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THE INNER WORLD.

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every scene brings the animating revelations of grandest images of God? See the heart of Milton Scripture, and awakens the transporting hopes and brooding over the chaos of his mind, and shaping exalting charities of the child of God; his mind and animating a universe beneath its wings, and always moves on consecrated ground, and his march filling the hights, the depths, the paradise, with is in a triumphal procession of sanctified saints to upper, nether, or surrounding fires. Would you glory and to God; he communes with the white- | bring out fully the power of the mind, you must robed and pure, and lives rather in the tranquil light up a consuming fire in the breast. past or the jubilant future than in the dull and sinful present. For him roses are roses of Sharon, and lilies are fragrant with incense. For him Christ stands and teaches amid his apostolic band, or even in the desert; and angels leave their heavenly bowers to gather round his new-born soul in the hour of sorrow and of trial.

And who does not know the influence of the heart on the judgment? Why do poets sing better and oftener of a lost than a recovered Paradise? Why is it that genius planted in the soil of righteousness and the air of worship produces only a few fading leaves, while in the ashes of sin and the atmosphere of moral death it breaks out into gorgeous luxuriance? Why is it that the Hebrew melodies are sought after by the few, while the Don Juan is craved by millions? Why is it that the works of wickedness are often as impressive as the tempest, while the melting beams of holiness are unheeded as the sun? It is because of the power of the heart to warp the judgment.

The heart is the source of inventive genius. Will can not bring up a single thought; the heart is the wizard that evokes, shapes, and directs them all. I know it does not make thought any more than the mountains make the springs that gush from their grassy sides; but, like the volcano, it heaves up mountains within the mind, and makes a channel which gathers up and whirls the spiritual waters as they fall, and rolls them in deeper and deeper currents to the sea. It does more: it disturbs the electricity of the mental clouds, and opens the sluices of the inner skies. Let the heart be excited, and the mind needs no schoolmaster in order to express itself. What one man feels he can make another feel. I would not despise criticism or rhetoric, but we had Homer and Pericles before either. Love can pour music from its throat without a gamut; can ascend the sky, like the prophet, in its own chariot of fire; can thunder and lighten like unto him that walketh upon the wings of the wind. Don't undertake to instruct it. The eagle in his eyrie needs no anatomy in order to fold his wings around his triumphant heart, no physiology to direct his course to the morning sun. The excited soul thinks of no rules, and requires none; it seizes its figures and arguments without a consciousness of its movements, and hurls them with an energy that is like to supernatural. Sometimes it seizes and drops, builds up and destroys, engages and terrifies, with a confusion that abides no criticism, and heeds none; for it is the confusion of inspiration-an inspiration to which, however wild, common sense and philosophy alike respond in the hour of its triumphant action. Would you see one of the

Now, in order that I be not thought transcendental, consider that although thought flows on according to the general laws of association-contrast, resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect-these are modified by coexistent emotion, frequency of renewal, peculiarities of mental constitution, etc., and that these chiefly depend upon the heart; finally, that the stimulus imparted to the mind by intense emotion both determines its affinities and gives the tendency to suggestion by analogy, in which principally consists the charm of genius.

4. The inner world is sublime because of its influences. These extend indefinitely, but immensely, both through space and time: each moral world is related with many others. You see that star high up in the skies; should it leave its orbit, this earth would be shaken-all worlds would feel its erratic movements. Look at your soul. Its movements may be felt in hell, in heaven, raising a new wail in one or a new song in the other. The wandering of a planet affects only matter; the wandering of a soul affects rational and immortal mind. So in time the soul is felt afar off; it may pass from earth, yet still live beneath the sun: the oak dies, but the acorn lives. Truth springs from truth as seed from seed; though with this difference, that the crop, while of the same nature as the seed, and much more abundant, is not always its exact copy. The acorn will produce an oak to the end of time; but the Illiad may produce an Æneid in this age and a Paradise Lost in that; while it is bringing forth an epic in one mind, it may be producing an ode in another, a tragedy in a third, and a philosophical oration in a fourth. The history of Thucydides produced the orations of Demosthenes, and the novels of Sir Walter Scott the historical works of Guizot and Theirs.

