In Nature there is nothing melancholy."

So saith Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Nor is there. For melancholy, we know, means black bile, and a misanthropist is a miσúvớрwños—a man-hater— both of them inconsistent with the loveunity of brethren. We have absolutely no faith in the atrabiliar, and regard much of the "inarticulate dumb show," and all of the lugubrious utterances of our numberless Byronlets, very much in the same light as we do the disconsolate brayings of some woe-begone A—.

But, while these are our sentiments— there is, nevertheless, in every person of fine feelings, a tinge of sadness--the resuit of the strange, motley minglings of these awful life-and-death commingling scenes that seems to steep nature in tears, and renders everything sadly solema to the eye and to the heart.

We remember reading, some years ago, in those delightful "Conversations with Goethe," by Eckermann, a passage wherein Goethe refers to the modern "Passion-school" of poetry, the followers of which, says he, seem to regard every person as sick, and the whole world one vast lazaretto-and observes that it is the function of poetry to make us more contented with life, and to exhibit the joyous side thereof. Now, this may be just, but it would be well for us to remember that the author of this dictuin was he who, a few years previously, with passionate fire-words, penned the Sorrows of Werter!

Else how, indeed, are we to interpret the melodious moanings of a poor Shelley, filing the earth," as our great, benignant Thomas Carlyle tells us," with inarticulate wail; like the infinite inarticalate grief and weeping of forsaken children ?"

And more especially is what we have enunciated above, the case with that class which we may call sensitive spirits. For we recognize two types of man: the cold, heavy, sluggish, unexcitable, nil admirari man—the phlegmatic, and he whoun nature has strung with finer chords-he of the flashing eye, and the impulsive temperament, and the acute perception, and the exquisite sensibility

the sensitive man.

Now, this sensitiveness is an innate,

an unbought thing-coming with and forming the very framework and tissue of one's being-not at all to be dispensed with, save at the peril of losing your own self. And this we declare, albeit it may appear unorthodox-albeit parents train and teachers thrash us into a contrary belief--and these great world-influences seen all to tend towards the making of us a community of apathists.

The sum total of their teaching may be thus expressed: "Nature has made us altogether wrong; we, however, are going to rectify nature. And, in order to effect this, begin by getting rid of all those fine feelings; they are nothing but romance, and sentimentality, and very troublesome at best. Make yourself hardy (i. e. heartless). Scour off this exquisite coating of susceptibility, so that, instead of a soul on whose surface every passing sunbeam and shadow may daguerreotype itself, you will be sensible to naught that comes not in positive cuffs and downright hard blows!"

Now, to these doctrines, friend, we, for one, cannot subscribe credo. Nay, on this score, we are utter unbelievers! We say, feelings make the man-opinions are but the outer dress. We live, as saith Festus,

"In feelings, not in figures on a dial ;

We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives,

Who thinks most-feels the noblest-acts the best!"

"Nature," says Novalis-that most ethereal of thinkers-"is an Eolian harp, a musical instrument; whose tones again are keys to higher strings in us.” And this is that which constitutes sensitiveness-the more heart-tones that we have in unison with the great Æolian harp of Nature, that resounds with jubilee and wail all around us-in proportion as we increase the points of affectibility-in proportion as our feelings pulsate with the great heart of humanityso much, and in such proportion, are we sensitive.

And is it, then, that there are those who are to an exquisite degree alive to all vague, boundless, inexplicable impressions; to whom

"The meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears;"

and whose heart-tones tremble, in pangs or in pleasures, to every note of

"The still, slow music of humanity ?"

There are. Nor are they to be regarded otherwise than with wonder and awe by us-presenting, as they do, endless and interesting anthropological studies.

Poor Jean Jacques, for instance. Here is, in effect, a sensitive spirit. With a reticulation of nerves the finest and most susceptible possible--thrilling in ecstasy, or writhing in agony-full of a thousand whims, and humors, and inconsequences--vacillating between the poles of endless contradictions, presenting a very Sphinx-riddle for solution-the sublimation of his own happiness and woe. Readily can we understand his bewilderment-his perfect bamboozlement at the generation of inane buckram individuals among whom, by some strange mishap, or anachronism, he found himself existing. And perfectly can we appreciate how, living among such a race, he should imagine himself to be essentially different from any possible human creature. "Je ne suis fait comme aucun de ceux que j'ai vus; j'ose croire n'être fait comme aucun de ceux qui existent. Si je ne vaux pas mieux, au moins je suis autre. Si la nature a bien ou mal fait de briser le moule dans lequel elle m'a jeté, c'est ce dont on ne peut juger qu'après m'avoir lu."

