heavenliest of qualities, and to visit the fatherless and widow, religion pure and undefiled. A beautiful life, not profession, is, in Christ, its model. Here has been the error of the Church. It has contended with arguments more than with actions. Show me a sect whose life is truly Christ-like, and theirs is my creed-they can not be wrong. The truly pious man has too often regarded his religion as an intangible and impracticable essence, a kind of vestal flame to be kept dimly burning in the sanctum sanctorum of the soul, to be visited only in the closet, and then with breathless awe, a thing to be thought of but softly, to be spoken of never, save with gravity and even mournfulness of face. He has forgotten the injunction, "Let your light so shine before men, that they seeing your good works may glorify your Father who is in Heaven." Make religion attractive, make it radiant, and its own beauty will make it universal. Besides, the Church is full of those who, judging "by their fruits," know nothing of vital piety. They lift their voices in loud and apparently earnest petitions for the world's spiritual salvation, and then, turning to their farms or their merchandise, under the cloak of law insure a poor man's temporal ruin, or take the last morsel from a hungry mouth. Yet they are honest the civil law justifies them, and conscience slumbers, for the law of love is not graven there. I call them not hypocrites, for few I believe, of my fellow-men are so base, but their hearts are insensate, their views mistaken, and they construe the easiness of habit into the fervor of devotion. Out of the true Church we can expect but little moral excellence. There, honesty is but necessity, mere subservience to the law of statutes or public opinion. It is not the spontaneous development of inward qualities, obedience to a natural impulse, but a jealous regard for reputation. Dishonesty is unpopular, the most incorrigible knave hates it in others; hence, to be respected and esteemed a man must be honest. Benevolence, too, is but necessity or pride. The man of wealth, to be esteemed by the truly good, must give, and he is careful to unroll his bills and cast them into the Lord's treasury, if possible, in the eyes of all people. His heartlessness is proved in an hour by complaints of poverty, or by the rude repulsion of some child of charity. But better days are coming. The Christian is dethroning his religion from its seat in the penetralia of the soul, and infusing it into his daily life. The beauty of right and charity is pouring its radiance into the heart. The last echoing of war's noise and glory is coming up from fields where liberty is born and tyranny discomfited, and in the very midst of these last but glorious blows, the Congress of Peace is assembled, where the great, the gifted and the good of earth are met to substitute hymns of peaceful brotherhood, in place of the wild poesy and song in which war has for ages been celebrated.

Outward Bound.

A SALT WATER SKETCH.

The wind blows fair, the vessel feels
The pressure of the rising breeze,
And, swiftest of a thousand keels,

She leaps to the careering seas!

Willis.

A WEEK now, and still the same grim easterly storm is blockading the bay. Still rolls the same heavy swell, still blows the same inexorable wind, still drives the same dismal rain, the same, for aye, that was abroad a week ago. In President Roads and in the Roads of Nantasket, still ride the same outward bound fleet, and still they rest as uneasily at their anchors, while they await with us a change of the weather, that they may get to sea.

A pest upon these hard-hearted north-easters! More vexatious are they than the incessant tongue of an old maid. They are, verily, dogs in the manger; the granny Caudles of Jack Tar's life.

Anchored about us are craft of every rig, freighted for every part of the globe. Wallowing yonder, like a Dutchman in a slough, is a cotton ship bound to New Orleans. Of' down east' extraction is she, I'll warrant, for her wall sides and chubby stern show, plainly enough, that the place of her nativity is in that land of cute Yankees, where they build ships by the mile, and saw them off in lengths according to order. The trim clipper ship to leeward, curveting so gracefully at her anchors, is a Canton trader, bound out for teas; and that saucy looking barque, with the black hull and rakish masts, and as lean fore and aft as a June shad, is bound to Rio; where, for aught I know, she will hoist Brazilian colors and run over to Africa for a cargo of slaves.