Action is no less prolific than words. He who has no children may, nevertheless, have a numerous and illustrious progeny. His character, like Newton's, or Wesley's, or Washington's, may be a fruitful parent. Marathon was the mother of Thermopyla, Thermopyla of Salamis, Salamis of Platea; the battle-fields of Greece begat those of Rome, as Cannae and Phillipi did those of Gaul and Britain; Bunker Hill and Yorktown have descended lineally from the first mountains and fields of martial glory. The tomb of Leonidas, as long as an oration was annually delivered from its side, produced a yearly crop of heroes. The dead body of Lucretia, planted by the hand of Brutus, brought forth the living liberators of Rome; and the wounds of Cæsar's corpse, touching Plebeian sympathy, as Anthony lifted up his shroud, were the seeds

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whence sprung the tyrants of ten centuries. The blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church. Hail, Archimedes! though the sphere and the cylinder have moldered long since from thy tomb, I see thee to-day. Hail, Demosthenes! though thy voice has long since died away over thy native shores, it heaves many a living breast about me. Hail from thy grave! Hail, Paul! though Nero long ago claimed thy head, thy heart beats sacred music in a thousand pulpits to-day.

5. The inner world is eternal. Those seas must dry up and these mountains dissolve, the sun itself shall burn out, and the lamps of this temple of night may drop from their sockets, like autumn's withered leaves, but the soul of that good man shall never die. It is the holy of holies which God's chosen ministers watch over, and which mortal eye may not see; and it shall be removed with reverential care, when the cloths of this tabernacle of the body are folded up, and its boards are taken down in the grave. The faculties of his soul are holy things, which go not into darkness, but shall have an entrance ministered to them by angels of light into the temple not made with hands, where they may abide with God forever.

Such a world, young man, is thy soul; and wilt thou be dependent on external things for thy happiness, so that thou art sad or cheerful according as the wind blows hither or thither? Rather be like him whose soul is his country-his own dear native land—and to whom neither cloudless skies, nor perennial spring, nor double harvests can yield so much delight.

When we drink the bitter waters of life, or loathe the surfeit and the pestilence of its pleasures, or burn with the sting of its fiery serpents, let us go home. O glorious truth! that the mind, shut out from this scene of sensible things, can retire into its own infinite domain, and, as it moves along, arrange all things into order and symmetry by an untaught yet unerring astronomy! Thrice happy he who finds that spiritual immensity a sanctuary, sprinkled with the blood of the Lamb, lighted up with the lamps of angels, radiant with the presence of God, and perfumed with his perpetual blessing. To such a one even the dungeon is the vestibule of heaven, and the scaffold a step in the ascent to glory. He can say,

"Should fate command me to the farthest verge Of the green earth, to distant barbarous climes, Rivers unknown to song, where first the setting sun Gilds Indian mountains, or his setting beams Flames o'er Atlantic isles, 'tis naught to me, Since God is ever present, ever felt, In the void waste or in the city full." How grand a sight is the launch of a ship! As she moves from the stocks slowly down the inclined plane, with a few shouting sailors upon her deckas she booms for the first time into the bosom of the waters, and rises and proudly rights herself upon the waves, you think of the fate that awaits her, the rich cargoes she is to bear, the multitudes

of living men that she is to hold up on her planks from the deep, billowy grave; of the communion she is to establish between distant continents; of the messages of love and the lessons of light that she is to bear to the nations; of the storms she may encounter, and the lightning that may smite her masts and wrap her sides in flame, lighting up the sea as if in mockery of the night; of the many that may plunge down from her burning bowels to rise no more, and the few that may float over the spray upon some half-burnt plank, and you feel a swelling at the heart. But what were this scene com pared with one such as God might show you, if he were to convey you beyond the milky way, and point you to a new world which, perhaps, he is at this moment lanching into space! Could you see the wide landscape of mountain and lake, and light breaking forth, and creation becoming warm and living; fields turning into flowers, waters floating with birds, lands bringing forth cattle, the very dust, on some fragrant eminence, turning into two human but not immortal beings-their nostrils dilating and their bosoms swelling with the breath of God-the surrounding stars crowded with excited angels, and the new seas and skies becoming vocal with the song of the sons of the morninghow would you feel? Suppose you were informed that the conduct of that new-made pair was to determine the future character of that globe: whether, as its valleys fill up with population, it shall roll onward in deeper and deeper darkness or into higher and higher light; whether it shall float in cursing and groans, or in thanksgiving and the voice of melody-how would you watch and pray | over them, as if the blood would rush from your eyes and the soul sob out of your body! But the lanch of a single immortal soul into life is a grander and more awful sight than the lanch of such a world. The happiness of those millions of successive generations would cease in the grave; then misery, however intense, would terminate in death. Take the most joyous conceivable life of one of its inhabitants, or the most intense agony of another, and multiply it by millions of millions, and you have still but a limited joy or sorrow; but that immortal soul carries wrapt up in itself a happiness or woe that shall know no limit. As it sails out in life, it is to determine whether it shall float in the blackness of darkness forever, or circle in eternal light around the throne of God.