This is his constantly reiterated declaration. Now, this was just the case with Bernardin de Saint Pierre, and a score of others whom we might mention. But the thought was merely imaginary. There is not in them a single finesse of feeling, not a nuance of character, but that has been felt and illustrated in multitudes of individual experiences-which, in fact, has been, is now, and shall be.

This, indeed, is one of the peculiarities characteristic of the class to which we refer. Each individual conceives himself to be sui generis-perfectly unique in his formation-a very Phoenix, only that no new bird ever springs out of his ashes. "Ah!" says the sentimental he or she-"I don't expect to be appreciated-I was born to be misunderstood-I don't feel as other people do-and there's no help for it!" And so the matter rests-he wrapping himself up in this incrustation of a determi

nation that he is never to be understood. How long? For ever? ... Not generally. Until, in the profundities of the soul, he realizes that life is a struggle-not at all an attainment, and feels that it is not in sentiment alone, but in feeling combined with action, that true happiness consists.

And here we return to the original question of sensitiveness. Now let us see if the application of our etymologic wand will not raise from the dead and buried past, some shapes that may assist us in the realization of the whole subject.

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Sensitive," is merely the Latinized form of our good old Saxon adjective, "feeling"-a sensitive person is, therefore, just a person of feeling. And to show that there is, or was, a proper degree of appreciation among mankind on this subject, we may observe that "Sense "that sublimation of everything that is excellent and desirable in human nature, is but an abstraction from this same verb, to feel-the idea of which underlies and vitalizes it. So it is with those two beautifully expressive words, "compassion," and "sympathy," that sound forth with the soft, wailing melody of an infinite, world-embracing pity-both of them imply a fellow-suffering, a fellow-feeling.

Oh! what a story do these words tell us-how they burst with meaning! And what a perversion, what a radical untruthfulness, and unfaithfulness to the holiest emotions of our being does it manifest, when these precious, priceless words (and worse still, the feelings which they symbolize) are warped to denote mere pretended, tawdry, pseudo-emotions -when sentiment degenerates into sentimentality.

But that there are fine feelings-that there is even a subdued solemn sadness -which are at once natural and noble, we can neither afford to lose sight of nor deny. And why not? Is not life itself even such? Amid Nature's blush and bloom-even though

Sentio, to feel.

yet she cannot quite accomplish: it. Still stalks there over her fairest scenes the Shadow

"Grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt and ominous "—of an infinite sorrow. The shadow of ourselves? Perchance!

And then, in this strange, particolored life of ours, doubt forms the back-ground upon which every picture paints itself. Every system rests upon hypothesis, the actual merges into the shadowy confines of the probable and the possible, and the whole

"Is rounded with a sleep."

The Sphinx is no mere philosophic idealization or poetic myth, but a profoundest reality-a reality which every heroic soul must experience as a very condition of its heroism. Fate surrounds us with unanswerable problems, and an "endless study" with which to tantalize and in vain occupy ourselves, and then sets us to eating our own souls, from the sheer impossibility of an answer. These "Obstinate questionings

Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings,
Blank misgivings of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,

High instincts before which our mortal nature Doth tremble like a guilty thing surprised," eternally haunt and trouble us.

Thus has the bewildered wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting, question after question, into the Sibylcave of Destiny, and receive no answer but an echo."

Do we not live out a childhood teeming with these dreams?

For many a long, long summer's day have we lain on the heathery hill-side, without the power, and, indeed, without the desire to move, gazing with calm placidity, or breast heaving with ecstasy of emotion on the deep blue ether that hung over us, listening

and.

"To the cadence of the whirling world Which dances round the sun,"

"With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls," we would string fancy into fancy, comtine together all we have ever heard or imagined concerning ourselves, or nature, or God-pursue with a motley, yet Dot incoherent logic, a thought-linking Vagary with vagary and the known with the unknown, till we found our selves in labyrinthine mazes from which we fain would have-but found it impossible extricated ourselves. And still there would come ever up the eternal Why; till we would turn us round, and

resting our head on our arms, weep the tears of baffled inquires and heart throbbings unresponded to-unresponded to, because their answer is only to be found in that Absolute which is their birthplace, and which to us, exists but in the desire. And so we glide through a youth

"Haunted for ever by the Eternal Mind."

