"It can't be done," is the cry which greets every new application of science, when first announced; every project for the removal of wrongs, under which generations have grown grey; every scheme for the elevation of the multitudinous classes to a position of social comfort and intelligent existence, "It can't be done-the thing is impossible."

So said Sir Walter Scott, when it was proposed to light our towns with gas. "It can't be done-it is only the dream of a lunatic!" So said the sneering by-standers, when Fulton proposed to ascend the Hudson river with his first steam-boat: "It can't be done!"-and the thing was talked of as "the Fulton folly." So said Dr. Lardner, when it was proposed to navigate the Atlantic by steamers; and he "demonstrated" that it was impossible. So said the Quarterly Review, when it was proposed to carry Londoners to Greenwich by rail, at the rate of twenty miles an hour: "It can't be done; and we should as soon expect people to allow themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve's ricochet rockets, as that they should allow themselves to be carried along at such a rate, even were it possible." The electric telegraph was a greater folly still! Who would ever credit such a thing as instantaneous communication between points, hundreds and even thousands of miles distant? Yet these, and a great many more pronounced impossibilities, have become the actualities of this day; and the rapidity of the progress of science, and the wonders which attend it, would almost forbid us pronouncing as impossible anything that it proposes to perform.

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resolute purpose can accomplish all things. Progress and perfection lie before us; mankind advances without ceasing; and the impossible daily disappears before our ardent tread. Darkness and chaos fly, and are chased down the horizon by the advancing light.

Those moral improvements, which are usually pronounced "impossible," are so styled, because the fancied interests of some particular class are supposed to be endangered by their adoption. Admit all men equally to the possession of social and political power, and the few who actually possess these fancy their position would be endangered. They prophesy revolution, and fear overturn. They have not faith in man. They fear humanity, because they are unjust to it. They will admit the advantages of certain principles, when enjoyed by themselves, but deny these advantages when proposed to be conferred on others; they refuse to do unto others as they are done by.

It is possible to place all men in a position of intelligent citizenship, and to include all citizens in a bond of civilized and happy brotherhood. It is possible to make all men personally interested in the preservation of peace and security, so that all the possibility of war between classes and nations shall be entirely removed. It is possible to do this by the extension of justice, and by the improved practice of human culture. We have as yet made but little progress in the art of turning human beings to the best account. It is the accident of birth which, for the most part, determines the respective culture of the various members of the human family. Society allows the great majority to grow up to manhood in a state of imperfect culture, many in a state of untutored ignorance; and the result is an enormous mass of half-developed, ill-trained, and badly-regulated minds in all classes.

All large measures that have yet been promulgated for bettering the social condition of man have been at It is possible, by a wise and careful system of culture, first received with equal incredulity. "Impracticable!" to entirely change the condition of society, and vastly "Utopian!" are the epithets applied to them. How increase the happiness of the whole. See what cultivamany centuries of sneering, and aversion, and persecution tion does for plants and animals. Every horticultural had Christianity to undergo, before it could secure a footing among civilized nations? Even at this comparatively advanced stage of civilization, many of its noblest principles are pronounced to be "impracticable." Propose to disband armies and adopt the non-resistent policy; to enfranchise poor men as well as rich, and concede to all, without distinction of sect or class, the full benefits of citizenship; to practise that social love and community of well-being which are the true practical issue of Christianity; and you are still hailed with the cry of "Utopian! Impossible! It can't be done!"

We believe too much in the impossible. We forget that most of the "impossibilities" of past ages have already become the every-day transactions of this. Napoleon held that there should be no such word. Indeed everything is possible in human progress. By faith and action we can remove mountains. The strong will and

exhibition proves its wonderful influence; how, out of the vilest weed of the fields, the scientific gardener, by careful training and culture, can educe the "bright, consummate flower;" from the wild crab-tree, the luxurious apple; from the little mountain-strawberry, the most delicious and beautiful fruit. Go to the agricultural show, and you will see what the careful cultivation of animals can accomplish. An equally careful cultivation of MAN, would issue in still more astounding and world-blessing results. Indeed, in the superior culture of some men, we see what all men might be made. For, every individual contains in himself the germs of all possible improvement. Nature distributes her gifts without the slightest reference to the artificial distinctions of society; but, for want of training, we allow those gifts to run to waste, or to become choked up by the dense undergrowth of ignorance and vice.

