supplication, and never rest till you feel yourself firmly fastened there!"

She then made me kneel down; and kneeling beside me, with her arms clasped round my waist, she commended me to God and his grace so fervently and pathetically, that the recollection of that hour will always linger in my memory. I thought I never should be passionate again. But, alas! even on that very day I was frequently reminded of my own' weakness, and recalled from very near approaches to fretfulness and ill-temper, by my mother's serious, but sweet expressions, and an emphatic Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I!

Alas! I soon lost this devoted mother! She was too fair and frail a plant to buffet the storms of life, and she was bowed beneath them. I forgot her pious precepts, and my spirit was too nearly assimilated to a licentious world—but I can say with truth, that in the wildest career of folly, when sense and reason have been almost annihilated, and the voice of conscience has been disregarded, those very words, 'Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I!' have come over my benumbed senses, like a voice from the tomb, restoring me to my better self, and quickening me to a sense of my infatuation and guilt.

I was once a victim to calumny and falsehoods, and the fever of my soul had well nigh driven me to madness; but the same sweet words, in all the tenderness of my mother's tones, fell on my burning spirit, and I was calmed. In that season of bereavement too, when all that I loved seemed forsaking me, they entered my desolate heart like a dream of childhood, restoring to me thoughts of innocence and peace.

They, at length, became as the hand-writing on the wall to guilty Belshazzar. "Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I!" was continually before my mind-not, as heretofore, with soothing influence, but as something fearful and appalling. Go where I would, it followed me, and the consciousness that I had hardened my heart against its silent teachings pursued me like a ghost. It was this, under God, that led me to repentance. It is this that now shields me in temptation; and whenever these horrible struggles, such as you have seen, come upon me, I instinctively reach forth my hand, to lay hold upon "the Rock that is higher than I!"

THE DEATH OF ALTAMONT.

BY DR. YOUNG.

Oh! come hither, ye sons of ambition, ye children of pride; descend awhile from the lofty summit whereon you stand, and look disdain on all beneath you; oh! come, and pass a few silent minutes with me in this lonely vault, which boasts the most noble inhabitants; and elevation will no more dwell in your eye, nor vanity rise in your hearts.

Here are the great and the gay, the young and the brilliant, the honourable and the lovely, placed in no mean order or elegance together. Their coffins are decorated with velvet and with silver; but, ah! their contents are only like vulgar dust. There lies the noble Altamont; no wonder the remembrance of him first strikes every soul which descends into this vault, and was no stranger to his character.

I am about to represent to you the last hours of a person of high birth, and high spirit, of great parts, and strong passions, every way accomplished, not least in iniquity. His unkind treatment was the death of a most amiable wife, and his great extravagance, in effect, disinherited his only child.

The said evening before the death of that noble youth I was with him. No one was there but his physician, and an intimate, whom he loved, and whom he had ruined. At my coming in, he said, "You and the physician are come too late. I have neither life nor hope. You both aim at miracles. You would raise the dead."

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Heaven," I said, was merciful;"Or I could not have been thus guilty. not done to bless and to save me?

What has it

I have been too strong

for Omnipotence! I have plucked down ruin."
I said,
66 the blessed Redeemer"-
Hold! hold! you wound me.
which I split. I denied his name."

That is the Rock on

Refusing to hear any thing from me, or to take any thing from the physician, he lay silent, as far as sudden darts of pain would permit, till the clock struck; then, with vehemence

"Oh, time! time! it is fit thou shouldst thus strike thy murderer to the heart.-How art thou fled for ever!-A month!-Oh for a single week! I ask not for years though an age were too little for the much I have to do."

On my saying, we could not do too much; that heaven was a blessed place

"So much the worse. It is lost. It is lost. Heaven to me is the severest part of hell.”

Soon after I proposed prayer.

Pray you that can; I never prayed, I cannot pray. Nor need I. Is not heaven on my side already? It closes with my conscience. Its severest strokes but second my own."

His friend being much touched, even to tears, at this (who could forbear? I could not), with a most affectionate look, he said,

'Keep those tears for thyself. I have undone theeDost thou weep for me? That is cruel. What can pain

me more ?"

Here his friend, too much affected, would have left him. "No, stay. Thou still mayst hope; therefore hear me ; how madly have I talked; how madly hast thou listened and believed. But look on my present state as a full answer to thee and myself. This body is all weakness and pain; but my soul, as if stung up by torment to greater strength and spirit, is full powerful to reason; full mighty to suffer; and that which thus triumphs within the jaws of mortality is doubtless immortal. And as for a Deity, nothing less than an Almighty could inflict what I feel."

