The shepherds gazed,--with greatest wonder gazed!
And as they gazed they heard the rapturous song
So sweetly harped above them, and with awe

Were filled, and trembling.

"Fear ye not," they said,

"For unto you, in David's town, is born

The Saviour, Prince of Life, and Prince of Peace."

THE mind has ever been, and still remains problem; and all its parts,-operating with th harmony, depending one upon another for m and existence, as do the essential parts of structed machinery, form as a whole, a mos tricacy.

No philosophic wanderings, no scientific lengthened metaphysical disquisitions, have ed in unravelling the mystery that envelopes it or in exploring and divulging the fountain immortality.

Ancient philosophy had sealed the summi ledge, and descended to the silence of the dee when it discovered that man was moved b embodiment of uncreated excellence, an ema mortal principle, which conveyed to them a attributes which they conceived to be centred yet could form no idea of the character of its the nature of its destiny; yet being well assur

principle as mind did exist, suggesting every deliberation and controlling every action, it served only to awe them into profound reverence for the character of God, from whom they supposed it to emanate. They conceived it to be a bright ray of infinite wisdom, a spirit-form, partaking of Divinity; but that it should have its seeming location in the body, only served to involve in mystery the nature of its connexion with the body, and the relation of the one to the final destiny of the other.

And even now, in the nineteenth century, when the sun of knowledge has passed the mental horizon, and climbed the zenith of the intellectual firmament, and is shining in meridian splendour; when the ineffable light of science is shedding its halo over all lands, illuminating, with the bright flashes of its rich corruscations, the darkest abodes of ignorance; when bigotry and superstition are being crushed before the triumphant march of civilization and religion ;— even in this age of the world, when to doubt the existence of mind, would be considered by the most ignorant, folly as consummate as to clothe in the vesture of rationality a madman's dreams; even now does the veil of secrecy hang in sable folds over the immortal superstructure, defying the most desperate efforts to divulge, and the most ponderous reasonings to elucidate. The oracle of oracles has been consulted, to aid the man in this contest with mind, yet not one spark of immortal fire has ever fallen before the veil.

Yet notwithstanding it is not possible to effect an entrance within the inner veil, and behold, unshrouded, the glories of the immortal mind, we delight to linger in the distance,

which lends a holy enchantment to the view, and contemplate this mystery. We love, while sparkling admiration kindles into fire, to bend the knee to the unseen, yet not unconceived beauty, that reigns within the inner temple of man,—the while thought, wrapped in the mystic mantle of its high order, passes and repasses the fiery ordeal yet cannot unfold to man its unoriginated loveliness in the language of earth, and durst not, while man embodies corruption, pluck from angelic harps the song of heaven.

Without thought, the world of mind would be as day without the sun, a cheerless night and dark, without moon or star.

Reason enthroned, and judgment dancing attendance, are the unceasing ministers of thought. Memory, mighty Memory looking down through the lapse of ages, working with untiring efforts beneath the decaying wreck of the past, breaking the brooding silence, and scattering the shades of dark oblivion, unfolding to clear view the world that was, vies with Thought in traversing the mazy labyrinth of other years, and by swift flight over past history, plants your feet in Paradise, the garden of God, when the early dew hung upon the opening blossoms of new-born time, before the light of the near stars had kissed the face of smiling nature; and hand in hand with Thought, wanders to the very beginning of time, within hearing of the mandate, "Let there be light," and standing on the verge, where rolled the first wave of time, glassing the faintest light of the first morning star, side by side with the first budding-hour, triumphantly exults in equality with Thought, the Frince of Powers.

While in the midst of its laughing glee, Thought gently glides from her side into the boundless, the shoreless and the unfathomable, where it is neither light nor dark, nothing reigning, a mighty still profound. There, where the wing of time has never swept, where the thunder-bolt never struck, where the lightning never reached,—there Thought revels in all the grandeur of its existence, breathing its own immortality. Returning, hand in hand, they come on airy wing over the hill-tops of a thousand snows, and across the verdant carpetings of a thousand springs, down to the present, where Memory crowning herself conqueror of the past, and monarch of the present, beholds Thought bounding into futurity, surrounded by the distant, high swelling waves of time, bearing along the magnitude of coming events; and even beyond the future, which man scans for use, as bearing on the present, it flies, to where time's almost imperceptible horizon stretches its dark outline along the infinitude of space.

Thought is the life of the mind, the eternal spring, ever green amid life's changing seasons; the ever-springing fountain of all science, and the perfection of all art. The life of true genius is its shadowing forth; for on Avon's mount and banks, it lighted a fire whose flames, mingling with the sunbeam, have been kissed by all the winds of heaven, and whose embers shall glow when all others are extinguished; and there it plucked from fame's etherial bower the fairest flowers, and entwined them into a wreath to crown the brow of Shakspeare. Thought lingered near the shrine of his soul, while he touched with bold pencil

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