his habits, gave token of poverty. He was thin, and apparently feeble; his coat was seedy, his hat rusty, his nether habiliments thread-bare, and otherwise betokening long and arduous service; and his expenditure never exceeded the sixpence required to pay for the one glass of brandyand-water. Nobody seemed to know him; and after a few of his daily calls, he came to be recognised by the waiters and landlord, with that happy adaptation of names for which English landlords and waiters are remarkable, as the poor gentleman that reads the paper.'

If any doubts existed as to his poverty, they were dispelled when Christmas-day arrived, and the poor gentleman was seen taking his place at the long table, and demolishing an ample allowance of the beef and the pudding, for which there was nothing to pay. Poor fellow!' soliloquized the landlord of the Bush; I'm sure he can't afford that sixpence every day, for his brandy-and-water; I must make it up to him again.' His measures were accordingly taken: John the waiter had his instructions; and when the poor gentleman handed his plate for another slice of the pudding, a guinea was slipped into his hand, with the whispered, Master's compliments, Sir, and says this will do to lay in some winter flannels for the children.' The poor gentleman looked at the coin, and then at the waiter; then deposited the first in the right hand pocket of his small clothes; and then drew forth a card, which he handed to John, quietly remarking: My thanks and compliments to your master, and tell him that if he ever happens to come my way, I hope he'll call upon me.' This was the card:

THOMAS COUTTS,

59 STRAND,

LONDON.

The 'poor gentleman' was at Bristol, superintending the erection of some thirty or forty houses, which he was building on speculation. What afterward passed between him and the landlord of the Bush, is not recorded; but this much is known, that the said landlord soon after engaged very largely in the coaching business; that his drafts on Coutts and Co., the great bankers, were always duly honored; that he was very successful, and became one of the richest men in Bristol. And it is farther said, that the identical Christmas guinea is still in the possession of the poor gentleman's' widow, her Grace the Duchess of St. Albans.

AND now, Reader, peace be with you! This salutation by the hand of me. OLLAPOD

NATURE'S TEMPLE.

BEHOLD this glorious Earth! - a church whose roof
Is the bright firmament, whose lamp the sun,

Its blue walls draperied by the blazing woof
Of clouds and beams enwoven into one,
Its pillars mountains, and their vales its aisles,
Fragrant with incense that their flowers respire;
Its altars are the plains where Plenty smiles,-
Its organ, thunder! - and the winds its choir!

Н.

- and made the earth,

And thus he wandered, till the centuries
Had fill'd green fields with graves
With its cold congregation of the dead,
But one vast surface of mortality,

Where yet th' unsullied spirit might have swept
In the undying brightness of its morn!

And now what is he? The eternal mind,

That when earth sprang from chaos, with it sprang,

To give it radiance, from its heavenly home,
How is it blighted by the breath of years!

How has he cast his purity away,

Nor thought of the exchange, till Evil came,
And, like a serpent, hiss'd within his bower,
That he had dream'd to joy was dedicate,
When fallen from his glory! How his thought,
Bow'd from its cloudless pathway of the stars,
Its eagle flight, and high imaginings,
Creeps earthward, lost in base realities,
That give that sad mortality to mind,

Which ever mantles with the flush of shame,

The brow that is the throne of Intellect!

-sce

What is he? Follow but the noble powers
That God had made gigantic in him-
Their very riot in the infamy
Of the fell purpose, and the gory hand!
See the great glory of all goodness wane
Before that cold and meteor brilliancy,
Which mad ambition points to on the sky,
As its fierce leader! Mark him as he goes

Forth from his cottage home where he had knelt,

For years, in stated prayer with lowly heads

Bent reverently round, in brotherhood

Of happiness and holiness behold!

The lessons which his heart leapt as he heard

Are all forgotten, as the battle noise

Of a great world breaks on him. He believes
Virtue has no reward, unless it move
On its triumphant way, still heralded

By the loud shouts of praise the maddening
And crazy tribute of the crowded mart!