But even in manhood, there are moments solemn and calm, when, amid our sad satiety, we ask ourselves these same child-questionings over again. Times in which we realize with Dante that "Tutte l'oro, chè sotto la luna,

E che già fu, di queste anime stanche
Non poterebbe farne posar una."

And when the same eternal whence and why and whither, come with awful force over us. But still without a response. Why? Because the Finite can never make out the theorem of the Infinite.

We stand beneath "the long-drawn aisles and fretted vaults" of a vast mystery-temple-at each end of which hang, in drapery folds, the curtains of life and death. Through the mysterystained windows, glimmer faint streaks of a dim, religious light-which light we name knowledge. The phantasmagorical fetters of a sense, of a phenomenal world, bind us and limit our experience. How, then, can we hope to arrive at a solution to the infinite problems?

Have we not, then, cause for thoughtfulness-for sadness-for sorrow? And then, in addition, come the boundless "miseries of human life "-the concentrated woes of mankind wailing in infinite discord, and lacerating every heart possessed of a particle of sensibility. And so the tender heart sinks down desponding, the consummation of the reali zation being the consummation of his despair.

Moreover, this acuteness of sensibility, allied to a feeling of longing, constitutes the very essence of poesy. "Hast thou not found some spot

Where miserable man might find a happier lot?" is the language of poetry. The response thereto-lying all around us, in “thousand-figured, thousand-toned harmonious nature"-she, too, gives us. For, indeed, what is the poet, but one whose heart, strung in sympathetic unison with all the manifold voices of the universe, renders back these voices; and, like the harp of Eolus, "changes even the vulgar wind into articulate melody?"

And now the question wiii force itself upon us Is this sensitiveness a good, is it a desirable thing? . . . The reply, like the solution of so many other lifeproblems, is both positive and negative. An exquisite organism is productive at once of untold pleasure and incalculable pain. It a throwing open the avenues of both an increase of possibilitiescapable of transporting its possessor to Elysian scenes, or plunging him into the utter blank starlessness of Tartarus. But certes, if life consist in feelings, in impressions, in heart-throbs-the sum total thereof constituting the result in the man-then the sensitive soul, which is just the feeling soul, alive to every psychal sun-beam and shadow-awake to every influence from without, and concentrating into hours the experience and the emotion of years, lives moredraws more copiously on the vital fount, and is, thereby, more of a man. But then the sadness? .. Ah! the sadness, the very hyperbole of woe that such an one endures! With his boundless capabilities of suffering-his emotions ramifying into endless intricacies--with oddities and idiosyncrasies (what others kindly name for him, whim, petulance, etc.), which those that are made of sterner stuff cannot possibly conceive of-pos-essed, too, by that terrible power of feeling-exaggeration-no that he begins, in youth,

"with gladness

wonder

But therefrom cometh in the end despondency and madness!"

We referred, in the beginning, to the two types of man. These are, of course, antipodal in their nature, as, indeed, are the poles of all philosophies. We have the thesis in the man of feeling, the antithesis in the man of intellect-at one extreme the man theoretic, at the other the man practic. Between them is waged an endless antagonism—and yet they have both of them a truthful basis, But they view life from a different standpoint. Shall we reconcile them? It were impossible. Says R. W. Emerson: "Each inan is born with a predisposition to one or the other of these sides of nature; and, it will easily happen that men will be found devoted to one or the other."

And this leads us to a natural corollary-which is, at the same time, the highest problem of education; it is this: Bring out yourself, act yourself, be your

self! And with such a development you will attain to the loftiest type of your ideality. The discovery will have to be made sooner or later, that it is in vain to fit every soul into the Procrustean bed of any one rigid form or system. For there are too many heights, and depths, and lengths, and breadths in the soul for mathematics to measure, or logic to compass. And not until the evolution of a system of philosophy which places the heart-telling and the divine intuitions in their own central position, can we hope to arrive at the day-spring of truth.