FUSELI, a foreign painter of eminence, after sitting perfectly silent for a long time in his own room, during "the bald, disjointed chat" of some idle callers-in, who were gabbling with one another about the weather, and other topics of as interesting a nature, he suddenly exclaimed, "We had pork for dinner to-day!" "Dear Mr. Fuseli, what an odd remark!" "Why, it is as good as any thing you have been saying for the last hour."

REMINISCENCES OF MY EARLY SCHOOL-TEACHERS.

REMINISCENCES OF MY EARLY SCHOOL-TEACHERS.

BY REV. BENJAMIN ST. JAMES FRY.

THERE are no recollections that cling to the mind with the same tenacity as those of our early schooldays. The events of that dreamy period become engraved on the mind with a pen of iron; and as we unroll the pages of past years, we are compelled to pay them due reverence. I can not well understand why this should be so. Not because of their intrinsic importance, for they had none; nor, indeed, for any permanent effect they produced on our lives, for it is quite impossible for us to conceive they have any connection with our present condition. But they come to us in all the pomp and magnificence with which we arrayed all things in those days of fancy and hope; and as they pass before us, despite the stern reality of our present situation, the old enthusiasm causes quicker pulsations, and the heart forgets its age and sorrows. We can not drive them away from our minds if we would. Time touches them with such an affectionate tenderness-such tenderness as love manifests in the sick chamber-that no decay is visible; and we are thankful for it. They are a heritage of joy-a spring of cooling waters, to which the weary spirit goes every now and then, and comes away young and refreshed.

The lessons we learned in those happy days, the position we occupied in the class, the struggle for promotion, and the hours of triumph-these have a distinctness to which the scenes of our college years can bear no comparison. The games of the school-yard-simple and foolish as they appeared to our elders-little scraps of play-ground wit, smart sayings, and innocent tricks without number, are remembered as well, perhaps better than the multiplication table. All the nameless peculiarities of the old school-room and shaded yard, even the broken panes of glass, and the low places in the fence next the apple orchard-all of these are daguerreotyped on the varied page, and have an astonishing freshness. But why should I strive to present in detail all the panorama passing before me; it is a task beyond my power.

I am particularly pleased, in my vacant hours, to marshal before me all my former school-masters or mistresses, and, as they glide noiselessly along, look into their familiar faces, and see if I can detect the peculiarities by which we knew them, and sometimes in the hight of youthful impudence nicknamed them. For some of these I have a happy smile and a nod of recognition; for others but a passing, unmeaning glance; and for a few some slight remnant of the old feeling of dislike, which in the days of their authority were only whispered in secret, and then in undertones. As some of these old forms are passing before me now, I shall make hasty notes and sketches of them-a somewhat dim and imperfect outline of the very perfect picture present to my own mind.

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I was singularly fortunate in having for my first school-master one whom I shall never forget to love, and whose hand I should be happy to grasp once more with the pressure of a glowing affection. He was of medium size, of very gentle manners, and a mild blue eye, large and clear as a little child's, and as true an index of his mind. The warm affection of his nature was manifested in every tone of his voice and touch of his hand; and I recollect that I never once shrank from the tone of commands, nor could feel the pressure of his hand without having a sensation of delight pass over my whole frame. When the summer days came, and in the sultry afternoons drowsiness stole over me in spite of all my efforts, the fall of the dog-eared spelling-book was his signal to come and take me gently in his arms, and lay me down on a little pallet in the corner of the school-room. What refreshing slumbers and whole troops of laughing dreams I have had on that little pallet! Then when I awoke the cool water, as it flowed from the pump and touched my face, gave such sensations of delight as I have for a long time been a stranger to. Who would not be compelled to love such a school-master? It was the star of love that shed its hallowed influence in our studies, and the recollection of its kindly beams has become a source of perpetual delight. After some two years he moved away to the far-west, and has become a politician of note. I wonder sometimes if he loves children as he once did. Once since his departure I saw him; it was a few years after, and he took me in his arms and called me his boy.

The next one who darks the path is, in almost all respects, the exact reverse of the loved one. He was a New Englander. I can see him nowtall and lank, with long arms, a slouchy walk, and a hungry look. Our parents said he was a clever man, and apt in the qualifications necessary for a good teacher; but we of the school-room never learned to appreciate his recommendable qualities. With him came the apple sprout, the fantastical fool's-cap, standing on one leg, and exclusion from the play-ground for a whole week at a time. It was the iron rod of tyranny instead of the star of love ruled us, and we made alarming progress in mischief. There was no source of joy under our former master that he did not change into an instrument of terror; and the school-room became a place of dread, and soon truants abounded. Like all misrule, it was of short duration. When the time of his departure came, it was with a seeming satisfaction on his part, and visible demonstrations of joy on ours.