Yonder, half a dozen molasses carriers and sugar tubs, with cargoes for the West Indies, are tumbling at their moorings, and a couple of dirty colliers are riding beyond. Here is a stately Liverpool packet; there is a Levant, and there a Cape Town trader, which will bring, on her return, lions and lionesses from the jungles of Caffraria. Yonder is a ship bound to the "Gold Regions," in which three hundred unfortunate existences have hazarded their all. Poor fellows! Little do they know about "going to sea," or they would have been less eager to give their dollars for the privilege of being packed, three hundred dense, into those dank and dark between-decks, where each is allotted about the same space that a stevedore allots to a barrel of flour; and that too, for a voyage of six months, during which they must be twice roasted under the blazing Line, and seasoned once at least, with good frost, in the doubling of stormy Cape Horn. Little know they what it is to live upon the high seas for six monotonous months, in an overcrowded ship! And in their haste to reach that Lotus shore,

they stop not to think of the salt junk whose complexion and tenacity is that of a mahogany knot; nor of the leaden plum-duff; nor of the indescribable lob-scouse; nor of the lively biscuit with inhabitants as old as the ship in which they sail; nor of the daily allowance of one pint of indifferent water, whose savor or flavor is not that of Croton nor Cochituate, but of the oil casks in wich it is stowed! Poor fellows! when the scurvy, or the malignant ship fever, wrestles with your emaciation, and sick comrades sow up the dead body in heavy canvas, and lift it upon the plank, and slide it from the ship's side, then you will curse the broker who has pocketed five thousand dollars commission for inducing you to take passage in this death-ship, and whom, perchance, you may now see standing upon the end of yonder pier, laughing at your folly.

O, for a cradle on the smooth summer seas of the Southern Pacific! Do you see that jaunty craft yonder, that looks as genteel as a gallant and as spruce as a young bachelor?-the brigantine, I mean, with the long spars and the red stripe, and as fleet in her build as the build of a greyhound.

Afar off is she bound, even to the vague summer seas of the Southern Pacific; where, for days and for weeks, the expanse of the Tropical ocean is as blank as the face of a mirror; where the sky is colorless, and not a sign of human existence is seen; where, as, in dreamy indolence, you float along, the awful silence of nature is broken, anon by the crackling of a plank beneath you, which the sun has drawn from its boltings; anon, by the drowsy hum of the canvas, as it is stirred by airs imperceptible; anon by the whisper of the bow, as your bark bends her head to the long undulations and kisses the billow before her; anon by the clumsy plunge of a Dolphin, or the jets of a Cachelot, or the profound sigh of a Grampus, as one after the other they come up for a breath and settle again to their siestas beneath the still waters.

Now, as you sail that sea, a weary Flying-fish drops upon your deck; now, a ghastly Shark, the villain and scavenger of the ocean, attended by his retinue of obsequious little Pilots, shows "his bottomless white pit of teeth" under your lee; now, a tiny Nautilus spreads its bony sail by your side, and the dorsal fins of the glossy Black-fish are flashing in the sunlight ahead. Now, the far off horizon is piled up with clouds of crimson, and gold, and azure, and your eye wanders through their tracery of temples, and mosques, and minarets, and gothic towers; and blue islands float in the distance; and the nights are still and starry, and the sea is illuminated with phosphorescence; and the billows are awakened to a frolic by the mild equatorial breeze!

Take me with you, bonnie barque, on your sunny voyage, for I long to sail those seas of enchantment; to wander those paradisean archipelagoes of coral islands; to listen to the cadence that breaks upon the pearl-shell beach of Tedaidee, and the palmy Oroolia, the land of Yillah the mystical maiden! Give me a good craft, a fleet craft, a petrel in the storm and a gull in the breeze, with companions who can

talk sentiment and philosophy, who love nature, and can stand the night watch, and I am off, off for the seas of the Southern Pacific!

But the pilot promises us fair weather in the morning, for the moon changes to night, and with a change of the moon is sure to come a change of the wind, notwithstanding, to the contrary, "the late Dr." Obeelackajaw, and natural philosophers, and almanac makers in general.