ELIZA COOK'S JOURNAL.

expected to reach bliss by sliding for five days down a
rugged rock, wounding itself and shivering with cold.
The American Indians sought happiness in castigation,
and considered vomits the most expeditious mode of en-
Some tribes of Afri-
forcing self-denial on the stomach.
cans believe that on the way to Heaven every man's head
is knocked against a wall. By consent of mankind,
therefore, it granted that we must pass pain on the way
to pleasure.

bouquet, at a time when the dull seeker of health and
strength would have her to go upstairs with a bed-
candlestick. Your guests arrive. Young ladies thinly
clad, and packed in carriages, emerge half stifled, put a
cold foot, protected by a filmy shoe, upon the pavement,
and run, shivering, into your house. Well, sir, we'll warm
them presently. But suffer me to leave you now, while
you receive your guests.

"I know a Phyllis, fresh from the country, who gets

"What pleasure is, when reached, none but the dog-up at six and goes to bed at ten; who knows no perfume She is now in London, and desires to do matical can venture to determine. To Greenlanders, a but a flower-garden, and has worn no bandage to her waist spacious fish-kettle, for ever simmering, in which boiled except a sash. seals for ever swim, is the delight of Heaven. And as others do. She is invited to your party, but is not yet remember that, in the opinion of M. Bailly, Adam and come: it may be well for me to call upon her. Why, in the name of Newgate, what is going on? She is shrieking A Eve gardened in Nova Zembla. Murder!' on the second floor. Up to the rescue! judicious maid directs me to the drawing-room: 'It's only Miss a-trying on her stays,'

"You will not be surprised, therefore, if I call upon you to prepare for your domestic pleasures with a little suffering; nor, when I tell you what such pleasures "Here we are, sir, Phyllis and I.-You find the room are, must you exclaim against them as absurd. Having the sanction of our forefathers, they are what is fashion- oppressive?-'tis with perfume, Phyllis.-With foul air? ah, your nice country nose detects it; yes, there is foul able now, and consequently they are what is fit. "I propose, then, that you should give, for the enter-air; not nasty of course, my dear, mixed, as it here is, tainment of your friends, an Evening Party; and as this is a scene in which young ladies prominently figure, I will, if you please, on this occasion, pay particular attention to your daughter.

with eau-de-Cologne and patchouli. Pills are not nasty,
sugared. A grain or two of arsenic in each might be not
quite exactly neutralized by sugar; but there is nothing
like faith in a good digestion.-Why do the gentlemen
cuddle the ladies, and spin about the room with them
like teetotums? Oh, Phyllis! Phyllis ! let me waltz with
An ice will refresh you. Spasms
you. There, do you not see how it is? Faint are you-
giddy-will you fall?
next! Phyllis, let me take you home.

Now, then, sir, Phyllis has been put to bed; allow me to dance a polka with your daughter. Frail, elegant creature that she is!

Bonbon. Cham-
Brandy
Jelly.