The next face as it comes is beaming with love, and an air of indescribable tenderness surrounds her petit person, which no circumstances, however vexatious, could dispel. The light, active step, which sometimes detected us in mischief; the sweet, soft voice, vibrating like the tones of a rare musical instrument; the gentle nod of recognition which we always bashfully solicited, and always

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received, when we met her on the public walks, can not be forgotten by me while Memory performs her faithful task.

One evening she told us we were to have holiday for a whole week. What joyful news to schoolboys! But the next morning we heard she was married, and gone on her bridal tour. Something like fear took possession of our hearts; but when she came back at the appointed time, with a face brighter than ever, we shouted for joy. And when one of us, after a long noon-time spent in consultation, and much mustering of courage, crept up to her side, and, with starting tears, asked if she was "going to quit teaching school," she put her arm around his neck, and, with a warm kiss, assured him that she would stay "a long time yet:" we were happy beyond measure, and told our parents with mingled feelings of pride and joy. But the dreaded time came at last; and one Friday evening she took us in her arms and kissed us, and told us to be good boys. We cried, and laughed, and promised faithfully to follow her wishes. I saw her a few days ago, and she is now a staid matron, with sons and daughters about her as large as her former scholars; but she is the same quiet, cheerful, happiness-making little woman that she was when we called her "our teacher."

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There is one more; and as he approaches with slow and mournful tread, I feel the tears coming into my eyes, and the strange fascination of his eyes and voice is more than I can withstand. From the first moment that I saw him, heart was strangely drawn toward him; yet I shrank from his touch, and felt uneasy in his presence. It was evident to the most casual observer that some great sorrow was pressing heavily upon him, and crushing his life. I have never seen a face that claimed so much sympathy as his; and I recollect one occasion, when, after sitting a long time with his head buried in his hands, he raised his face heavenward, and there was such pleading in his eyes as I have never seen before or since; then a radiant smile seemed to suffuse his whole person, and he engaged in his daily toil as usual. There was not one in the school who was so hard-hearted as to do otherwise than he commanded; and although we were all young, we knew there was a goodness about him such as this earth rarely saw.

The pale brow grew still paler, the bloom of the cheek still redder and contracted in size; and we heard our parents say he was not long for this world. They wished him to cease his labors, and assured him he should not want; but he taught till he could no longer leave his room. From this time he sank more rapidly; for it was not more than three weeks after that he was released from suffering. One evening, the third or fourth before he died, he requested to see all his scholars, and we went to his room. It was in November-a still, sad day, that seemed to be in fear of the coming storms of wild December. They raised him up when we came in, and he smiled when he saw us,

and said a very few words. There was a bright look about his face, and the old tinge of sorrow had given way to the calm confidence of contentment. It was as if he had commenced to realize the end of his sorrows. When he died the next week, we followed him to the grave; the solemnity of the scene was touching. I can see it all now, and the little knoll on which he was buried.

His was a broken heart. He had a miniature, which he requested them to put in his coffin; and those who saw it say the face was one of superhuman beauty. It is more than probable neither were calculated for the stern realities of life, and they both escaped it: she with consumption, and he with a broken heart; but both with faith in the same God.

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Too long, my harp, thy gushing strains
Lie hushed upon the air;
Too long thy willing chords have drooped
In bitter, wild despair.

I fain would hear again the notes
That soothed my weary heart;
For O, I love the thrilling tones

Now sighing to depart!

Then linger yet, and wake to life

Thy beauteous minstrelsy; Sweep o'er the silence of my soul

Wild, echoing melody.

There's sadness stealing o'er me now
That thou can'st bid to flee;
There's sorrow in my spirit hid,

That weeps with all but thee.

What though rude hands have touched thy strings,
And bid harsh discord rise!

I'll love thee still, my own, my harp,
Though hope grows faint and dies.

All, all I loved but thou art fled

My glittering day-dreams gone;
And thou art changed, thy music ceased,
And all thy gladness flown.

I strive to wake some gentle lay,
As I was wont to do,

When all thy trembling chords will sigh,
And I am weeping, too.

Too long, too long, my harp, thou'st drooped-
Too long, my heart, thou'st bled;

O, we must learn the world's cold sneer,
Ere all our joys are fled!

A shade has come-a blight is felt-
A tear-drop fills mine eye;

I list-bright harp-strings swell with joy;
I gaze-light beams on high.

PLEASANT MEMORIES.

PLEASANT MEMORIES.

BY HARRIET N. NOYES.

