LESSON IV.

IMAGINARY AND REAL ENDOWMENTS.

1. THE fire of a glowing imagination may make folly look pleasing, and lend a beauty to objects which have none in them; just as the sun-beams may paint a cloud, and diversify it with beautiful stains of light, however dark, unsubstantial, and empty in itself. But nothing can shine with undiminished luster, but religion and knowledge, which are essentially and intrinsically bright. Among the wise and good useless goodnature is the object of pity; ill-nature, of hatred; but nature, beautified and improved by an assemblage of moral and intellectual endowments, is the only object of a solid and lasting

esteem.

2. Relentless Time, that steals with silent tread,

Shall tear away the trophies of the dead;
Fame, on the pyramid's aspiring top,

With sighs shall her recording trumpet drop;
The feeble characters of Glory's hand,
Shall perish, like the tracks upon the sand;

But not with these expire the sacred flame

Of Virtue, or the good man's awful name.--BOWLES.

LESSON V.

DEFINITIONS.-1. Efrused, (ef or ex, out; fused, poured.), poured out; shed forth.

2. PERENNIAL, (per, through; ennial, annual.), continuing through the year; perpetual.

3. ORIENT, the east; the rising, as of the sun or moon.

4. EMPYREAL, (em or en, in; pyreal, belonging to fire.), formed of pure fire or light; pertaining to the purest and lightest region of heaven.

ASPIRATIONS AFTER THE INFINITE.

1. SAY, why was man so eminently raised

Amid the vast creation? why ordained

AKENSIDE.

Through life and death to dart his piercing eye,
With thoughts beyond the limit of his fame;

2.

3.

4.

But that the Omnipotent might send him forth,
In sight of mortal and immortal powers,
As on a boundless theater, to run
The great career of justice,—to exalt
His generous aim to all diviner deeds,-

To chase each partial purpose from his breast;
And through the mists of passion and of sense,
And through the tossing tide of chance and pain,
To hold his course unfaltering, while the voice
Of Truth and Virtue, up the steep ascent
Of Nature, calls him to his high reward,——
The applauding smile of Heaven?

Else, wherefore burns
In mortal bosoms this unquenchéd hope

That breathes, from day to day, sublimer things,
And mocks possession? Wherefore darts the mind
With such resistless ardor to embrace

Majestic forms; impatient to be free,

Spurning the gross control of willful might;
Proud of the strong contention of her toils;
Proud to be daring?

Who but rather turns

To Heaven's broad fire his unconstrained view,

Than to the glimmering of a waxen flame?
Who that, from Alpine hights, his laboring eye
Shoots round the wide horizon, to survey

Nilus or Ganges rolling his bright wave

[shade,

Through mountains, plains, through empires black with

And continents of sand, will turn his gaze

To mark the windings of a scanty rill

That murmurs at his feet?

The high-born soul

Disdains to rest her heaven-aspiring wing
Beneath her native quarry. Tired of earth,
And this diurnal scene, she springs aloft

5.

Through fields of air; pursues the flying storm;
Rides on the vollied lightning through the heavens;
Or, yoked with whirlwinds and the northern blast,
Sweeps the long track of day. Then high she soars
The blue profound, and, hovering round the sun,
Beholds him pouring the redundant stream
Of light; behold's his unrelenting sway

Bend the reluctant planets to absolve
The fated rounds of Time.

Thence far effused,'

She darts her swiftness up the long career
Of devious comets; through its burning signs,
Exulting, measures the perennial' wheel

Of Nature, and looks back on all the stars,
Whose blended light, as with a milky zone,
Invests the orient. Now, amazed she views
The empyreal' waste, where happy spirits hold,
Beyond this concave heaven, their calm abode;
And fields of radiance, whose unfading light
Has traveled the profound six thousand years,
Nor yet arrives in sight of mortal things.