"O, mystery of preparation!-Pardon, sir, You err if you suppose me to insinuate that ladies are more careful over personal adornment than the gentlemen. When men made a display of manhood, wearing beards, it is recorded that they packed them, when they went to bed, in paste-board cases, lest they might be tumbled in the A glass of wine,-a macaroon,That was a night. Man at his grimmest is as vain as woman, even when he stalks about bearded and battle-axed. This is the mystery of preparation in your daughter's case; how good. Sontag, yes; and that dear novel. You have prepared her from child-delightful dance; now let us promenade. The room is Is does she breathe? hood for the part she is to play to-night, by training her close; a glass of wine, an ice, and let us get to the deform into the only shape which can be looked on with com-licious draught in the conservatory, or by that door. A machine called stays, it not beautiful? The next quadrille-I look slily at my How placency in any ball-room. Another dance. introduced long since into England by the Normans, has watch, and Auber's grim chorus rumbles within me, Supper. My dear had her in its grip from early girlhood. She has become Voici minuit! voici minuit !' pale, and-only the least bit-liable to be blue about the fond she seems to be of macaroons. nose and fingers. Stays are an excellent contrivance: sir, I will take good care of your daughter. One sandthey give a material support to the old cause, Unhealthi- wich. ness at Home. This is the secret of their excellence. woman's ribs are narrow at the top, and as they approach the waist they widen, to allow room for the lungs to play within them. If you can prevent the ribs from widening, you can prevent the lungs from playing, which they have This you accomno right to do, and make them work. plish by the agency of stays. It fortunately happens that these lungs have work to do-the putting of the breath of life into the blood-which they are unable to do properly when cramped for space; it becomes about as difficult to them as it would be to you to play the trombone in a china-closet. By this compression of the chest, ladies are made nervous, and become unfit for much exertion; they do not, however, allow us to suppose that There is a fiction of attire which they have lost flesh. would induce, in a speculative critic, the belief that some internal flame had caused their waists to gutter, and that the ribs had all run down into a lump, which protrudes behind under the waistband. This appearance is, I think, a fiction, and for my opinion I have newspaper authority. In the papers, it was written one day last year, that the hump alluded to was tested with a pin, upon the person of a lady coming from the Isle of Man. and it was found not to be sensitive. Brandy exuded from the wound, for, in that case, the projection was a bladder, in which the prudent housewife was smuggling comfort in a quiet way. The touch of a pin changed all into discomfort, when she found that she was converted into a peripatetic wateringcan-brandying-can, I should have said.

Champagne. Blancmange. Tipsy cake. Champagne. Sherry. A pagne. Trifle. Glass of wine. A macaroon. cherries. Champagne. Custard. Macaroon. The ladies are being taken care of.-Yes; now in their absence we will drink their health, and wink at each other: their and our Bad healths. This is the happiest moment of our lives; at two in the morning, with a dose of indigestion in the stomach, and three hours more to come before we get to bed. You, my dear sir, hope that, on many occasions like the present, you may see your friends around you, looking as glassy-eyed as you have made them to look We will rejoin the ladies. now. "Nothing but champagne could have enabled us to We were getting weary keep up the evening so well. before supper,-but we have had some wine, have dug the spur into our sides, and on we go again. At length even the bottle stimulates our worn-out company no more, and then we separate. Good night, dear sir; we have spent a Very Pleasant Evening under your roof.

"To-morrow, when you depart from a late breakfast, having seen your daughter's face and her boiled-mackereleye, knowing that your wife is bilious, and that your son has just gone out for soda-water, you will feel yourself to be a Briton who has done his duty, a man who has paid something on account of his great debt to civilized society."

LOVE can excuse anything except meanness; but meanness kills love, cripples even natural affection :

"Your daughter comes down stairs dressed, with a without esteem, true love cannot exist.

FANCIES AND FICTIONS OF THE EARLY

WORLD.

ginnings. Between these two constellations was situated
Crater, the starry cup, out of which these exiled spirits
were compelled to take a deep oblivious draught, that
they might carry with them to earth no memory of
that songful Paradise, to which they were now bidding a
long, a sad adieu. There, for the last time, they con-
sorted with their heavenly companions, and quaffed, in
sorrowful farewell, the nectar of the gods.
"If souls,"
says Macrobius, "retained, in their descent to bodies, the
memory of divine concerns of which they were conscious
in the heavens, there would be no dissension among men
concerning divinity. But all, indeed, in descending,
drink of oblivion, though some more, and others less." *

