In my preservation from the lion and the earthquake, he taught me to behold the hand of the unknown God! I listened-believed -adored! My own, my more than ever beloved Ione has also embraced the creed! a creed, Sallust, which, shedding light over this world, gathers its concentrated glory, like a sunset, over the next! We know that we are united in the soul, as in the flesh, forever and forever! Ages may roll on, our very dust be dissolved, the earth shrivelled like a scroll, but round and round the circle of eternity rolls the wheel of life,-imperishable,-unceasing! And as the earth from the sun, so immortality drinks happiness from virtue, which is the smile upon the face of God! Visit me, then, Sallust; bring with you the learned scrolls of Epicurus, Pythagoras, Diogenes; arm yourself for defeat, and let us, amid the groves of Academus, dispute, under a surer guide than any granted to our fathers, on the mighty problem of the true ends of life and the nature of the soul. OLYMPIC FESTIVAL. If, warmed for a moment from the gravity of the historic muse, we might conjure up the picture of this festival, we would invoke the imagination of the reader to that sacred ground, decorated with the profusest triumphs of Grecian art,-all Greece assembled from her continent, her colonies, her isles,-war suspended,-a sabbath of solemnity and rejoicing, the Spartan no longer grave, the Athenian forgetful of the forum,-the high-born Thessalian, -the gay Corinthian,-the lively gestures of the Asiatic Ionian; -suffering the various events of various times to confound themselves in one recollection of the past, he may see every eye turned from the combatants to one majestic figure,-hear every lip murmuring a single name,-glorious in greater fields: Olympia itself is forgotten. Who is the spectacle of the day? Themistocles, the conqueror of Salamis, and the saviour of Grecce! Again, the huzzas of countless thousands following the chariot-wheels of the competitors,-whose name is shouted forth, the victor without a rival?-it is Alcibiades, the destroyer of Athens! Turn to the temple of the Olympian god, pass the brazen gates, proceed through the columned aisles,-what arrests the awe and wonder of the crowd? Seated on a throne of ebon and of ivory, of gold and gems, the olive crown on his head, in his right hand the statue of victory, in his left, wrought of all metals, the cloud-compelling sceptre,-behold the colossal masterpiece of Phidias, the Homeric dream embodied, the majesty of the Olympian Jove! Enter the banquet-room of the conquerors; to whose verse, hymned in a solemn and mighty chorus, bends the listening Spartan?-it is the verse of the Dorian Pindar! In that motley and glittering space (the fair of Olympia, the mart of every commerce, the focus of all intellect) join the throng, earnest and breathless, gathered round that sunburnt traveller; now drinking in the wild account of Babylonian gardens, or of temples whose awful deity no lip may name; now, with clenched hands and glowing cheeks, tracking the march of Xerxes along exhausted rivers, and over bridges that spanned the sea; what moves, what hushes that mighty audience? It is Herodotus reading his history! HENRY ROGERS, 1806 THIS eminent critic and essayist was born at St. Alban's in 1806, and studied at Highbury, with a view to the ministry; but, owing to his delicate health and very feeble voice, he felt it a duty to relinquish his cherished plans and to devote himself to literature. In 1836 he was appointed Professor of the English Language and Literature, University College, London, but resigned in 1839 for the chair of Philosophy in the Independent College, Birmingham. where he remained till 1858, when he accepted the Principalship of the Lancashire Independent College, Manchester, on the resignation of Dr. Vaughan. Mr. Rogers's first literary efforts were critical Essays on the Genius ant Writings of Jonathan Edwards, Edmund Burke, Jeremy Taylor, and Thoma Fuller, prefixed to editions of those authors. He also contributed numerous articles to the Edinburgh Review, such as The Genius of Plato; Recent Developments of Puseyism; Vanity and Glory of Literature, &c. His chief publications are Eclipse of Faith, in reply to Mr. F. W. Newman's Phases of Faith, and a Life of John Howe. As a writer, his style is clear and manly, and his thought acute, vigorous, and occasionally highly eloquent, as may be seen in the following beautiful passage upon THE CHARACTER OF CHRIST. Humanity will never forget those glorious scenes with which the evangelical narrative abounds; men still wonder at the "gracious words which proceeded out of Christ's