But, hark! another instinct is about to be set at work. Is it fancy, or do I hear the distant note of a shepherd's pipe? Ay, nature now has her sway. Look! I am not the only listener to the moving strains and melting moods. Not far away-for we all know what the scene would likely be-though carefully concealed by a thicket of friendly foliage, there is an ear open, there is an eye watching, there is a heart beating, which, alas! will list, will look, will beat, till the music of that reed is lost in heart-melody. Like a charmed bird, the fair one-for it is a fair one-approaches nearer and nearer, step by step, more and more desperately bold, till, caught at her fearful business by the lovelit eyes of the magic charmer, she faints and falls, but wakes where she must wake or perish. A thousand apologies, on both sides, are offered and accepted, where not one was needed. Each has been obeying the impulse of a gitimate passion, which, seated at the very center of the soul, will have its way in spite of every thing. To reach the object of this passion, a man will leave home and friends, abandon the haunts of his youth and the dearest of his earthly associations, and brave dangers and difficulties with a lofty self-denial. The woman, too, who is singled out by this affection, repaying it with interest, will excel her lover in feats of moral heroism. She will endure, if need be, poverty, and reproach, and the loss of her inheritance, and the anger of her family and friends, and the coldest look of a very cold world. The heat of summer, or the frost of winter, or the plunge she often makes into obscurity, toil, and wretchedness, is no obstacle, no sacrifice, no wretchedness to her. She bares her bosom to all evils, if, by so doing, she may meet the object of her desire. This is nature. Both parties feel it. Both would rather die than not yield to it. If either is taken from the other, there is a void made, which earth may not hope to fill again. The one, like Petrarch, like Klopstock, like Lamartine, like Burns, will weep forever over the memory of his Laura, of his Meta, of his Elvira, of his blue-eyed Highland Mary. The other, like all these distinguished females, and thousands more unknown in immortal verse, will live with the image of her lover on her heart, and with her last breath pronounce his name, as she enters into the presence of her God. If both survive, sooner or later, over less or greater obstacles, through the midst of few or many dangers, they meet; and marriage, the end and consummation of their passion, the result called for by the voice of nature, the first institution of revelation, and the very ground-work and basis of the social state, settles and sanctifies their union.

Look again at the fair Atlantis. While we have been regarding a single case, just forty-nine other courtships and marriages have been enacted; and the hundred individuals have become fifty families, bound together, in the first place, by the conjugal affection. Does any one now suppose, that these families, thus originated and thus united, can be

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dissolved by any trivial circumstance, or at the bidding of any romantic philosopher, who may wish to try his genius at constructing a new social fabric? Nothing is more chimerical. There are some, nay, there may be many families, within older nations, in which the true conjugal passion never existed, whose union could, no doubt, be very easily broken up, if tampered with; but there are, also, thousands, tens of thousands, as many as form the foundation of society every-where, which no power on earth could sever; and here, on our fair and happy island, they are all based on that genuine affection, which has become the emblem of devotedness and fidelity. Each man, as we have seen, was impelled by a resistless impulse to seek his counterpart. He found her, and now loves her, not so much for her being called a woman, as that she is his wife. She is his wife; the two are ONE; and both are deeply conscious of this unity. The one has become the property of the other. They both acknowledge and feel this fact; they acknowledge because they feel it; for nature, much more clearly than custom, points it out to them, and records it on the sacred tablet of their being. What dangers will not the husband dare for the angel of his bosom! What woes and sufferings will the wife not welcome, if she may wipe a tear from the eye of her faithful husband! If either proves unfaithful, how the malevolent passions themselves rise up-jealousy, anger, revenge-leading often to blood and murder, in defense of this amiable and innocent affection, thus insulted! All nature arms itself, both the loves and hates of the soul, to maintain the marriage union! Lucretia stabs herself to avenge the insulted rights and honor of her husband; and Brutus fires the world in the name of the bloody sacrifice! It is not law, or custom, or convenience, that founds the family. It is built on human nature; and men will suffer war, and famine, and death itself in all its forms, rather than see them broken up or polluted! If any social reformer, therefore, wishes to abolish the family, in order to begin his new era, let him expect to do it only when he has annihilated one of the innate, universal, indestructible, unconquerable elements of being that God has given us!

