A WHITSUNTIDE WREATH.

ΤΗ

BY MONCURE D. CONWAY.

HE French Emperor in the new volume of his "Life of Cæsar" shows me a probability that out here on Wimbledon Common, where I hasten with each returning Spring, Cæsar marched after his first landing in Britain, and that these old trenches around our vine-covered cottage mark where his first great battle was fought. Cæsar is dead; Vercingetorix is dead; the Roman dynasty in Britain is dead. But the nightingales which sang those soldiers in their tents to sleep so many thousands of years ago, last night sang me to sleep, and this morning the same sunshine softly unsealed my eyes, and the same vocal sunshine (that of the larks) my ears, which unsealed those who rest in nameless graves beneath the grass and flowers, which also bloom to-day as then. For those men with their ambitions and their aims there was no immortality on earth; but as I stroll over this Common, and to the Thames, and on its banks, there are the very same beauties blooming below, soaring, singing above which bloomed of old. Nay, the warriors did not even live in the gardens of poets, but every flower and bird blooms or sings there. How thrilling is it to walk these fields and river-banks and feel that one is seeing the very daffodils, daisies, and violets, and listening to the very larks and cuckoos and nightingales, which the blessed bards looked on and wove into the divine sky-tinted gauze with which they have invested this old island — which with all her faults the lover of poetry must love still! As I lately strolled beside the Thames and saw two lovely swans softly floating out below Hampton Court, and near by a group of girls gathering flowers, I felt as if Spenser might have been the very coinage of that scene, and might be a spirit yet hovering over it. Perhaps on that mossy rock there he sat and wrote:

"There in a meadow by the river's side
A flock of nymphs I chanced to espy,
All lovely daughters of the flood thereby.
Of every sort which in that meadow grew
They gathered some; the violet, pallid blue,
The little daisy that at evening closes,
The virgin lily and the primrose true. . . .
Sweet Thames! run softly, till I end my song.
swans of goodly hue

With that I saw two

Come softly swimming down the lee;

Two fairer birds I yet did never see;

The snow which doth the top of Pindus strow

Did never whiter show."

I veer a little, entering a pleasant grove where the birds are lustily rehearsing the same old madrigal which some hundreds of years ago Nash, walking here, heard them at, and caught in the springes of a lyric:

"Spring, the sweet Spring, is the year's pleasant King;

Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,

Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing,
Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!"

And was it not this very morning that old Drummond of Hawthornden saw "ensaffroning sea and air"? Was it not here that the Passionate Shepherd promised his love

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle "?

And may not he have wandered hither, the great unrecognized one, -unrecognized even by himself, - from the great city lonelier to him than the fields? Never see I a lark rising from its nest in the lowly gorse, and ascending slowly straightly (as if on a sunbeam ladder) showering back such sounds as sparkling dew-drops and the eyes of infants might yield had they voices, ever upward until it has become against the blue a quivering visible trill of music,—but I remember what it sang to Shakespeare:

"Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,

Featured like him, like him with friends possest,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least ;

Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee-
and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising

From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate."

-The successors, imitators, biographers, of the Cæsars, of tyrants, of mean self-seekers, are about as ugly to-day as ever. They do not improve under close observation in point of time. Bismark, Victor Emmanuel, Louis Napoleon, Andy Johnson are not lovely beings too look upon. It is not lovely to see America crouching under ex-slavemasters, and trying to defraud the lowly. And one sometimes goes to bed listening to Philomel with her breast against a thorn, when her burden seems to be that of Bacon:

"Wars with their noise affiright us; when they cease,

What then remains, but that we still should cry
For being born, or, being born, to die?"

But in the morning there are the nameless unmarked graves of dead ambitions beneath the living scented grass; there are the moss-conquered conquerors; and the lark sings on over them-as will the thrush and the robin one day sing over our forgotten graves of wrongs and wrong-doers in America. Human hearts will also beat for justice, and aspire to noble ideals, instead of meannesses and cruelties. And so:—

"Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his merry note

no, not even "winter and rough weather," which are no enemies but friends, -Will Shakespeare to the contrary, notwithstanding.

What a pity our mornings will not last. Stay, thou art fair!' In vain. No flower more surely fades than that superb daily dawn-bloom of the East which all things greet. And, forsooth, every minor bloom must ape that Auroral one, and expand or close as it comes or goes. "How well,”. sings Marvell :

"How well the skilful gardener drew
Of flowers and herbs this dial new!
Where, from above, the milder sun
Does through a fragrant Zodiac run:
And as it works the industrious bee
Computes its time as well as we,

And could such sweet and wholsome hours,
Be reckoned, but with herbs and flowers!"

