at even, amid the cheerful parting of friends, and consider well where they were when the morning broke. There were travellers from foreign lands, ready with pleased heart to tell at home the thousand marvels they had gathered on their way. There was a family of mourners, taking to their household graves their unburied dead. And there was one at least of rare truth and wisdom, of designs than which philanthropy knows nothing greater; of faith that all must venerate, and love that all must trust; of persuasive lips, from which a thoughtful genius and the simplest heart poured forth the true music of humanity. And does any one believe that this freight of transcendent worth,—all this sorrow, and thought, and hope, and moral greatness, and pure affection, were burnt, and went out with flame and cotton-smoke? Sooner would I believe that the fire consumed the less everlasting stars! Such a galaxy of spiritual light and order and beauty is spread above the elements and their power, and neither heat can scorch it, nor cold water drown. The bleak wind, that swept in the morning over the black and heaving wreck, would moan in the ear of sympathy with the wail of a thousand survivors; but to the ear of wisdom and of faith, would sound as the returning whisper and requiem of hope.

MUTUAL RELATION AND DEPENDENCE.

In the grouping of nature, dissimilar things are invariably brought together, and by serving each other's wants and furnishing the complement to each other's beauty, present a whole more perfect than the sum of all the parts. The world we live in is not a cabinet of curiosities, in which every kind of thing has an assortment of its own, labelled with its exclusive characters, and scrupulously separated from objects of kindred tribe. The free creative hand distributes its riches by other order than the formal arrangements of a museum; and, for the happy life and action of the universe, blends a thousand things, which, for ends of knowledge only, would be kept apart. A singie natural object may be the focus of all human studies, and present problems to puzzle a whole congress of the wise. A tropical mountain, for instance, is a seat for all the sciences; and from the snows of its summit to the ocean at its base, ranges through every realm of the physical world, and presents samples of the objects and forces peculiar to each. Its granite masses stand up as the monumental trophy of nature's engineering; while each successive stratum piled around their pedestal is as a notch on the score and chronicle of her

operations. Its melting glaciers and its poised clouds keep her chemical register; showing the temperature of her laboratory, and marking the dew-point every hour. And from the lichen and the moss that paint its upper rocks, through the fields and forests of its slope, to the sea-weeds that cling around its roots, it carries gradations of vegetable and animal life more various than can be told by the most accomplished physiologist. And perhaps from some platform on its side the observatory may be raised; whence the astronomer obtains his glimpse at other regions of creation, surveys the lordly estate of the Sun of whom our holding is, and espies the realm of space beyond, where worlds lie thick as forest-leaves. In this, we have only a representation of the harmonizing method of creation everywhere, which combines the most unlike things into a perfect unity. The several kingdoms of nature, as we term them, are not like our political empires, enclosed with jealous boundaries, thick with commercial barriers, and bristling with military posts. They pervade and penetrate each other; they form together an indissoluble economy; the mineral subduing itself into a basis for the organic, the vegetable supporting the animal, the vital culminating in the spiritual; weak things clinging to the strong, as the moss to the oak's trunk, and the insect to its leaf; death acting as the purveyor of life, and life playing the sexton to death. Mutual service in endless gradation is clearly the world's great law.

In the natural grouping of human life, the same rule is found. It is not similarity but dissimilarity, that constitutes the qualification for heartfelt union among mankind; and the mental affinities resemble the electric, in which like poles repel, while the unlike attract. A family, — than which there is no more genuine type of nature's method of arrangement, — is throughout a combination of opposites; the woman depending on the man, whose very strength, however, exists only by her weakness; the child hanging on the parent, — whose power were no blessing, were it not compelled to stoop in gentleness; the brother protecting the sister whose affections would have but half their wealth, were they not brought to lean on him with trustful pride; and even among seeming equals, the impetuous quieted by the thoughtful, and the timid finding shelter with the brave. That there "are diversities of gifts" is the reason why there is "one spirit ;" and it is because one is reliable for knowledge, and another for resolve, and a third for the graces of a balanced mind, that all are held in the bonds of a pure affection.

WHAT CHRISTIANITY HAS DONE.

THE difference between the ancient and the modern world is this; that in the one the great reality of being was now; in the other, it is yet to come. If you would witness a scene characteristic of the popular life of old, you must go to the amphitheatre of Rome, mingle with its eighty thousand spectators, and watch the eager faces of Senators and people; observe how the masters of the world spend the wealth of conquest, and indulge the pride of power; see every wild creature that God has made to dwell from the jungles of India to the mountains of Wales, from the forests of Germany to the deserts of Nubia, brought hither to be hunted down in artificial groves by thousands in an hour; behold the captives of war, noble perhaps and wise in their own land, turned loose amid yells of insult more terrible for their foreign tongue, to contend with brutal gladiators trained to make death the favorite amusement, and present the most solemn of individual realities as a wholesale public sport; mark the light look with which the multitude, by uplifted finger, demands that the wounded combatant be slain before their eyes; notice the troop of Christian martyrs awaiting, hand in hand, the leap from the tiger's den; and when the day's spectacle is over, and the blood of two thousand victims stains the ring, follow the giddy crowd as it streams from the vomitories into the street, trace its lazy course into the forum, and hear it there scrambling for the bread of private indolence doled out by the purse of public corruption; and see how it suns itself to sleep in the open ways, or crawls into foul dens, till morning brings the hope of games and merry blood again; —and you have an idea of the Imperial people, and their passionate living for the moment, which the gospel found in occupation of the world. And if you would fix in your thought an image of the popular mind of Christendom, I know not that you could do better than go at sunrise with the throng of toiling men to the hill-side where Whitefield or Wesley is about to preach. Hear what a great heart of reality in that hymn that swells upon the morning air; -a prophet's strain upon a people's lips! See the rugged hands of labor clasped and trembling, wrestling with the Unseen in prayer! Observe the uplifted faces, deep-lined with hardship and with guilt, streaming now with honest tears, and flushed with earnest shame, as the man of God wakes the life within, and tells of him that bare for us the stripe and the cross, and offers the holiest spirit to the humblest lot, and tears away the veil of sense from the glad and awful gates of