Look again on the fair and happy island. Time, the great producer, has peopled those families with helpless offspring. They are in want of every thing and have nothing. Some one, at the expense of much unrequited toil, must supply the necessities, or they perish. See, then, what nature has provided for them! There, in that mother's soul, in that father's heart, are those wells of love that never lack for living, gushing waters. From the cradle to the grave, in sickness and in health, in prosperity and in adversity, how the parental nature yearns after them! Though they run into sin and erime, and turn their backs upon the love that follows them, that love still follows, and will not give up the struggle for them. Insult and injury can not conquer it. Fraud, deceit, treachery

can not weaken it. There it is, and there it will be, after every opposition. Sickness becomes health, and death is changed to life, if endured for the benefit of children. What, then, is that unconquerable love, which the parent thus cherishes for his offspring? 'There,” says the father, "are my children; they are the children of my wife; we love them because they are ours, and because we love one another." Will that father, now, to gratify some philosopher or reformer, give up the knowledge he has, from the exclusiveness of the marriage covenant, that those are his children, and not the children of another? Will the mother, as she sits viewing their interesting traits, or watching their bed of death, easily resign the privilege, arising from her own fidelity, of sharing her joys and griefs with him, whom she knows to be their natural protector? Would the child, could he see so far, willingly relinquish his interest in a father's love, and sink to the sole care of her, who, calling herself his mother, lives rather the life of an unvirtuous widow, without the consolations or support guaranteed by the widow's God? No, verily. Heaven and earth cry out upon such sins against the family relation. Nature, in her powerful loom, has woven these domestic ties; and no man could burst them if he would; and no rational being would, were the effort the easiest within the compass of his power!

But those family ties are not yet complete. The children, so dearly loved by those that gave them being, return that love with almost an equal strength. It did not require a Sophocles to give us the affecting spectacle of the fair Antigone, clinging to the blind old Edipus, her father, in his crimes and self-inflicted cruelties, leading him from place to place, and suffering many things worse than death for his happiness, to show us an example of filial tenderness. Nor need Dickens have piled up that huge mass of chapters, entitled Dombey and Son, to prove to us, that long-repeated insult and injury can not subdue the ardor of this love. The truth of it is, the world is full of Antigones, of Florences, who, when the occasion comes, will sacrifice their life on this altar; and they remain unnoticed and unknown, like other great characters in obscurity-unknown even to themselvesonly because the circumstances do not often happen to call forth and test the power of their dormant love.

The same is true, also, of the fraternal feeling, which reigns in the breasts of all. It is a passion which nothing can destroy. No form of society, no fashion of association, except it is that which abolishes at once all family relationships, can take it from the soul. Brothers and sisters will love each other, with a peculiar love, and will wish to know each other as brothers and sisters truly, connected on the father's no less than on the mother's side, so long as the world shall stand. Take that knowledge from them, by removing the fact on which it rests, and this lovely tie is broken, the feeling of

fraternal love is gone. But it can not be broken. Nature, felt in man, ratified by the providence of God, will have its way.

You will see each family, moreover, governed by a strong affection between its individual members, doing as all families throughout the world have done, or tried to do, to perpetuate their existence and their name. This feeling, the family feeling, reaches beyond the grave. It carries men often to endure all manner of hardships, both of soul and body, through a long, and laborious, and self-tortured life, so powerful is its influence. It is felt alike, though in degrees corresponding to the expectations of success and the means of gratification, in the palace, in the country mansion, and in the poor man's cot. The rise of great families, in every land and age, gives us untold examples of its power; while the history of empires, from Babylon to Britain, is almost a continued commentary on the universality of its sway. To found a family, the father of the Medicis could bury himself in an early grave, dug by the same hand that sought for and found his gold; and Napoleon, for the same purpose, could lay aside the dearest principles of his heart, declare war against his deepest convictions, and even banish from his bosom the woman he most dearly loved. He, indeed, who essays to abolish the family, the first specimen of natural society, bound together by nature's strongest bonds, has undertaken a task beyond the power of mortals to achieve.

But look again, reader, on the fair Atlantis. After the formation of these fifty families, which have sprung up in obedience to the laws and necessities of our being, the next step, in the onward growth of society, is the gathering together of those next larger affiliations called neighborhoods. The island, like the great continents on every side of it, is divided and subdivided by rivers, hills, lakes, and other natural landmarks. These fifty families, therefore, can not all live together. As many of them, however, as can conveniently visit and traffic with each other, in the use of the ordinary means of intercourse, tacitly fall into a single group, till the whole territory is cantoned out into these little neighborhoods. This traffic, which acts so important a part in bringing and holding adjacent families together, is as much the result of nature as are those hills and rivers by which one group of families is hemmed in from contact with every other. Not only are the productions of every man's few acres liable to differ, both in kind and quality, from those of his more distant neighbors, but his own genius, his physical advantages or disadvantages, or some peculiarity of his condition, will not fail to fit him for certain occupations, while they disqualify him for other busiThe division of industry, therefore, and the consequent necessity of trade, even in small districts of country, are as much provided for in our constitution and circumstances as are the instincts, the laws, and the regulations of the family; and thus, by the business of life, no less than by the