THE life of nations has its prototype in the life of the individual. As in the individual, sentiment is manifested before intelligence, and imagination precedes reflection: so in nations, the literature of the heart has always preceded the literature of the intellect; and the vagaries of fiction have heralded, though sometimes at a distance considerably remote, the footsteps of philosophy. Imagination had called the world her own, centuries before reason had attempted to wrest the sceptre from her hand, and to establish a sedater empire. The wild war-song had nerved the arm of the warrior, and the martial dirge" Yet," continues the same old, quaint philosopher, "the poured forth its disjointed, melancholy music over his forest-tomb, ages before the Genius of History had collected the first rude materials for her ponderous scroll.

Beautiful, indeed, were the fictions of the early world! And yet, withal, they had a grandeur and a grasp, which later ages have never been able to attain. The imagination of early men was more bold, vigorous, and beautiful, and was characterized by a greater freshness than it wears now, in this duli, heavy, leaden, utilitarian age. It crowded every cave and grotto, mountain, fountain, field, and wilderness, with spirits of malignity or benevolence. Every appearance of nature had its special god. The cloud, the wind, the sea, the storm, the earthquake, and the tempest, each had its own presiding deity. The world's first fathers, in the rampant luxuriance of their untamed fancy, peopled the universe with the beautiful creations of their gay mythology. All the mysterious events of life, and the marvellous phenomena of nature, were readily explained by the traditions of a poetical and dreamy faith, which transmitted orally from generation to generation, and received with unquestioning credulity, governed for ages the thoughts and the opinions of

mankind.

Did the rainbow fling its orb across the sky, fringing the thunder-cloud with beauty, imagination at once transformed it into the "bridge of the gods,"* down which the spirits of a brighter sphere-like those which gladdened the pillow of the aged patriarch-came to hold soothing converse with the fallen and world-battered wayfarers of this.

soul is not extinguished by its temporary banishment, but, when purified and cleansed from the pollutions of vice, and refined from its earthly incrustations, it will be restored again to its perennial life, and return to its pristine beauty, and its primal home."

This old Greek fancy was, after all, like most of their philosophy, borrowed from the Egyptians. In the secret recesses of their stupendous temples, the priests of this strange and wonder-loving people taught the young Neophyte, that men were spirits fallen from a brighter sphere, and that the reason they brought with them no reminiscences of that pre-existence was, because one of the Genii stood at the gate of human life, with a leathean cup in his hand, from which each soul, ere it ventured forth, was compelled to take a deep oblivious draught, on recovering from which, there flitted before it but dim, broken, and fragmentary visions of the past.

Amongst these broken visions of the past — these glimpses of the "Better Land"-dim memories of an ante-natal life, music, or harmony, was supposed to be the chief.

Those old dreamers of the Nile had observed the strange, saddening power, which music has over the feelings; that we are never merry when we hear sweet music; and they supposed it to result from the spirit calling to mind the airs of Paradise, heard in a state of preexistence. Nor were the Hindoos strangers to this wild, beautiful, and dreamy faith. Observing that our sweetest songs always tell of saddest thought, they endeavoured to account for it in the same manner. Thus, in the Indian drama of Sacontala, the following remark occurs :

men, otherwise happy, on seeing beautiful forms, and listening to sweet melody, arises from some faint remembrance of past joys, and the traces of connections in a former state of existence." +

Call it an idle fancy if you will, yet was there a beau-" Perhaps," says the king, Dushmanta, "the sadness of tiful and an elevating philosophy in the thought, for it taught men that the benevolent "All-Father" still watched over them, and would sometimes come down from his throne of stars, to sympathize with their sorrows, and to gladden with his presence, a world which had forfeited his love!

And verily there is a strange, unaccountable, and dream-like beauty in music, which can subdue the proudest spirit, and, gliding into the hush of the heart, will nestle there, stilling its more tumultuous throbbings, and filling it with calm, peaceful memories of the far long ago.