He feels that Heaven is second to the Earth,

And thus dishonoring his destiny,

He points through baser paths his pilgrimage,

That lead him to dark shores-and when he leaps
The uncertain future, with a reckless plunge,
He leaps to find no landing!

O, Man - Man!

How hast thou sported with thy promises-
Insulted thy great power and given the clod
That nobler part which beckon'd to the stars!
Thou hast turn'd back from glory- when the warmth
Of its great radiance was on thy brow,

And Virtue read, in golden characters,
On yonder sky, its story of reward!

Canst thou yet hope for mercy! Then cast down
Earth's every idol to the very dust --

Cast thyself down and veil thy face in earth,
And as thou mak'st companion of the worm,
Pour thy crush'd spirit out, in shame and tears-
The lowest at the footstool of thy God!

Cambridge, December, 1835.

GRENVILLE MELLEN.

MY COUNTRY.

'Ultilium que sagax rerum, et divina futuri.'-HORACE.

I STOOD upon the storied rock* which overlooks that spot where two mighty rivers have burst through the rifted mountains, to pour their confluent waters into one majestic stream. The works of nature and the operations of man were strangely mingled. Around me were the awful cliffs, fashioned by the finger of Sublimity; on either hand, a turbulent and rushing flood, chafing and foaming over its rocky bed; while far in the blue distance, my eye could trace the mingled waters, wafting their silvery tribute toward the ocean. Beneath, were the habitations of busy man, from whence arose the varied sounds of active occupation; the rattle of machinery-the clink of distant hammers - the droning hum of business-mixed with the eternal roar of waters. The sparkling furnace belched forth its darksome vapors on the crimson air; the steeple glittered on the hill-side; and beyond, the eye could just discern the tiny vessel, gliding over the smooth canal; while more near, the rattling engine, with wheels of fire, flashed like a meteor through the hewn chasm of the everlasting rocks. It was an epitome of my country! and I read her prosperity and her glory in the impressive scene.

But soon Imagination bore me from this living landscape to the contemplation of dead empires. I stood upon the summit of one of those mysterious structures, the conjectural tombs of long-forgotten kings; the monuments of unknown ages, and unrecorded dynasties. I gazed upon the broken and scattered memorials of Memnon's line; I beheld the still progressive decay, which Destiny, through fabled and historic days, had witnessed from these watch-towers, and visibly inscribed upon their hoary summits. The power of Sesostris, the beauty of Cleopatra, perchance, had mouldered in the sepulchre beneath me; and the religion, the politics, the history of many centuries of happy and glorious civilization, were unveiled in those dim hieroglyphics, which Learning never may decipher.

'Jefferson's Rock,' at Harper's Ferry.

Thought passed on to better times, and brighter lands. The misshapen idols of Egypt were superseded by the sculptured divinity of Greece. The mystic pyramid vanished from my view, and the mythological temple rose, in its beautiful proportions, before me. But there was no change in that destiny, of which they were alike the monuments. The same fate was equally written upon both. The shrines of Delphi are desecrated, but oracles far truer than the Pythian voices, now echo from the caverns of prophetic desolation.

Imagination carried me still farther along the monumental banks of that resistless stream which hath thus swept over the forms, the customs, and the lore of ages. Amid the countless ruins of the Eternal City's self-included world, where Time, the Destroyer, seems to have paused, to make sublimer havoc, I read his mighty lesson, traced in more gigantic characters.

But memory soon reverted to the feeling which had engendered these ideal visions, and gazing again upon the material scene before me, I cried, 'O, my country! - are these the prototypes of thy career?'

History could not assume the dignity or value of Philosophy, did she teach merely by examples, without revealing the causes of each particular event. From her ample page, we learn that the downfall of nations has ever been preceded by a dereliction from those institutions to which they owed their prosperity. The arts and arms' of other times and other countries have been coexistent with the arbitrary maxims of government upon which they were founded: those maxims were fluctuating and temporary, and have been buried under the superstructures they were unable to support. The institutions of the United States of America furnish the only system the world has ever seen, of regular contrivance, drawn, since its very origin, from sure and immutable principles; all others have been either the results of accident, the gradual accretions of time and circumstance, or the enormous accumulations of bigotry and error.