mouth," and persist in saying, "Never man spake like this man." The brightness of the brightest names pales and wanes before the radiance which shines from the person of Christ. The scenes at the tomb of Lazarus, at the gate of Nain, in the happy family at Bethany, in the " upper room" where He instituted the feast which should forever consecrate His memory, and bequeathed to His disciples the legacy of His love; the scenes in the Garden of Gethsemane, on the summit of Calvary, and at the sepulchre; the sweet remembrance of the patience with which He bore wrong, the gentleness with which He rebuked it, and the love with which He forgave it; the thousand acts of benign condescension by which He well earned for himself, from self-righteous pride and cen sorious hypocrisy, the name of the "friend of publicans and sinners;" these, and a hundred things more, which crowd those concise memorials of love and sorrow with such prodigality of beauty and of pathos, will still continue to charm and attract the soul of humanity, and on these the highest genius, as well as the humblest mediocrity, will love to dwell. These things lisping infancy loves to hear on its mother's knees, and over them age, with its gray locks, bends in devoutest reverence. No; before the infidel can prevent the influence of these compositions, he must get rid of the Gospels themselves, or he must supplant them by fictions yet more wonderful! Ah, what bitter irony has involuntarily escaped me! But if the last be impossible, at least the Gospels must cease to exist before infidelity can succeed. Yes, before infidels can prevent men from thinking as they have ever done of Christ, they must blot out the gentle words with which, in the presence of austere hypocrisy, the Saviour welcomed that timid guilt that could only express its silent love in an agony of tears; they must blot out the words addressed to the dying penitent, who, softened by the majestic patience of the mighty sufferer, detected at last the Monarch under the veil of sorrow, and cast an imploring glance to be "remembered by Him when He came into His kingdom;" they must blot out the scene in which the demoniacs sat listening at His feet, and "in their right mind;" they must blot out the remembrance of the tears which He shed at the grave of Lazarus,-not surely for him whom He was about to raise, but in pure sympathy with the sorrows of humanity,-for the myriad myriads of desolate mourners, who could not, with Mary, fly to Him, and say, "Lord, if thou hadst been here, my mother, brother, sister, had not died!" they must blot out the record of those miracles which charm us, not only as the proof of His mission, and guarantees of the truth of His doctrine, but as they illustrate the benevolence of His character and are types of the spiritual cures His gospel can yet perform; they must blot out the scenes of the sepulchre, where love and veneration lingered, and saw what was never seen before, but shall henceforth be seen to the end of time, the tomb itself irradiated with angelic forms, and bright with the presence of Him "who brought life and immortality to light;" they must blot out the scene where deep and grateful love wept so passionately, and found Him unbidden at her side, type of ten thousand times ten thousand, who have "sought the grave to weep there," and found joy and consolation in Him "whom, though unseen, they loved;" they must blot out the discourses in which He took leave of his disciples, the majestic accents of which have filled so many departing souls with patience and with triumph; they must blot out the yet sublimer words in which He declares himself "the resurrection and the life,"-words which have led so many mil lions more to breathe out their spirits with childlike trust, and to believe, as the gate of death closed behind them, that they would see Him who is invested with the "keys of the invisible world," "who opens and no man shuts, and shuts and no man opens," letting in through the portal which leads to immortality the radiance of the skies; they must blot out, they must destroy, these and a thousand other such things, before they can prevent Him having the pre-eminence who loved, because He loved us, to call himself the "Son of Man," though angels called him the "Son of God." At His feet guilty humanity, of diverse races and nations, for eighteen hundred years, has come to pour forth in faith and love its sorrows, and finds there "the peace which the world can neither give nor take away." Myriads of aching heads and weary hearts have found, and will find, repose there, and have invested Him with veneration, love, and gratitude, which