themselves. In such a case all that can be done is, to endeavour to devise some mode of meeting this miserable influence of habit, by forcing the mind to make sɔme faint effort to realize the infinite magnificence of the subject. Let us endeavour, then, to approach it thus.

You are wandering (I will suppose) in some of the wretched retreats of poverty, upon some mission of business or charity. Perplexed and wearied amid its varieties of misery, you chance to come upon an individual whose conversation and mien attract and surprise you. Your attention enkindled by the gracious benevolence of the stranger's manner, you inquire; and the astounding fact reveals itself, that, in this lone and miserable scene, you have, by some strange conjuncture, met with one of the great lights of the age, one belonging to a different and distant sphere, one of the leaders of universal opinion; on whom your thoughts had long been busied, and whom you had for years desired to see. The singular accident of an interview so unexpected, fills and agitates your mind. You form a thousand theories as to what strange cause could have brought him there. You recall how he spoke and looked; you call it an epoch in your life to have witnessed so startling an occurrence-to have beheld one so distinguished, in a scene so much out of all possibility of anticipation; and this even though he were in no wise apparently connected with it, except as witnessing and compassionating its groups of misery.

Yet, again, something more wonderful than this is easily conceivable. Upon the same stage of wretchedness a loftier personage may be imagined. In the wild revolutions of fortune, even monarchs have been wanderers. Suppose this then,-improbable, indeed, but not impossible surely. And then, what feelings of respectful pity, of deep and earnest interest, would thrill your frame, as you contemplated such a one cast down from all that earth can minister of luxury and power, from the head of councils and of armies, to seek a home with the homeless, to share the bread of destitution, and feed on the charity of the scornful! How the depths of human nature are stirred by such events! how they find an echo in the recesses of our hearts,—these terrible espousals of majesty and misery!

But this will not suffice. There are beings within the mind's easy conception that far overpass the glories of the statesman and the monarch of our earth. Men of even no extreme ardour of fancy, when once instructed as to the vastness of our universe, have yearned to know of the life and intelligence that animate and that guide those distant regions of creation which science has so abundantly and so wonderfully revealed; and have dared to dream of the communications that might subsist-and that may yet in another state of existence subsist-with the beings of such spheres. Conceive, then, no longer the mighty of our world in this strange union with misery and degradation, but the presiding spirit of one of these orbs; or multiply his power, and make him the deputed governor, the vicegerent angel, of a million of those orbs that are spread in their myriads through infinity. Think what it would be to be permitted to hold high converse with such a delegate of Heaven as this; to find this lord of a million worlds the actual inhabitant of our own; to see him, and yet live; to learn the secrets of his immense administration, and hear of forms of being of which men can now have no more conception than the insect living on a leaf has of the forest that surrounds him. Still more, to find, in this being, an interest, a real interest in the affairs of our little corner of the universe, of that earthly cell, which is absolutely invisible from the nearest fixed star that sparkles in the heavens above us; nay, to find him willing to throw aside his glorious toils of empire, in order to meditate our welfare, and dwell among us for a time. This surely would be wondrous, appalling, and yet transporting; such as that, when it had passed away, life would seem to have nothing more it could offer, compared to the being blessed with such an intercourse!

And now mark: behind all the visible scenery of nature— beyond all the systems of all the stars-around this whole universe, and through the infinity of infinite space itself— from all eternity and to all eternity-there lives a Being, compared to whom that mighty spirit just described, with his empire of a million suns, is infinitely less than to you is the minutest mote that floats in the sunbeam. There is a Being in whose breath lives the whole immense of worlds;

who with the faintest wish could blot them all from existence; and who, after they had all vanished away like a dream, would remain, filling the whole tremendous solitude they left, as unimpaired in all the fulness of his might as when he first scattered them around him to be the flaming beacons of his glory. With him, coïnfinite with immensity, coëval with eternity, the universe is a span, its duration a moment. Hear his voice attesting his own eternal sovereignty: "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away."-But who is he that thus builds the throne of his glory upon the ruins of earth and heaven? who is he that thus triumphs over a perishing universe, himself alone eternal and impassible? The child of a Jewish woman ;--he who was laid in a manger, because there was no room for him in the inn at Bethlehem !

POETRY.

SECTION I.-HISTORICAL AND DESCRIPTIVE.

I.-TRIUMPHS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

(J. G. LYONS.)

Now gather all our Saxon bards, let harps and hearts be strung,

To celebrate the triumphs of our own good Saxon tongue; For stronger far than hosts that march with battle-flags

It

unfurled,

goes with FREEDOM, THOUGHT, and TRUTH, to rouse and rule the world.

Stout Albion learns its household lays on every surf-worn

shore,

And Scotland hears its echoing far as Orkney's breakers

roar

From Jura's crags and Mona's hills it floats on every gale, And warms with eloquence and song the homes of Innisfail.

On many a wide and swarming deck it scales the rough wave's crest,

Seeking its peerless heritage the fresh and fruitful West: It climbs New England's rocky steeps, as victor mounts a throne;

Niagara knows and greets the voice, still mightier than its

own.

It spreads where winter piles deep snows on bleak Canadian plains,

And where, on Essequibo's banks, eternal summer reigns:

It glads Acadia's misty coasts, Jamaica's glowing isle, And bides where, gay with early flowers, green Texan prairies smile:

It tracks the loud, swift Oregon, through sunset valleys rolled,

And soars where Californian brooks wash down their sands of gold.

It sounds in Borneo's camphor groves, on seas of fierce Malay,

In fields that curb old Ganges' flood, and towers of proud

Bombay:

It wakes up Aden's flashing eyes, dusk brows, and swarthy

limbs ;

The dark Liberian soothes her child with English cradle hymns.

Tasmania's maids are wooed and won in gentle Saxon speech; Australian boys read Crusoe's life by Sydney's sheltered beach:

It dwells where Afric's southmost capes meet oceans broad and blue,

And Nieuveld's rugged mountains gird the wide and waste Karroo.

It kindles realms so far apart, that, while its praise you sing, These may be clad with autumn's fruits, and those with flowers of spring:

It quickens lands whose meteor lights flame in an arctic sky, And lands for which the Southern Cross hangs its orbèd fires on high.

It goes with all that prophets told, and righteous kings desired,

With all that great apostles taught, and glorious Greeks admired;

With Shakspere's deep and wondrous verse, and Milton's loftier mind,

With Alfred's laws, and Newton's lore,-to cheer and bless mankind.