You may theorize to a seafaring man about the absurdity of his belief, that the moon exerts a controlling influence over the weather, even until your tongue tumbles out. You may adduce all the observations and examinations of meteorologists and astronomers, even from the day that the sons of Adam first peeped through a telescope. You may exhibit their most accurate registers of the air, its temperature, its weight, its moisture, its dryness, as ascertained by the most accurate barometers, and thermometers, and anemometers, and hygrometers, and every other meter whatsoever. But your efforts will be utterly in vain. He will give no credence to your abstract "scientifics." You may as well attempt to indoctrinate him to the belief that a ship makes its greatest speed when at anchor; or that a shark is not a philanthropist; or that Sir Whale is the Tom Thumb of the seas; or soaring into the regions of your more refined science, that the Northern Lights, as a modern theory asserts, are the result of the very intense friction of the earth upon its axis; or that the moon is a huge mouldy cheese, inhabited by centipeds!

All his experience contradicts your theory. And his is the experience of a life which, perchance, was upon the broad ocean when it first opened its eyes; which has been nurtured amid the noise of its waters, and which is as familliar with its peculiar and various phenomena, as you are with your own household. An experience which tells him that with a change of the moon, after a "spell of bad weather," he may invariably expect a change of the wind.

And our pilot was correct. With the sun of the next morning came a fresh westerly breeze, putting to flight the leaden cohorts of the most disagreeable of all the disagreeable north-easters, that ever sacked the good city before which we are lying.

Eight bells of the morning watch, and the fleet in the Roads is fast getting under weigh

In a moment our canvas is adrift.

The sheets are bowsed home with a hearty " Yo! Ho!" The topsails and to'gallant sails go to the mastheads to the song of " Cheerily, men!" The anchor is tripped, and dripping with sea-weed it swings from the bow. Out go the stun'sail booms alow and aloft, and white wings are outstretched upon them. Out flap the royals, up slide the gibs, and from deck to truck, bellies the snowy canvas before the western breeze. Rapidly part the waters before us, and rapidly they close upon our receding track.

Sev

We are off! Farewell, early friends and early associations! ered now are the ties that long have bound me to you, to country and to home. This is the reality of that which once was only a dream ;

a reality that often moistens the eye of the voyager, who, with the inherent restlessness of our common nature, turns from present ills only to fly to others that he knows not of.

Boston light is on our beam. Yonder loom "the Graves" and " the Brewsters" black ledges, each of which has in times gone, been the death bed of many a good ship of oak. Point Alderton bends up its brawny arm from the southward to bid us adieu, and, beyond, the highlands of Marshfield are scarce discernible.

On, like a startled deer, speed we to the rustling brine, and the breeze follows after, like an unwearied hound.

Boston Light drops astern. Lo! yonder the rocky promontory of Nahant is lifting its front to the churlish waves, and, still yonder, a score of white villages skirting the retreating coast, look upon us a silent farewell! Before us expands the broad Bay of Massachusetts. Reelingly push we on towards the eastern horizon. There lost is the eye in the blending of the blue above with the blue beneath. On, on!

And whither wend ye, blithe mariners?
To the East!-to the East!

The Life of William Maginn.*

THE above is the unpretending title of a work published nearly two years since, and which seems to have fallen almost still-born from the press. What its circulation on the other side of the water may be, we can not pretend to say. But here we have never seen it advertised except on a single occasion, and it then figured upon a list of somewhat rare publications. It must be admitted that there is not much in the general appearance of the work itself, to recommend it in the eyes of critical publishers. It forms an unpretending duodecimo, plainly bound, in coarse paper, and most abominably printed. Many of the dates, some of them highly important, too,-are illegible. Some notes scarcely present any thing to the eye, but a mystic collection of ink blots arranged in parallel lines. The author's name is by no means a prominent one, and he has had the unusual modesty to say as little as possible about himself. From the title page we gather that he is a London barrister, and one or two slight hints in the Preface seem to convey the supposition that he is, or has been, an occasional contributor to Fraser's Magazine. To all further investigations into his private matters, there is returned a non est inventum, as his readers will easily discover for themselves.

Moreover, the soul of Mr. Prince's book is nearly as ill a piece of work as the body. The style is as bad as it can conveniently be.

* LIFE OF WILLIAM MAGINN, by Samuel Prince, Barrister. London, 1848.