than the elastic gum of Para? Yet is man to be esteemed the sole patentee of the steam-engine, the absolute creator of the magnetic telegraph, the unassisted contriver of the uses of India-rubber? Have not these various elements and substances been patiently seeking their natural and appropriate ends; knocking at the door of the human mind to unlock their passages to usefulness; and vindicating in their vast triumphs not more the genius of man than the beneficence and foreordination of God? Is not nature full of undiscovered springs of health, wealth, usefulness, all waiting the willow-wand of a more delicate observation to point tremblingly to their source, and open it to their proprietors and lords, the human race? In the divine sympathy or primordial correlation of nature and man, of divine laws and human uses of them,of material elements and mental appropriation or accommodation of them,- of nature and humanity, we behold the grandest and most glorious proof of the being of that God, that wonderful Designer, whose plan, as it opens, shows an infinite forecast, and of the patience, wisdom, benevolence, of that Providence, which keeps his own gifts half hidden, half revealed, that they may be received with the best advantage of his creatures, while he strictly subordinates the material world to the spiritual discipline and moral victory of his rational offspring."

This extract is a coast-wise, yet commanding, view of the island of thought, whereon we have landed, to enjoy a ramble in search of nutritious fruits and fresh scenery, rather than to institute a scientific exploration. The useful arts, more than the fine, will be kept in mind, the former having a more immediate interest for men, particularly in a Crusoe adventure.

Cowper's expression of piety and poetry," God made the country and man made the town," has passed into a doctrine, like many other utterances of profound feeling. The words are often quoted to express a love for nature, and an aversion to the haunts of pride and misery; but the language, if strictly taken, implies that the Creator had no purpose that the materials he has supplied should be fashioned into beautiful villages and splendid cities; that he gave man no instinct or skill so to use them, and laid upon him no such necessity; and that, so employed, the materials exhibit no new beauty and fitness, or, if they do, that the glory of it belongs to man, not to his Maker. Natural Theology has taken it for granted, that its inquiries are limited to unmodified nature; and, accordingly, the theologian, like an Indian or bison, keeps him

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self carefully beyond the borders of civilization; he sees nothing Divine in his mechanical surroundings; he ascends to the stars, or flees to the uttermost parts of the sea, whenever he would illustrate the attributes of the Infinite One. The Bridgewater Treatise on the Adaptation of the External World to Man, is the nearest approach to a formal statement of the subject in hand; but the author discourses of climate, season, soil, grain, and raw material, with reference to the necessities, not the instincts and genius, of man; he beholds Divine wisdom in the rough substance, rather than in the beautiful product. In various books are paragraphs and allusions which more or less vaguely recognize the divine in Art, but nothing, probably, more direct, unless it be a partial exception in Ruskin's "Modern Painters." Art, or some work of art, is frequently called divine, in the classic sense, however, of beautiful only. It is sometimes said, that Art is a part of Nature, and a "higher nature," words that look towards the shore of thought on which we have set foot. But the truth is not followed in its leadings. It seems to have been assumed that the Great Artist had nothing but a general and indefinite design in the creation of finite artists and artisans, and in the endowment of matter with susceptibilities of reconstruction into endless forms of use and elegance. It appears to have been inferred, that whatever man transforms, by his divinely received wisdom, to other shapes, ceases to be the work of the Almighty, and thenceforth bears less, instead of frequently more, of the impress of His hand.

This prevailing sentiment is manifested in many ways. The stereotyped question of village lyceums, whether "the works of Nature are more wonderful than those of Art," is surrendered, in the end, to the affirmative, the young disputants yielding to an amiable candor, or to an unconscious fear that Dame Nature, like other dames, may somehow punish a seeming undervaluation of her dignity. Fugitives from the summer disagreeablenesses of towns, and they who are driven forth by fashion, laud the country at the expense of the city, in a threadbare litany of praise, whether or not they have any true sympathy with nature. A mixture of the artificial and natural in wild scenery is always a lucky text for cant sentimentality.

The tourist, at Niagara or the Hudson Highlands, wastes himself in echoed lamentations over a scene of grandeur "desecrated" (this is the inevitable word) by the hand of man. Wordsworth, in a string of sonnets, more melancholy than they were intended to be, bemoans the advent of railroads in the North of England. No rhapsodist can tell us too often about the "temple of Nature," with its "dome of sky, and music of winds and waves." The versifier, as a matter of business, deals in sunsets, stars, and dew, and operates in roses and moonlight; - he, or she, is apt to think, with the Arabian critic, that "palm-trees, fountains, and moonlight cannot be introduced too frequently into good poetry." All classes of people accept it as a duty to extol nature, and to disparage art in the comparison, as if it were doing God service. We hear, in prose and verse, of Divine purpose in the eye, the hand, and in the motions and powers of each; but not in the products resulting therefrom. Lessons of creative forethought are drawn from the shell, the honey-comb, the flower, seldom or never from the picture, implement, garment, book, and building. We see something of God's glory in the violet, snow-flake, cataract, and sun; we fail to see it in the instruments which reveal the minute beauty, or use the wonderful power, of these objects. We behold it in the ores, the fire and sand, but are too deaf to hear it in the musical, graceful result brought forth from those formless materials, a heavenly-sounding bell. "On the bells of the horses shall be Holiness to the Lord" inscribed; and it will be, not only in the sense that religion shall consecrate everything, but also that in everything the Most High shall be habitually seen.