All tribes and races of men, in all countries and in all times, have owned the spell, from the hour when Pan first taught the Thracian shepherd, to carve his love-notes in the invisible air, and fill the summer nights with softest, sweetest flute-music, down to the present moment. It is a universal language, understood by all, and wakening strange pulsations even in the most obdurate heart. Most of us have experienced the luxury of tears, when listening to an old ballad.

A singular fancy, too, was that of the old Greeks, concerning the milky way. Holding the doctrine (so beautitully shadowed forth by Plato, under the name of Reminiscence) of the soul's ante-natal life, they imagined that the milky-way was the path down which spirits exiled from their heavenly home, descended on their tearful pilgrimage, to take up their lodgment in human flesh. And as they gravitated towards this lower world, and became surrounded with the grosser forms of matter, stupefied by the strife and the turmoil thus introduced into their hitherto pure and simple natures, they became oblivious of the past, waking up to their earthly destiny, with but a dim and confused memory of their former history. Cancer was the last constellation, in which these earth-vice and crime, was at length banished from his country; bound spirits were supposed to reside, prior to the commencement of their mournful pilgrimage. Leo was said to be the first stage in the descent of these exiled gods, because it was in this constellation, according to the ancient philosophy, that the rudiments of birth, and certain primary exercises of human nature had their be

Edda Islandorum.

We knew an old man who, having led a long career of

and who, while undergoing his period of banishment amidst the wilds and jungles of a distant land, heard, in the summer eventide, a sweet female voice, singing in his own language, the very song which had lulled him to his infant slumbers, when he knew crime but by name, and know it only to abhor. It had been sung, too, by the cra

Macrob. in Somn. Scip., cap. 12, p. 368. † Sacontala, p. 49.

dle of an infant sister, a little one who had died young, and was now in heaven; the mother, too, was no more. But the song-the old song had not lost its influence over him yet. Back came trooping upon him the old memories, which had so long slumbered down there in the unsunned depths of his heart: the mother and the father; the household gatherings; the old books; the old school-house; the time-worn church, half hidden by the old yew-trees, where he had first heard the Bible read; all came back upon him, as fresh as if it were but yesterday; and, overpowered by his feelings, he gave vent to them in a flood of tears. And then the oid man grew calm, and his latter days were his best days; and when the term of his banishment had expired, he came back again to his father-land, and there, in that old village graveyard, amid whose grassy hillocks he had first played and gambolled, and where the mother and her little one were sleeping, he lay down his weary limbs, and sank peacefully away into the common grave.

Pan, the harvests to Ceres, and the thunder to Jupiter,
taught its disciples, that the universe itself was the spa-
cious temple of the Divinity. They made

"Their altars, the high places, and the peak
Of earth o'er gazing mountains."

And surely theirs was the spirit we cannot choose but love,-so holy, so reverend was their unquestioning faith. Was not theirs the true heart-language, which we most with nature holier and deeper than ours? And now reverence, most admire? Was not their communion they have passed away, those old world dreamers! The place that knew them knows them no more for ever. They have gone over to the great majority! They have relics of their once-beautiful faith still survive, like wrecks joined the famous nations of the dead! The broken scattered upon the ancient sands of creation,-precious fragments, which have escaped the sweeping surges of Time's ever-rolling sea. And as we wander upon the It was on the sunny and luxuriant plains of Hindostan, shores of that solemn, soundless ocean, we hear ever and In the vale of Cashmere, amid the regions of the sky-rious billows, and whispering in tones of dull, pulsating anon sorrowful, sweet voices, sighing up from the mystecleaving Himalayas, and on the lotus-decked banks of the Ganges, that the human imagination put forth some of its wildest and most beautiful dreamings. The country of the first men was especially fitted for the development and play of the imagination.