will never, never be paid to any other name than His. SAMUEL WARREN, 1807 FEW writers of fiction of the present century hold a more powerful pen than Samuel Warren. He was born in 1807, and was educated in the University of Edinburgh, with the view of entering the medical profession; but he abandoned this intention, and entered the Middle Temple as a lawyer, and was called to the bar in 1837. In the mean time there appeared in Blackwoods Magazine a series of papers, entitled Passages from the Diary of a late Physician,1 the descriptions in which were so lifelike and graphic, that the writer was denounced in the medical paper called The Lancet for revealing the secrets of the sick-chamber. In 1839 he commenced in Blackwood another series,- Ten Thousand a Year. This was followed by Now and Then. In these works he displayed high talents as a novelist, in vivid painting of the passions, and in faithfully depicting scenes of modern life. After the Great Exhibition he published The Lily and the Bee, in commemoration of that event; but it added nothing to his reputation. In his profession he is considered an able pleader, and he has published several excellent professional works; of these, the best known are his Introduction to Law Studies, and his edition of Blackstone Abridged. | religious fervor, that refines every sentiment and hallows every aspiration inspired by the elder work." 1 Of this work, the Oxford and Cambridge Review remarks, "We know of no book in the English language so calculated to rivet the attention and awaken the purest and deepest 2 Of this, the London Times said, “A vindisympathies of the heart as this book. The cation, in beautiful prose, of the ways of God man who has not read these tales has yet to to man. A grander moral is not to be found learn a lesson in the mysteries of human na- than that which dwells on the reader's mind ture; and, though Ten Thousand a Year may, when the book is closed: conveyed, too, as it as a literary composition, claim precedence, is, in language as masculine and eloquent as we think it lacks something-a very little-any the English tongue can furnish." of that truthful simplicity, that trusting and LIFE. As the metaphysician is unable to tell us what constitutes the mind, so it is with the physiologist with reference to life. His most rigorous analyses have totally failed to detect what is the precise nature of that mysterious force-if one may use the word which we designate by the word "Life!" He sees its infinitely varied modes of existence and action; but what it is that so exists and acts is now as completely hidden from the highly-trained eye of the modern physiologist as it was from the keen and eager eye of Aristotle. * * * And as man has hitherto been baffled in all his attempts to discover the nature of life, so has it been with him in respect of death. The awful question of the Almighty himself to Job remains unanswered:-" Have the gates of death been opened unto thee? or hast thou seen the doors of the shadow of death?" FRUITS OF CHRISTIANITY. It is to Christianity alone that the world was first indebted for those noble monuments of charity and mercy which are to be found in our hospitals, infirmaries, and other similar institutions. Not a trace of them is to be found among the refined and highlycultivated Greeks and Romans. The Christian agencies now at work to civilize mankind are fed direct from the twin founts of inspiration and morality. They are gradually chasing away the shadows of ignorance and sensuality, and melting the manacles and fetters in which cruelty and vice have bound mankind for ages. "The whole world will be Japhetized,-which, in religious matters, means, now pre-eminently, that it must be Christianized by the agency of the Teutonic element. Japhet holds the torch of light, to kindle the heavenly fire in all the other families of the one undivided and indivisible human race. Christianity enlightens only a small portion of the globe; but it will advance, and is already advancing, triumphantly over the whole earth, in the name of Christ and in the light of the Spirit." That Christianity has a vital influence over individuals and the nations which they compose. The presence and the absence of it are equally recognized, seen, and felt. DEATH AT THE TOILET. -'s ""Tis no use talking to me, mother; I will go to Mrs. P party to-night, if I die for it, that's flat! You know as well as is to be there, and he's going to leave I do that Lieutenant N town to-morrow; so up I go to dress." 1 From that eminent Prussian statesman and philosophical writer, Baron C. C. J. Bunsen, who died November 28, 1860. |