Were sincere devotion ever, and harmless sentiment only, the fruit of this partiality for that which is strictly natural, it might be passed by. But when this tendency circumscribes the sympathies of natural piety itself; when it runs into affectation and sentimental worship; when it nourishes in man a proud self-felicitation over his works, as if they were no part of the universal plan, and he had accomplished them by his own unaided wisdom; or when, on the other hand, it leads him to despise the success of his own species, when, in fine, it expels the God of nature from the haunts and habitations.

of his rational creatures, it is time to unfold a thought which has occurred to many minds, in the shape of an undeveloped suggestion.

Human art attests the Supreme Intelligence by disclosing, in the first place, the various susceptibilities of use and beauty inherent in every form of matter.

Everything in nature fulfils one or more purposes, in its original state. Thus a cloud is a curtain of shade, a shield against frost, a cistern of showers, and a vision of glory. But every object, on the earth at least, seems invested with another set of qualities for art, of equal, or higher, profit and pleasure. The palm-tree is not only good for fruit, shade, and lordly beauty; it also yields fuel, wine, oil, flax, flour, sugar, salt, thread, utensils, weapons, in fact, all things needed in a barbarous condition of society. Such reserved qualities of matter are sometimes the simplest change of use, not of form, as when straw is woven into hats; sometimes the useful part is eliminated from the other components, as the fibres of flax; in other instances, a combination of substances creates a quality not to be found in any one of the ingredients, for example, the explosiveness of gunpowder, and the transparency of glass. The artificial value is, in some cases, apparent, as in the pearl-shell, ready to be cut for ornament; in others, it is half concealed, as in the veins of rough marble and agate; in others, it is wholly hidden, as the medicinal properties of plants; in still other instances, both the substance and its qualities are, like electricity, themselves hidden, and revealed only in their effects. We can never be sure that we have reached the best, or the last, use that can be made of anything. The inclosing of complex purposes in more simple ones, is apparently a universal rule of creation. Man but poorly imitates this, when he conceals a slender fishing-rod, or a defensive weapon, in a walking-stick, or so inflates a mattress that it may be used as a life-boat. Manifold blessing, exhaustless beauty, is the motto of Nature. Every product of hers is a cocoa-nut, wherein progressive discovery finds the cup of a new use beneath the oakum exterior of a present one, and, within the second use, the nutritious meat of another, and, within the third, the sweet milk of a fourth service and

joy. The undisguised fairness and benefits of the material world are the story it tells to the childhood of the human race, a Pilgrim's Progress or Faerie Queene, an allegory that veils many spiritual and material meanings. Man's art is a prosecution of God's designs as truly as the work of the coral polyp is, the difference being in favor of the former, as will yet be shown. It is Nature's earthly consummation of her womanly expectations, when she is led forth as man's bride, sparkling in her polished gems, blushing in her crimson dyes, delicately fair in statue and column, smiling in the lustre of silver and gold, and crowned with the flowers of decorative skill.

To illustrate the theme in a homely way, which may associate it with the daily thoughts of men, let us walk the street, approach a house, and enter a parlor. The point is, that the artificially disclosed qualities of matter have an equal, frequently a higher, utility and charm, than the materials in a natural condition.

The pavement on which we tread was part of a shapeless mass of stone, cropping out from some hill-side. As one feature of a picturesque scene, breaking up the monotony of smoothly sloping ground, contrasting its solidity with the light grace of tree and stream, and its neutral color with the unvaried green around, it would have reminded us of the Maker's wisdom. New, clearer signs of his forethought are revealed, however, when the rock is quarried, and we find that, by the forces in operation many ages since, the stone was cleft into thin, smooth plates, and even cut by Nature into perfect parallelograms. We pause before a suburban villa. The wood, of which the house is composed, was beautiful and serviceable in its native state. Not to mention the vital necessity of its chemical influence, a tree is a marvel of strength and grace; it is a servant of man, patiently standing and holding out its living baskets of fruit, and holding up its regal canopy; it is a palace of the birds, domed, windowed, and draperied, for their abode. But the trees have hidden capabilities for human habitations; they can be cut into shining smoothness, put together into combined strength, carved into ornamental shapes, the whole process resulting in an arti