A JOURNEY through Vermont in the early summer presents to the traveler a picture of quiet loveliness which goes directly to the heart. Green fields and pleasant woods; spacious farm-houses far up the grassy hill-sides, and cottages nestling at the foot, half buried in shrubbery of lilacs and cinnamon roses-home scenes of content and peace are ye all to me.

On one of these sunny slopes, dismantled and discolored by a half century of sunshine and storm, stands the old church of my native village. The holiest and the dearest picture is it to-day of all that memory has treasured of the scenery around the place I once called home. Strangers have for many years sat by my father's hearth-stone. Merry voices are still ringing in the shadows of the old elm by the doorway, and willing feet go lightly through the fields, where the scarlet berries are nestling in the strawberry vines, and down through the dim aisles of the maple woods; but they are not our children. Bessie and Mary-my brighteyed sisters-ye have found richer fruits and fairer flowers, and clearer skies are above you now!

Stranger eyes look coldly and forgetfully upon me; for the hearts that yearned toward me and loved me here, the voices that would have given me a glad welcome, are stilled forever. But within that old church I forget, for a time, the years that have gone since I stood here last.

The glory of its time, the glory of the fathers who builded it, was that goodly edifice in its better days. Though it equaled not the richness of that wondrously magnificent former temple, yet it, too, had its curtains of scarlet and fine-twined linen, its chains of wreathen work, its pillars and cherubim, its altar, and its most holy place; and no less certainly were these, to the simple-hearted worshipers, types of the glory that should follow in that city, whose light is the presence of the

Lamb.

O, it has made me a child again to stand, of a June morning, within its hallowed precincts. The same childish awe steals over me as when I crossed its threshold then, and clung closer to my mother's side, as we walked up the broad aisle to the square, high-backed pews, and noiselessly seated ourselves to await the solemn service. The breath of the early summer, laden with the fragrance of apple blossoms and clover beds, comes in from the old orchard at the west windows, fresh and dewy as I remember it then; and the brown thrush and the robin sing as merrily-I wondered how they dared of a Sabbath-the same old yet ever-new carols.

Temple where my fathers worshiped-desolate, deserted to other eyes-how art thou thronged today! Families, far separated by sea and shore, are gathered again, each in its place, as they sat in their youth and prime. Familiar faces look down

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upon me from the quaint, high galleries-faces of the young and old, of the rich and poor, of the loved, the absent, and the dead. And memory brings with these the voice of the gray-haired man, who, for forty years, here fed his flock like a shepherd, gathering the lambs with his arm and carrying them in his bosom. Even childhood forgot in his presence the observance of other objects, and remembers now only the impression left by his impassioned utterance-only its yearnings for an entrance into the better kingdom, with its gates of pearl, its crystal sea, and its innumerable company of angels.

And with the voices of the harpers come to me the voice of one who sat with me then, but since has obeyed the call, "Come up hither." LouisMentor of my girlhood-thou, too, art here to-day. Thou hast left me, as another Telemaque, looking earnestly upward toward the better sanctuary, yearning, hoping also to enter, as the light has flashed upon me through the doors unfolding again and again, that some other might pass in before me. Not like him, visibly upward-for even in death my feet may follow every step of thine; but down through the bitter waters agonizingly, and up rejoicingly on the other shore of Jordan.

Twenty years hast thou been a dweller there, and yet this morning those sad, serenely earnest eyes are looking again into mine as kindly as though they had not looked their last upon meas truly as though the violet-covered turf were not blossoming above your head. In moments of sore temptation, O how many times have those same earnest eyes come between me and wrong! how often has that voice repeated its warning words! how firmly has that hand, already growing cold in the death-struggle, pressed again upon my head, till my worldly heart has grown warm again, and tears have shut away from my eyes the fascinations and follies of my life! Thank God for such memories! they never come without bringing with them a kindlier, a more patient spirit.

Who can estimate the influence of a good life? Who will assert that it lives not forever? To every one within its reach, it is an incontrovertible evidence of the sincerity and truthfulness of the man. In hours of darkness, when I have for a moment deemed religion a fable, and excellence a name, the memory of such a man has flashed upon me like a sunbeam, revealing a radiant path which went upward, shining more and more unto the perfect day. For eight years I spent my happiest hours in his study. He found me an unhappy, because unoccupied, child; shut away, by a constitutional malady, from the amusements and occupations of children of my age, without companionship, without books; for a farmer's house in those days had neither Parley's nor Sherwood's. His library opened to me a new world; he taught me how to find my dearest companionships, my nearest friends, in books and thoughts. He told me, when tired of every thing else, soothing tales of many lands-above all, of

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