Then let us, while we beware of abuse, cultivate, not repress, all those fine feelings, mingling all with action, which will be the antidote against every baneful result. They are not to be got rid of-being, as it were, the very voice of God. Indeed, what we require is more faith therein. We need more confidence in heart-tellings than in the dictates of mortality. We require men and women who, philosophers enough not to be materialists, believe that there is more in nature than we can see, and who are willing to have faith in what we cannot see. To whom there still lives in the faith of feeling as well as in the faith of

reason:

"The intelligible forms of ancient poets,
The fair humanities of old religion,
The power, the beauty and the majesty,
That have their haunts in dale or piny mountains,
Or forest, by slow stream or pebbly spring;
Or chasms and wat'ry depths "–

Nor less important is the lesson to preserve, through life, the sensitiveness of youth. The childhood of faith and belief, with all its gushing glory-its mystery and its majesty-passes awayand manhood too often finds us a race of sophists, and atheists, and apathists. To preserve through life, the gentle benignity, the boundless belief, and the tender sympathies of youth-such is our duty. To preserve immaculate till eve, the manners of the morn." We conclude with the exquisite idealization of the thought by our mild, Braminical Wordsworth, in the spirit of which may each one of us live and labor:

"My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky;

So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The child is father of the man ;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety."

A

FAMILY PARTY.-What different associations are awakened by these

words!

To the child-petted upon such occasions by aunts and uncles, who selfishly ignore the necessary discipline, the relaxation of whose wholesome restraints is felt by those more nearly connected with the spoiled darling-to a child such a meeting is a perfect fulfillment of the brightest ideal of happiness. Who does not remember those green oases in the dreary desert of youth (for in spite of poers, I hold childhood to be the most dismal stage of our mortal journey), a Christmas party, or New England Thanksgiving. The memories of such sunny hours, like the figures in Salvator's pictures, stand distinct and palpable upon the clouded canvas of the past.

The young man, it is true, just escaped from the thraldom of domestic restraint to the glorious liberty of collegiate existence, may choose to consider such domestic gatherings heavy beyond all sufferance, and love to escape to billiards or the club. But the whirligig of time, sooner or later, brings about its own revenges; and you shall one day find this very supercilious and glossy young gentleman transformed into the care worn citizen of sixty years, whose only real pleasure is in the society and kindly ministrations of those, whom the strong ties of kindred still bind to himself, when worldly claims, and worldly connections are loosened, and ready to fall away.

To age, as well as to childhood, a family party brings a pleasant hour; for ma's last days, like his first, must be spent at home. And happy, indeed, is he who is constantly surrounded by a familiar circle, harmonious and unbroken, during those latter days, when the mind craves other society than its own creations, and clings to the few bright links of affection and household interest, that draw it earthward more strongly than did the relations of business, politics, or social connections, that were severed long ago.

The presence of no form, endeared by love and custom, graces the desolate man-ion where the closing years of my life have been cast away. Νο young or cheerful voice ever breaks the heavy silence which fills the hall-muffles with so soft a carpet the oaken staircase—and

nestles undisturbed in the faded curtains of the drawing room.

And yet, from that old custom tha weds us to familiar states, this solitude has lost many of its terrors. The oversight of the farm occupies me during the day, and in the evening I muse over heaps of journals and letters that several generations have accumulated, till the bustling scenes of the past, whose only record is in the dingy paper before me, return as vividly as distant objects shine on the inward vision of those who, in the mysterious phenomenon of conscious sleep, resign their being to another's will.

And, truly, this society of phantoms sometimes seems more real and satisfying than if, after the example of enchanted princes in the fairy stories, these shadowy beings were permitted, on some one evening of the year, to take their earthly forins, and sit beside my fire. Every silver vein of talk must be opened through the rubbish of much that is vulgar and cominon-place. The material vesture that separates harmonious spirits here below, ever exacts this tribute. But in communing with the past, we are clogged by no such bindrance. The veil with which we seek to cover frailties, and beneath which characteristics and excellences are likewise concealed, is thrown aside-reserve and consciousness are dismissed-and we know an intercourse so deep and true as to image that for which we hope hereafter.

I turn over the papers just mentioned, and find them mixed, in strange confusion. They were hastily collected from various quarters, and tumbled together in an old trunk many years ago; and I have never been able to persuade myself to go through the task of arranging, destroying, and preserving, which from time to time such an inheritance demands. To-night the accustomed reluctance is upon me strongly as ever; and so packages and single sheets are taken up at random, and I note down hastily whatever strikes me; waiting for some more convenient time thoroughly to examine all the memorabilia before me, and so to arrange the history of a once noted family, that I have long had in mind. The desultory survey of my possessions proposed to fill this hour before bedtime, leads by chance to a person to