencies as Indications of its Destiny, published in 1835; Popular Infidelity, entitled in a late edition, The Philosophy of Unbelief in Morals and Religion, as Discernible in the Faith and Character of Men; The Uses of Adversity and the Provisions of Consolation; a vo lume of Maxims; and The Christian Life, a Fight of Faith. As a characteristic specimen of Dr. Hooker's skilful evolution of his topic, we cite a passage of a practical character from the "Philosophy of Unbelief:" GRATITUDE TO GOD. It requires no great insight into human nature, to discover the remnants of a now fallen, but once glorious structure; and, what is most remarkable, to see that the remains of this ancient greatness are more apt to be quickened and drawn out by their semblances and qualities, found in creatures, than by the bright and full perfection of them which is in the Creator; that the heart puts on its most benign face, and sends forth prompt returns of gratitude and love to creatures who have bestowed on us favor and displayed other amiable qualities, while He, whose goodness is so great, so complete, so pervading, that there is none besides it, is unrequited, unheeded, unseen, though hanging out his glory from the heavens, and coming down to us in streams of compassion and love, which have made an ocean on earth that is to overflow and fill it. How strange it is, that all this love, so wonderful in itself, so undeserved, so diffused, that we see it in every beauty, and taste it in every enjoyment,-should be lost on creatures whose love for the gentler and worthier qualities of each other, runs so often into rapture and devotion? How strange that they should be so delighted with streams which have gathered such admixtures of earth, which cast up such "mire and dirt," and have such shallows and falls that we often wreck our hopes in them.-as not to be reminded by them of the great and unmixed fountain whence they have flowed, or of the great ocean, to whose dark and unbottomed depths they will at last settle, as too earthy to rise to its pure and glorious surface! There are many mysteries in human nature, but none greater than this: for while it shows man is so much a creature of sense and so devoid of faith, that objects, to gain his attention and affection, must not only be present to him, but have something of sense and self in them, we are still left to wonder how he could, with such manifestations of divine goodness in him, around him, and for him, have failed to see and adore them, and become so like a brute, as not to think of God, the original of all that is lovely, when thinking of those his qualities which so please and affect him in creatures; and this, though they be so soiled and defaced by sin, that his unmixed fondness for any the most agreeable of them, instead of being an accomplishment, is a sure indication of a mind sunk greatly below the standard allotted to it by the Creator. Our wonder will be raised higher still, if we consider that our nature, when most corrupt and perverse, is not wholly lost to all sense of gratitude, but may be wrought upon by human kindness, when all the amazing compassion and love of God fail to affect it; if we consider that the very worst of men who set their faces against the heavens, affronting the mercy and defying the majesty thereof, are sometimes so softened with a sense of singular and undeserved favors, that their hearts swell with grateful sentiments towards their benefactors, and something akin to virtue is kindled up where nothing of the kind was seen before; we might think it incredible, if there was any doubting of what we see and know. When we see such men so ready to acknowledge their obligations to their fellows, and to return service for service; so impatient of being thought ungrateful, when they have any character or interest to promote by it, and sometimes when they have not; so strongly affected with the goodness of him who has interposed between them and temporal danger or death, and yet so little moved by the love of God in Christ, which has undertaken their rescue from eternal and deserved woes, and not merely their rescue, but their exaltation to fellowship with himself, and to the pleasures for evermore at his right hand,- -a love compared with which the greatest love of creatures is as a ray of light to the sun, and that ray mixed and darkened, while this is so disinterested and free in the grounds and motives of it, that it is exercised towards those who have neither merit to invite, nor disposition to receive it; when we see this, and find that this love, so worthy in itself, so incomprehensible in its degree and in the benefits it would confer, is the only love to which they make no returns of thankfulness or regard, we may ascribe as much of it as we please to the hardness and corruption of their hearts, but that will not account for such conduct. Depravity, considered by itself, will not enable us fully to understand it. Depraved, sensual, and perverse as they are, they have something in them that is kindled by human kindness, and why should it not be kindled by the greater kindness of God our Saviour?" It is not because it is a divine kindness; not that it is less needed not that it is bestowed in less measure, or at less expense. And if it is because they do not apprehend this kindness, do not feel their need of it, do not see anything affecting in the measure and expense of it, this is infidelity; and it grows out of an entire misconception of their own character, and of the character and law of God. It is a total blindness to distant and invisible good and evil. It is a venturing of everything most important to themselves on an uncertainty, which they would not and could not do, if they had any understanding of the value of the interests at stake. They really see nothing important but the gratifications of sense and time: still they have the remains of a capacity for something higher. These may be contemplated with profit, if not with admiration. They resemble the motions in the limbs and heart of animals, when the head is severed from the body. They are symptoms of a life that of itself must come to nothing, a life that is solely pouring itself out on the ground. But as this is all the life they have, an image of life, and that only of life in death; and as the motions of it are only excited by the creature's kindness, we discover in their best virtues, or rather, in their only breathings and indications of virtue, the evidence of a faithless heart. WILLIAM R. WILLIAMS. A HIGHLY esteemed clergyman of the Baptist denomination, who has for many years past been minister of the Amity street congregation in New York. He is the son of a former clergyman, of Welsh origin, much respected in the city. Though a quiet and retired student, fond of books and skilled in their various lore, and more given to discourse of his favorite topics at home than abroad, Dr. Williams has on several occasions afforded the public, beyond his attached congregation, proof of his ability. His occasional addresses and lectures, chiefly in the direct course of his ministry, show a mind of fine order, exhibiting delicacy of taste, devotional earnestness, and the reading of the cultivated scholar. They are mostly included in a volume of Miscellanies, published in 1850, |