Our institutions exhibit the first rational adaptation of the favorite creed of free born man, to the organization and direction of civil society. Liberty is the immediate offspring of Nature. Before the birth of man, she roamed with the illimitable winds over the fresh-created universe; she reigned with the monarch of the peopled forests; she heralded the upward course of the solitary eagle, as he soared, companionless, through the azure deep of air.

But abstract liberty, or the wild and untutored impulses of savage life, like the religion of nature, are equally imperfect, and unsuited to the wants and capacities of humanity. The unrestrained license of barbarism was early found incompatible with security and civilization. But the faint glimmering of nature was the only guide to unenlightened man the revelation of freedom had not yet dawned upon the world. Forced by necessity, he began to carve for himself images of a deluded worship, and erringly sanctified the rude creations of a false idolatry. The mis-shapen idol of those early days was unnamed, but it was the substitute, and received the homage, for Liberty. The genius of Greece chiseled the rude conception of ignorance into the ideal form of divinity, and endowed it with the attributes of intellect, the dignity of philosophy, and the graces of poetry. It became the statue, life-like, but not living; the abstraction of the beautiful, the impersonation of

sublimity, the idol of the mind, -exemplifying, in its exquisite creation, the ultimate perfection of human imagination.

We live not now in the mythological age of Freedom. The altars of her superstition are deserted. The deity of ancient error is dethroned. We live in a better era. We dwell under a new dispensation. The true, the celestial spirit of Liberty has descended, and lives incarnate in the heart of every freeman. Our creed is the Revelation of freedom! and its genius, though more homely and mechanical than that of classical antiquity, is the creation of utility, adapted to the wants of mankind, inspired with breath, motion, life! - directing the impulses of will, governing thought, controlling action, and performing the indispensable functions of the director of a visible and material universe.

Every political system is the result of causes which have been in progressive action through a long series of time; and these may be readily traced through their intermediate effects to the great final consequence toward which they all converge. Our government takes its 'form and pressure' from certain peculiar predisposing circumstances, which, from the first settlement of the country, have been in constant and active operation. As these causes were rather moral than material, they exerted a correspondent effect upon the opinions and habits of the people, and superinduced upon both that simple yet grand principle, which forms the everlasting basis of our fundamental and administrative polity. This basis is utility; that practical utility which constitutes the distinctive impress of the present age; which is the spirit, and the watch-word of the times, the test of innovation, and the touch-stone of experiment. Trans-atlantic speculation supposes that the utilitarianism of America is the result of her peculiar form of government. This is to mistake the effect for the cause. The germ had spread, the blossom had expanded, before the Revolution forced out its tints, 'to flush and circle in the flower.'

Philosophy may hereafter discover that there is a vast chain of events, reaching from the dim middle ages to some future period, beyond the ken of human prophecy, (of which the Crusades, the Reformation, the establishment of the Commonwealth of England, the declaration of American Independence, and the French Revolution, are visible concatenations,) which is destined to embrace the world, and whose last link will be universal liberty.

The essential doctrines embodied in our institutions, are founded upon this utility it is the rock from which their stability is derived. These doctrines are not the mere theoretical deductions of abstract reasoning, but the practical realization of the lessons of human experience, and the wise precepts of a rational philosophy; a philosophy which contemplates man, not in his isolated and metaphysical capacity, but as the active and operative being, the integral portion of a whole, which is subject to the action of general causes, and guided by common and universal rules of conduct. For these reasons, the principles of our Charter of Freedom are not municipal in their character, nor is their adaptation to usefulness circumscribed by the limits of our own age and country. Founded upon the nature and capacities of social man, they could not fail to prove sound and useful maxims of policy, under whatever modifications a varied destiny may impose on an age, or a people. It is this general and promiscuous appropriateness which peculiarly