stranger, who fell dead at his feet. Hearing approaching footsteps, he fled the fatal spot, and mounting his horse, which was at hand, retreated to his estate in the country, at no great distance from Seville. Here he remained throughout the next day, full of horror and remorse; dreading least he should be known as the murderer of the deceased, and fearing each moment the arrival of the officers of justice.

'The day passed, however, without molestation; and, as the evening advanced, unable any longer to endure this state of uncertainty and apprehension, he ventured back to Seville. Irresistibly his footsteps took the direction of the convent; but he paused and hovered at a distance from the scene of blood. Several persons were gathered round the place, one of whom was busy nailing something against the convent wall. After a while they dispersed, and one passed near to Don Manuel. The latter addressed him, with hesitating voice. "Señor,' said he, may I ask the reason of yonder throng?' "A cavalier,' replied the other, 'has been murdered.'

6

"Murdered!' echoed Don Manuel; 'and can you tell me his name?' "Don Manuel de Manara,' replied the stranger, and passed on. 'Don Manuel was startled at this mention of his own name; especially when applied to the murdered man. He ventured, when it was entirely deserted, to approach the fatal spot. A small cross had been nailed against the wall, as is customary in Spain, to mark the place where a murder has been committed; and just below it he read, by the twinkling light of a lamp: 'Here was murdered Don Manuel de Manara. Pray to God for his soul!'

'Still more confounded and perplexed by this inscription, he wandered about the streets until the night was far advanced, and all was still and lonely. As he entered the principal square, the light of torches suddenly broke on him, and he beheld a grand funeral procession moving across it. There was a great train of priests, and many persons of dignified appearance, in ancient Spanish dresses, attending as mourners, none of whom he knew. Accosting a servant who followed in the train, he demanded the name of the defunct.

"Don Manuel de Manara,' was the reply; and it went cold to his heart. He looked, and indeed beheld the armorial bearings of his family emblazoned on the funeral escutcheons. Yet not one of his family was to be seen among the mourners. The mystery was more and more incomprehensible.

'He followed the procession as it moved on to the cathedral. The bier was deposited before the high altar; the funeral service was commenced, and the grand organ began to peal through the vaulted aisles.

'Again the youth ventured to question this awful pageant. 'Father,' said he, with trembling voice, to one of the priests, who is this you are about to inter?'

Don Manuel de Manara!' replied the priest.

"Father,' cried Don Manuel, impatiently, 'you are deceived. This is some imposture. Know that Don Manuel de Manara is alive and well, and now stands before you. I am Don Manuel de Manara !' Avaunt, rash youth!' cried the priest; 'know that Don Manuel de Manara is dead! - is dead! is dead! and we are all souls

66

from purgatory, his deceased relatives and ancestors, and others that have been aided by masses from his family, who are permitted to come here and pray for the repose of his soul !'

Don Manuel cast round a fearful glance upon the assemblage, in antiquated Spanish garbs, and recognized in their pale and ghastly countenances the portraits of many an ancestor that hung in the family picture-gallery. He now lost all self-command, rushed up to the bier, and beheld the counterpart of himself, but in the fixed and livid lineaments of death. Just at that moment the whole choir burst forth with a Requeiscat in pace,' that shook the vaults of the cathedral. Don Manuel sank senseless on the pavement. He was found there early the next morning by the sacristan, and conveyed to his home. When sufficiently recovered, he sent for a friar, and made a full confession of all that had happened.

66

My son,' said the friar, all this is a miracle and a mystery, intended for thy conversion and salvation. The corpse thou hast seen was a token that thou hadst died to sin and the world take warning by it, and henceforth live to righteousness and heaven!'

Don Manuel did take warning by it. Guided by the councils of the worthy friar, he disposed of all his temporal affairs; dedicated the greater part of his wealth to pious uses, especially to the performance of masses for souls in purgatory; and finally, entering a convent, became one of the most zealous and exemplary, monks in Seville.'

WHILE my companion was relating this story, my eyes wandered, from time to time, about the dusky church. Methought the burly countenances of the monks in the distant choir assumed a pallid, ghastly hue, and their deep metallic voices had a sepulchral sound. By the time the story was ended, they had ended their chaunt; and, extinguishing their lights, glided one by one, like shadows, through a small door in the side of the choir. A deeper gloom prevailed over the church; the figure opposite me on horseback grew more and more spectral; and I almost expected to see it bow its head.

'It is time to be off,' said my companion, unless we intend to sup with the statue.'