The tradition which is still common to the rustics in our secluded country villages, that when that peculiar tremor or shudder, known by the name of " live-blood," passes over the frame, some one is walking over our future grave, owes its origin to the playful fancy of the dreamy Hindoo. From Hindostan it travelled into Egypt, was carried from thence into Greece, brought by the first Celtic tribes into Western Europe, and perpetuated by their Teutonic successors.

Most of the old traditions which still linger among us, in the outskirts of our great towns, and in our rural districts, twining their decaying tendrils round the hearts of the simple peasantry, are relics of the old Pagan faith, which once ruled the hearts and swayed the thoughts of mankind. Now the old gods have been deposed, their temples rudely violated, and their altars thrown down. The old faith is dead now; but its touching legends still survive in the hearts and thoughts of simple men. And though the shadows of the deep woods seem to be less holy, and the fairies dance no more in the charmed forestring, the simple faith of simple men still points to the spot, where erst in the moonlight they laughed and gambolled, while the star-gods looked down upon them from their sapphire thrones, and smiled. Verily, history teaches us this solemn lesson, that creeds and religions, like the generations of men, are born and pass away. Each people has its peculiar faith, each age its one dominant thought.

The aged faith of aged centuries, shorn of its venerable beauty, becomes the plaything of later times. The Druids have disappeared with the sacred forests of Gaul. The terrible, the wise, the beneficent Odin, has dwindled down into the ogre of our fairy tales. Neptune has perished with his trident. The water gods are gone; and Jupiter no longer thunders from the summits of the Capitol.

The religious sentiment ran like a vein of gold through all the fictions of the early world. Philosophy had not then laid bare the laws and operations of nature; and men, in their simple, child-like faith, thought that they traced the immediate finger of the Deity, in all the mysterious phenomena playing around them. They heard his voice in the tramping thunder, and in the mysterious winds, chanting their solemn anthems in the dark woods at night. They felt his presence alike in the hot silence of a summer noon, and the solemn splendour of the midnight sky. All music was but the echo of his voice; all beauty was but the shadow of his smile! That poetic mythology which confided the fountains to the Naiads, the flocks to

music, touching tales and legends of the olden time. And that mysterious heart-music, floating with such dirge-like cadence down the stream of time, seems to gather together, and to tie up again the broken links in the long history of human hearts and human sympathies, from B. B. W. Adam down to the world's latest wanderer.

SHADOWS.

ALL things earthly vanish and pass-
Vanish as hues of the morn;

All pass away as the glimmer of day,
While others as fleet are born.

Hush, hush! thou too must fall
Under the coflin shroud;
Stay, stay! thy funeral pall
Is imaged in yonder cloud!
All things vanish and pass away,
Like shadows, that flit at the close of day.

The flowers that bloom in the azure deeps-
The golden stars-must rall;
There is ever a time they cease to climb
O'er the steeps of Heaven's blue wall.
Hush, hush! one now goes down
Into the soundless sea;

Fleet, fleet, as that star hath flown,
Are the days of thy destiny!
Like Autumn's shadow, or evening's sigh,
Each star of darkness but gleams to die.

The blossoms that shine in the fields of Spring,
Like jewels sown in the grass,

Have a fate like stars which their glory fling,
And come but to wither and pass.

Look, look! as the leaves grow white,
And blooms but wither and fade,
The flowers which glimmered in Spring
so bright

Have perished in Autumn's shade,
As the voice of the sick when they sink to die,
So feeble and faint do the blossoms lie!

Look down on the infant, whose laughing eyes
Seem mirrors of heavenly bliss;

Look down at him now, as he sickens and dies
'Neath the breath of a parent's kiss!

Hush, hush! we are hastening fast
O'er ripples of Time's dark wave;
And, ere we arrive where our hopes we
cast,

We are deep in the silent grave!

So pause, nor hurry with tread so fast,
The moment which follows may be-your last!
J. S. HIBBErd.