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divisions and varieties of the soil, the neighborhood comes into being next, as the work of nature and of God. In this neighborhood an arena is opened for the unbounded gratification of friendly love; and there has never been a day, in the worst communities, or in the corruptest periods of the world, when it has not furnished examples of friendship, which have demonstrated the strength of our social ties. More than one David has had his Jonathan, more than one Euryalus his Nisus, since society began; and never can these social ligatures be broken, and all our freely-formed friendships be given up, merely to gratify some speculative reformer, who wishes to crowd us into involuntary fellowship with those whom we would not and could not choose to cherish as bosom friends. The heart knows its own predilections best; it wishes to follow out its own affinities; and, in spite of every attempt to cramp and fetter it, it must and it will be free.

Once more let us turn our regards on the fair and happy isle. Let us see these neighborhoods consolidating themselves, by the action of natural causes, into one common state. The great ocean, in the first place, while it separates this people from all other countries, gives them a common interest in the one they inhabit. This," says the islander, as he plants his foot on his native soil"this is my country, the land of my habitation;" and when he says so, he means the whole of it. Here were born, and here live, or are buried here, his wife, his children, and his friends. The people occupying the territory he regards as a sort of kindred, because they sprang, as it were, from the same soil that gave him birth. His soul, in a word, swells out to a kind of ideal ownership of the whole island, with every river, rock, and tree that marks its face. Every other man feels the same emotion. It is the emotion of patriotism, or love of country, which has performed such wonders in the world. It is the feeling to which Leonidas sacrificed himself and his noble-hearted followers. It is the feeling which animated the spirit of Tell and Winkelreid in their glorious struggles. It is the feeling that fired the breasts of our own countrymen, with the illustrious Washington at their head, in that long and bloody day that made us free. It is the feeling around which a state is formed, despotic, monarchical, or republican, with all the laws necessary to its order and prosperity, both in peace and war, including the interests of agriculture, manufactures, and trade. It is that feeling which keeps alive all nations, repressing internal feuds, meeting and subduing external aggressions, and preserving their institutions, their manners, their customs, and their laws. It is a feeling which follows us to other lands and holds us at the verge of the round world. Many centuries ago it sustained the hearts of that glorious band of Greeks, who, retreating homeward from Babylon through sufferings and perils till then unrecorded, wept when they only saw the sea that rolled its

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blue waters toward their native shores. The Swiss soldier now can not listen, in a foreign country, to those national strains which he heard in childhood on his birthplace hills. The French sailor, wandering on the bosom of distant seas, far from his sunny home, takes to his hammock with no unreal sickness-La Maladie du Pays-when the martial valor of his countrymen is imaged forth in the melting, rousing music of old Marsailles. Who, then, what man opposed to all human government, shall be able to root out this passion, and that love of order to which it ministers, from the human soul? Who shall be able to break up the state, and the natural relations of man to man, of individuals to law, and of law to individuals, all of which grow up so directly from the native passions of the mind? No man, my reader, in this age, or in the ages yet to come. Nations, states, are not the work of art, or of caprice, or of chance. They are the work of God; and they will remain, in some form or other, in spite of all philosophers and reformers, so long as humanity regards social happiness of any value, or God himself shall occupy his throne! Society, too, in the largest as well as the most restricted sense, including the family, the neighborhood, and the state, will ever be organized according to the same principles of human nature, on which it now so firmly stands; because, let it never be forgotten, the passions which institute, support, and perpetuate society, the same now that they always have been, are inherent in our being, as immortal as the mind! From the reason itself, which checks but does not change the passions, the social state acquires stability; and the moral feeling, the conscience, lends it her mighty sanction, deciding, that the work of nature, carried on under the direction of the reason, must be, as we have found it, and as the experience of the world has proved it, the lawful and unchangeable work of God!

THE FAR-OFF LAND.

WHY is it that the rainbow and the cloud come over us with a beauty that is not of earth, and then pass off and leave us to muse upon their faded loveliness? Why is it that the stars hold "their festival around the midnight throne," and are set above the grasp of our limited faculties, forever mocking us with their unapproachable glory? And, finally, why is it that bright forms of human beauty are presented to our view, and then are taken from us-leaving the thousand streams of our affections to flow back in Alpine torrents upon our hearts? We are born for a higher destiny than of earth. There is a realm where the rainbow never fades, where the stars will be spread out before us like islands that slumber on the ocean, and where the beautiful beings which here pass before us like shadows, will stay in our presence forever.