'I have no relish for such fare or such company,' replied I; and, following my companion, we groped our way through the mouldering cloisters. As we passed by the ruined cemetery, keeping up a casual conversation, by way of dispelling the loneliness of the scene, I called to mind the words of the poet :

The tombs

And monumental caves of death look cold,
And shoot a chillness to my trembling heart!
Give me thy hand, and let me hear thy voice;
Nay, speak and let me hear thy voice;
Mine own affrights me with its echoes.'

There wanted nothing but the marble statue of the commander, striding along the echoing cloisters, to complete the haunted scene. Since that time, I never fail to attend the theatre whenever the story of Don Juan is represented, whether in pantomime or opera. In the sepulchral scene, I feel myself quite at home; and when the

statue makes his appearance, I greet him as an old acquaintance. When the audience applaud, I look round upon them with a degree of compassion: Poor souls!' I say to myself, they think they are pleased; they think they enjoy this piece, and yet they consider the whole as a fiction! How much more would they enjoy it, if like me they knew it to be true and had seen the very place!'

AFTER THE MANNER OF BERANGER: BY R. M. CHARLTON.

GOD'S HAND IN AMERICA. By the Rev. GEORGE B. CHEEVER. With an Essay, by Rev. Dr. SKINNER. pp. 168. New-York: M. W. DODD. London: WILEY AND PUTNAM.

We have found in this little book excellencies both of matter and style, which we cannot pass without a word of commendation, at a period when it is unusually usual to throw 'pulpit efforts' before the public, which are not only efforts, in the poorest sense of the term, but the cause of effort in others- the effort of perusal. The volume before us contains the substance of two sermons, one delivered on Thanksgiving day, and the other on the evening previous to the 'day of prayer for the world's conversion,' presented in two parts. The general propositions traced in the first division, are: that God is governor among the nations; that he deals with nations on the same principles as with individuals; that the responsibilities and duties of nations as individuals, are commensurate with their capabilities, opportunities, and mercies; that the disregard and violation of this principle will be followed with the divine retribution, and if persisted in, must result in national degradation and ruin; and that in the light of these principles, an enumeration of the elements of national gratitude is an exceedingly solemn and admonitory service. The main subject to which these propositions are introductory are then discussed, viz: the opportunities and responsibilities of this country for its own and the world's evangelization: and here opens that most striking aspect of providence and duty, to which the writer has referred in the general title of his volume; a title which it is well claimed may be pardoned for its apparent singularity and quaintness, in consideration of its condensed expression of a most comprehensive and important theme. We agree with the author of the essay, prefixed to the volume, that the writer has well treated relations and responsibilities of infinite moment, involving every interest of his readers and their posterity; and while he has enlarged their view of the ulterior influence of the country, on the welfare of the world, he has added new and overpowering force to every other motive to the discharge of all individual and national obligations.'

The subjoined eloquent passage, upon the retributive rewards of Providence, in the career of nations as well as individuals, will sufficiently enforce the praise we have awarded to the style of this performance:

"God's retributive providence may be invisible as the angel of death, and gradual as the remorseless tide that steals its march for centuries, or the malaria that depopulates cities, and makes the very sight of them the dread of the traveller. One might, with almost as much impunity, go into the tomb of a plague-stricken mortal, as linger among the beautiful remains of some of those buried cities, whose inquest would rightly be written, DIED BY THE VISITATION OF GOD!- and yet that visitation unknown and unacknowledged even by the sufferers. Sometimes a series of retributive providences is unfolded, no one of which, by itself, excites alarm or surprise, till in the lapse of ages the solemn work is done, the nation has passed from existence, and historians write its epitaph, and philosophize upon the causes of its fall. A lingering decay may be far worse than a sudden overthrow; so that, in such a case, the common lamentation of mankind may be deeper for the degradation that remains, than the glory that has departed. It is the same with individuals. And this perhaps was the meaning of that melancholy breathing of the poet :

Thus fares it still in our decay;

And yet the wiser mind

Mourns less for what age takes away,

Than what it leaves behind.'

A nation dies when the spirit of every thing good and noble dies in it. The name may live, when the elements of life and beauty have departed. God may suffer the sins which a nation is cherishing to consume its energies, till the gangrene becomes incurable, and then his abused mercies work their own revenge. How solemn, in such a case, are the records and the proofs of the divine indignation; the prediction and the fulfilment seen and read together!"