I was about to congratulate this passive, involuntary confessor, on his asserting the two prime articles of his creed, extorted by the rack of nature; when he thus very passionately:

No, no; let me speak on. I have not long to speakMy much injured friend; my soul, as my body, lies in ruin; in scattered fragments of broken thought. Remorse for the past throws my thought on the future. Worse dread of the future strikes it back on the past. I turn and turn, and find no ray.—Didst thou feel half the mountain that is on me, thou wouldst struggle with the martyr for his stake; and bless heaven for the flames-that is not an everlasting flame; that is not an unquenchable fire."

How we were struck; yet soon after, still more. With what eye of distraction, what a face of despair, he cried out, My principles have poisoned my friend: my extravagance has beggered my boy; my unkindness has murdered

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my wife. And is there another hell? Oh! thou blasphemed, yet most indulgent God; hell itself is a refuge, if it hides me from thy frown."

Soon after his understanding failed. His terrified imagination uttered horrors not to be repeated or ever forgot. And ere the sun (which I hope has seen few ́ like him) arose, the gay, young, noble, ingenious, accomplished, and most wretched Altamont expired.

THE NATURAL BRIDGE;

OR, ONE NICHE THE HIGHEST.

The scene opens with a view of the great Natural Bridge in Virginia. There are three or four lads standing in the channel below, looking up with awe to that vast arch of unhewn rocks, which the Almighty bridged over those everlasting butments "when the morning stars sang together." The little piece of sky spanning those measureless piers, is full of stars, although it is mid-day. It is almost five hundred feet from where they stand, up those perpendicular bulwarks of limestone, to the key rock of that vast arch, which appears to them only of the size of a man's hand. The silence of death is rendered more impressive by the little stream that falls from rock to rock down the channel. The sun is darkened, and the boys have uuconsciously uncovered their heads, as if standing in the presence chamber of the Majesty of the whole earth. At last, this feeling begins to wear away; they begin to look around them; they find that others have been there before them. They see the names of hundreds cut in the limestone butments. A new feeling comes over their young hearts, and their knives are in their hands in an instant.- "What man has done, man can do." is their watchword, while they draw themselves up and carve their names a foot above those of a hundred full-grown men who have been there before them.

They are all satisfied with this feat of physical exertion, except one, whose example illustrates perfectly the forgotton truth, that there is no royal road to intellectual eminence. This ambitious youth sees a name just above his reach, a name that will be green in the memory of the world, when those of Alexander, Caesar, and Bonaparte, shall rot in

oblivion. It was the name of Washington. Before he marched with Braddock to that fatal field, he had been there, and left his name a foot above all his predecessors. It was a glorious thought of the boy, to write his name side by side with that of the great father of his country. He grasps his knife with a firmer hand; and, clinging to a little jutting crag, he cuts a gain into the limestone, about a foot above where he stands; he then reaches up, and cuts another for his hands. 'Tis a dangerous adventure; but as he puts his feet and hands into those gains, and draws himself up carefully to his full length, he finds himself a foot above every name chronicled in that mighty wall. While his companions are regarding him with concern and admiration, he cuts his name in rude capitals, large and deep, into that flinty album. His knife is still in his hands, and strength in his sinews, and a new created aspiration in his heart. Again he cuts another niche, and again he carves his name in larger capitals. This is not enough. Heedless of the entreaties of his companions, he cuts and climbs again. The graduation of his ascending scale grow wider apart. He measures his length at every gain he cuts. The voices of his friends wax weaker and weaker, till their words are finally lost on his ear. He now for the first time casts a look beneath him. Had that glance lasted a moment, that moment would have been his last. He clings with a convulsive shudder to his little niche in the rock. An awful abyss awaits his almost certain fall.—He is faint with severe exertion, and trembling from the sudden view of the dreadful destruction to which he is exposed. His knife is worn half-way to the haft. He can hear the yoices, but not the words, of his terror-stricken companions below. What a moment! What a meagre chance to escape destruction! There is no retracing his steps. It is impossible to put his hands into the same niche with his feet, and retain his slender hold a moment. companions instantly perceive this new and fearful dilemma, and await his fall with emotions that "freeze their young blood." He is too high, too faint, to ask for his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, to come and witness or avert his destruction. But one of his companions anticipates his desire. Swift as the wind, he bounds down the channel, and the situation of the fated boy is told upon his father's hearth-stone.

His