- SO

Well did the ancients deify the Sun: are not all things made in his image and likeness, are not all living things less or larger sunlets?— as appleblossoms, butterflies, stars? Or say some great and just cause climbs the horizon is it not a sun? No man can truly and deeply find joy except directly, or indirectly from that light. In its waxing its rays organize themselves into a myriad of beings and appliances. Men mark their lives and the life of their generation by it as a dial; by the old errors and wrongs closing, by the truths unfolding in fair growths and victories. Chaos withering like a weed, Paradise opening; every age has seen this repeated, but few have perceived it. Let us take courage- so far as is permitted those who must work desperately. Sometimes-in remembering how Nature refuses to repeat herself. Thomas Paine told the parsons that he had just been through their sacred grove and cut down many of their trees; "you may," he said, "and doubtless will, go and stick them in the ground again, and try and make people believe that they are growing because they are yet green; but they will never grow again." Poor Milton groaned when he saw the baubles and follies of royalty apparently brought back again from where Cromwell had driven them; De Tocqueville saw the empire fastened upon his country after the great earthquake in Paris which seemed to swallow it up; and I fear that Wendell Phillips may yet see Slavery enthroned at Washington. But it will be only the wraith of the thing that is ever seen thus: things—especially bad things, can never really be got back where they were before. The Restoration which Milton saw was no restoration at all, but the phantom of one. We know that this is so with the things we love and would fain recall; let not our weak faith ascribe a greater permanence or vitality to things foul than to things fair.

Forms beautiful and true can survive only by resurrection in higher forms; but there is no downward, no infernal resurrection. The wages of sin is DEATH.

"Only the actions of the just

Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."

LONDON, May, 1866.

THE BOSTON REVIVAL, AND ITS LEADER.

BY CHARLES K. WHIPPLE.

HAVING, in former years, had experience of the method of commencing and conducting "revivals" in six different towns in this State, and seeing, near the beginning of the present year, that preparations were making to produce one on a very large scale in Boston, I thought it worth while to spend some time in observing the movements preparatory to it, taking note of the machinery employed in it, marking the successive stages of its development, and examining the character and tendency of such results as should appear from it. In particular I wished to learn these two things, namely: whether the leaders would keep themselves within the bounds of truth and honesty in the various steps of this great effort to draw people into their churches; and whether any result attained would exceed what might reasonably be expected from the character and amount of the human machinery set in operation. It is to the results of this investigation that I now ask attention.

At or before the beginning of the present year, Dr. Nehemiah Adams began a series of "revival measures" at his church in Essex street, in this city. Extra prayer-meetings were held, special sermons preached, printed invitations sent to outside sinners to walk in and be provided for. The results of these measures were so very moderate, that greater efforts and new coadjutors were found necessary. So, on the 19th of January, a Council of the Orthodox Congregational churches of Boston was called by Dr. Adams and his church, and invited to assemble in the Essex street meeting-house and advise what measures should next be taken.

The problem seemed not an easy one, since it was only at the third adjourned meeting that a plan of action was adopted by the Reverends and laymen of the Council. They, however, showed themselves skilful and practical men, since after long discussions, the elaborate report of a committee, and the pruning of that report by the sagacious managers assembled, it was unanimously agreed among them that the tools must be sharpened.

The first measure proposed by the Council for getting the instruments of revivalism into working order was, a "renewal of covenant" by the members of each church concerned, after the preaching of appropriate sermons by their ministers. The second was that, immediately after

this manipulation (that is, on the evening of the third Sunday in March), there should be "united communion services" in the Park street meetinghouse, that the work already done might be fortified. The third was that addresses written by the ministers of the churches concerned should be printed and circulated among the church-members, plainly setting before them "the means through which we hope for a renewal of the work of the Holy Spirit among us." Eleven subjects for these addresses are specified. Next among the recommendations of the Council came "Observance of the Sabbath." They were convinced "that the services of the Lord's day ought to be considered supreme above all other times and means of grace," and they earnestly urged attendance "on both the services usually held” — a duty which they declared to be too much neglected by church-members as well as others.

Fifth, the Council recommended to the pastors great plainness and distinctness in preaching upon what they called the "primal truths of God's Word," namely: "Man's total alienation from God; His divine justice in the eternal punishment of the wicked; the new birth; salvation through faith in Christ."

Chief among the remaining recommendations of the Council were the following co-operation between different churches by union prayer-meetings; an increase in the number of social prayer-meetings held by each church for itself; a systematic visitation of the members of each church by "competent and experienced Christians ;" a co-operation of all the churches with whichever one of them may appoint "protracted meetings;" the use of the Sabbath School "as a means of drawing children and others into the services of the sanctuary;" the use of lay preachers "under the supervision and with the co-operation of the pastor;" and, finally, the diligent prosecu tion of a work already in progress, namely, the apportionment of the city into districts, and the assignment of a district to each church for its religious care, by which "the religious condition of every family should be known, and not a child unconnected with any Sabbath School should remain unsought."

A trial was then made, for several weeks, of diligent use of the measures above indicated. But, the results continuing small and unsatisfactory, though three months had elapsed since Dr. Adams's preparations were begun, and though, during the latter part of that time, the efforts of all the Orthodox Congregational ministers and churches of Boston had been concentrated on the work—it was decided to call in the aid of a professional “expert," and Rev. A. B. Earle, an experienced "revivalist," was desired to take charge of the movement. This he did with great zeal and vigor, and it must be acknowledged, with very great skill. He had, besides the reputation of twenty years successful management of this sort of work, the prestige of a very great revival just carried through in Chelsea; and his competence for the engineering department, the work of direction and persuasion, was so manifest, that sundry of those who had hitherto been prominent leaders, lay and clerical, immediately grouped themselves around him,