heaven and hell. Go to these people's homes, and observe the decent tastes, the sense of domestic obligations, the care for childhood, the desire of instruction, the neighborly kindness, the conscientious self-respect, and say, whether the sacred image of duty does not live within those minds; whether holiness has not taken the place of pleasure in their idea of life; whether for them too the toils of nature are not lightened by some eternal hope, and their burden carried by some angel of love, and the strife of necessity turned into the service of God.

BENJAMIN DISRAELI.

Benjamin Disraeli was born in London in 1805. His father was the well-known author of The Curiosities of Literature and other scholarly works. He was educated at a private school, and at an early age was articled to an attorney as clerk; but, being an eminently handsome person, with agreeable manners and a ready talent in conversation, he escaped from his destined drudgery, and became a favorite in the fashionable world. His first book, Vivian Gray, was written at twenty years of age, and was greatly successful. In this, as in nearly all his fictions, the author has given real portraits of well-known persons; and the popularity of the society novel is often owing as much to curiosity on the part of the reader as to any extraordinary ability in the writer. Among his other works are The Young Duke, Contarina Fleming, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, Henrietta Temple, Venetia, Coningsby, Tancred, Count Alarcos (a tragedy), and Lothair. The last-named novel is a sharp, polit ical pamphlet against the Catholic party, written in an extravagant style, that might be more pardonable in a younger author.

After several unsuccessful attempts, Disraeli was elected to Parliament, where in his maiden speech he made the worst possible figure. But resolution, practice, and a profound study of men, made him in time a powerful debater and an adroit party leader. He has been constantly in public life, and has twice been Chancellor of the Exchequer. He was lately offered a peerage, which he gracefully declined in favor of his wife. It is very seldom that any one in aristocratic London has achieved such a remarkable success, social, politcal, and literary, by the sheer force of his own abilities, and in spite of the disadvantages of his origin.

[From Tancred.]

IT was the first night of the new moon, and the white beams of the young crescent were just beginning to steal over the lately flushed and empurpled scene. The air was still glowing, and the evening breeze, which sometimes wandered through the ravines from the Gulf of Akabah, had not yet arrived. Tancred, shrouded in his Bedouin cloak, and accompanied by Baroni, visited the circle of black tents, which they found almost empty, the whole band, with the exception of the scouts, who are always on duty in an Arab encampment, being assembled in the ruins of the amphitheatre, in whose arena, opposite to the pavilion of the great sheik, a celebrated poet was reciting the visit of Antar to the temple of the fire

worshippers, and the adventures of that greatest of Arabian heroes among the effeminate and astonished courtiers of the generous and magnificent Nushirvan.

The audience was not a scanty one, for this chosen detachment of the children of Rechab had been two hundred strong, and the great majority of them were now assembled; some seated, as the ancient Idumæans, on the still entire seats of the amphitheatre; most squatted in groups upon the ground, though at a respectful distance from the poet; others standing amid the crumbling pile and leaning against the tall, dark fragments just beginning to be silvered by the moonbeam; but, in all their countenances, their quivering features, their flashing eyes, the mouth open with absorbing suspense, were expressed a wild and vivid excitement, the heat of sympathy, and a ravishing delight.

When Antar, in the tournament, overthrew the famous Greek knight, who had travelled from Constantinople to beard the court of Persia; when he caught in his hand the assassin spear of the Persian satrap, envious of his Arabian chivalry, and returned it to his adversary's heart; when he shouted from his saddle that he was the lover of Ibla and the horseman of the age -the audience exclaimed, with rapturous earnestness, "It is true! it is true!" although they were guaranteeing the assertions of a hero who lived, and loved, and fought more than fourteen hundred years before. Antar is the Iliad of the desert; the hero is the passion of the Bedouins. They will listen forever to his forays, when he raised the triumphant cry of his tribe, "O, by Abs! O, by Adnan!" to the narratives of the camels he captured, the men he slew, and the maidens to whose charms he was indifferent, for he was "ever the lover of Ibla." What makes this great Arabian invention still more interesting, is, that it was composed at a period antecedent to the Prophet: it describes the desert before the Koran, and it teaches us how little the dwellers in it were changed by the introduction and adoption of Islamism.

As Tancred and his companion reached the amphitheatre, a ringing laugh resounded.

"Antar is dining with the King of Persia after his victory," said Baroni; "this is a favorite scene with the Arabs. Antar asks the courtiers the name of every dish, and whether the king dines so every day. He bares his arms, and chucks the food into his mouth without ever moving his jaws. They have heard this all their lives, but always laugh at it with the same heartiness. Why, Shedad, son of