"I have stood beneath the walls of the Coliseum in Rome, the Parthenon in Athens, and the Temple of Karnak in Egypt; each of them the mighty relic of majestic empires, and the symbol of the spirit of the most remarkable ages in the world. The last, carrying you back as in a dream over the waste of four thousand years, might be supposed to owe its superior impressiveness to its vast antiquity; but that is not the secret of the strange and solemn thoughts that crowd into the mind; it is the demonstration of God's wrath fulfilled according to the letter of the Scriptures! No ruins of antiquity are so overwhelming in their interest as the gigantic remains of that empire, once the proudest in the world, and now, according to the very letter of the divine prediction, the basest of the kingdoms. From the deep and grim repose of those sphinxes, obelisks, and columns-those idols broken at the presence of God as the mind wanders back to the four hundred years of Israel's bondage in Egypt, methinks you may hear the wail of that old and awful prophecy, with the lingering echo of every successive prediction: THE NATION WHOM THEY SHALL SERVE WILL I JUDGE! Who would have believed it possible, four thousand years ago, amidst the vigor and greatness of the Egyptian kingdom, that after that vast lapse of time, travellers should come from a world then as new, unpeopled, and undiscovered, as the precincts of another planet, to read the proofs of God's veracity in the vestiges at once of such stupendous glory and such a stupendous overthrow! And now, if any man, contemplating the youthful vigor, the energy, the almost indestructible life of our own country, finds it difficult to believe that the indulgence of the same national sin, under infinitely clearer light, may be followed with a similar overthrow, let him wander on the banks of the Nile, and think down hours to moments in the silent sanctuaries of its broken temples."

Of the same felicitous character are the remarks upon our cause of gratitude as a nation, for the great freedom of opinion which we enjoy, as compared with other countries; the surest index and the most important result of civil and religious liberty:

"We can scarcely appreciate this blessing in our own country, for, like the air that we breathe, it has been round about us from our infancy. But the pages of history are a perpetual record of wars and persecutions on account of opinion. Political opinions, religious opinions, and even philosophica opinions, when they have been supposed to run counter to the tenets of the Church, have been prosecuted as crimes. Our discourse would be filled with names only, should we attempt to enumerate even a small part in the list of the martyrs of opinion. But are not all men free to think? it may be asked. Yes! as much as a prisoner in his cell is free to go the length of his chain, or to walk from one wall to the other. But can outward shackles or threats of persecution stop the freedom of opinion? Most assuredly. They induce the habit of slavish thinking; they make the mind's habitual state a state of bondage; they make it think, not freely, but according to received rules and dogmas, and paths traced out. The interdict against the free publication of opinion is an interdict also upon the formation of opinion, for it is as true, as it is beautifully expressed, that

Thoughts shut up want air,

And spoil, like bales unopened to the sun:

and so, in a very short time there will be no wholesome thought at all. The mind suffocates in such a prison, just as a light, put beneath an air-tight receiver, is extinguished. Even in this country, free as it is, there is yet the element of bondage and of persecution. Even here there are so many adverse influences, that in making your investigations in dark quarters with the torch of truth, you need to have a safety lamp, like Sir Humphrey Davy's invention, which you may thrust, with its light, into the midst of the impurest gases, or the moment it touches them they will blow you up. Still, there is a freedom of opinion in this country greater and more absolute than any where else in the world."

We make room for one more extract, setting forth the influence of our common language upon the destiny of our country, as an agent in the designs of Providence:

"We speak a language containing vast treasures of religious wisdom, and vernacular, more or less, over a large portion of the globe, and for this and other causes, perhaps destined to become an organ of international communication more universal than any other tongue. The students at the missionary seminary at Basle in Germany, well denominated the English language the missionary language. It might almost be called the language of religion, in reference to the vast treasures of theological science, the mines of religious truth, and above all, the inestimable works of practical piety, of which it furnishes the key. There is in it a capital of speculative and practical theology, rich and deep enough for the whole world to draw upon. From time to time, God himself has especially honored it, and prepared it more and more for his glory, by giving to the world, through its medium, such works as the Pilgrim's Progress and the Paradise Lost. It is the language of Protestantism, the language of civil and religious freedom, the language of commercial enterprise, the language spoken by the greater portion of seamen in the world. It is the language of the two freest, most enterprising, most powerful, and so far as the appellation can at present be admitted in a national sense, most truly Christian nations on the globe.

"The English tongue owes so much of its power and beauty to the Scriptures, that for this reason alone it is almost a sanctified instrument for the Church to work with. The common translation of the Bible, both in Germany and England, exerted the most beneficial influence in moulding the language, as well as the mind and morals of the people. Perhaps it has done more in the formation of our language, and the preservation of its purity, than all other causes. Bunyan is the most remarkable example of its agency in the development of genius. It was his intense study of the English Bible that gave him the command of a style of such native, idiomatic simplicity and beauty. For him the Scriptures were his mind's sole store-house, both of words and images, and his sensibilities