6. Even on the barriers of the world, untired
She meditates the eternal depth below;
Till half recoiling, down the headlong steep
She plunges,―soon o'erwhelmed and swallowed up
In that immense of being. There her hopes
Rest at the fated goal. For from the birth
Of mortal man, the Sovereign Maker said,
That not in humble nor in brief delight,
Not in the fading echoes of Renown,
Power's purple robe, nor Pleasure's flowery lap,
The soul should find enjoyment; but from these
Turning disdainful to an equal good,

Through all the ascent of things enlarge her view,
Till every bound at length should disappear,
And infinite perfection close the scene.

LESSON VI.

EXPLANATORY NOTES.-1. PERICLES was an illustrious statesman, orator, and warrior of Athens, who died 429 years before Christ. For forty years he was at the head of public affairs at Athens, and the flourishing state of the empire during his administration, caused the Athenians publicly to mourn his loss, and to venerate his memory.

2. ACROPOLIS was the citadel of Athens. It was built on a rock, and was accessible only on one side. The temple of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom, war, and the arts, was at its base.

3. PHIDIAS was a celebrated sculptor of Athens. At the request of PERICLES, he made a statue of Minerva. But having been accused of carving his own image and that of Pericles on the shield of the statue, he was banished. To revenge this injustice, he executed the statue of Jupiter Olympus, which far surpassed that of Minerva, and which has been esteemed one of the wonders of the world. He died 432 years before Christ. 4. MUSSULMAN is another name for Mohammedan, a follower of Mohammed, the false prophet, who appeared at Mecca in Arabia about 600 years after Christ.

5. SAMUEL JOHNSON and EDMUND BURKE were celebrated English writers of the Eighteenth century.

6. WILBERFORCE was a distinguished philanthropist, born 1759, whose exertions to procure the abolition of the slave trade, gave him a high rank among the benefactors of mankind.

THE VANITY OF EARTHLY GLORY.

WAYLAND.

"See the wide waste of all-devouring years!
How Rome her own sad sepulcher appears!

With nodding arches, broken temples spread!
The very tombs now vanished, like their dead!"

1. THE crumbling tomb-stone, the gorgeous mausoleum, the sculptured marble, and the venerable cathedral, all bear witness to the instinctive desire within us to be remembered by coming generations. But how short-lived is the immortality which the works of our hands can confer! The noblest monuments of art that the world has ever seen, are covered with the soil of twenty centuries. The works of the age of Pericles', lie at the foot of the Acropolis2 in indiscriminate ruin. The plowshare turns up the marble which the hand of Phidias had chiseled into beauty, and the Mussulman has folded his flock beneath the falling columns of the temple of Minerva.

2. But even the works of our hands too frequently survive the memory of those who have created them. And were it otherwise, could we thus carry down to distant ages the recollection of our own existence, it were surely childish to waste the energies of an immortal spirit, in the effort to make it known to other times, that a being whose name was written with certain letters of the alphabet, once lived, and flourished, -and died.

3. Neither sculptured marble, nor stately column, can reveal to other ages the lineaments of the spirit; and these alone can embalm our memory in the hearts of a grateful posterity. As the stranger stands beneath the dome of St. Paul's, or treads, with religious awe, the silent aisles of Westminster Abbey, the sentiment which is breathed from every object around him, is, the utter emptiness of sublunary glory.

4. The fine arts, obedient to private affection or public gratitude, have here embodied, in every form, the finest conceptions, of which their age was capable. Each one of these monuments has been watered by the tears of the widow, the orphan, or the patriot. But generations have passed away, and mourners, and mourned have sunk together into forgetfulThe aged crone, or the smooth-tongued beadle, as now he hurries you through aisles and chapel, utters, with measured cadence and unmeaning tone, for the thousandth time, the name and lineage of the once honored dead; and then gladly dismisses you to repeat again his well-conned lesson to another group of idle passers-by.

ness.

5. Such, in its most august form, is all the immortality that matter can confer. It is by what we ourselves have done, and not by what others have done for us, that we shall be remembered by after ages. It is by thought that has aroused the intellect from its slumbers, which has "given luster to virtue and dignity to truth," or by those examples which have inflamed the soul with the love of goodness, and not by means of sculptured marble, that we hold communion with Shakspeare and Milton, with Johnson and Burke', with Howard and Wilberforce".