MY CREED AND COUNTRY.

WHAT hath been suffered since this earth its primal course began

Is chiefly what hath had its birth in ignorance of Man;

Where youthful Faith was taught to tread where grey-haired Error trod, And blindfold to an idol led, was told to bow to God.

The twin-born nightmare of mankind, in day that still remains

(Dead on Earth's breast) is, that the mind consists in blood, not brains.
The golden calf that Israel made, to which they 'd kneel and pray,
A yellow monster, stands displayed in Mammon of to-day:
A coward, boasting is his trust — - his pride conceals his fears-
His feast is on the orphan's crust, his wine the widow's tears.
The common lie that strength is right, that truth is with the strong,
Hath shackled ages by its might, and chained the world to wrong;
But, lo! the Samson, shorn of locks, and blind, doth seize the walls,
And, see! old Custom's pillared rocks in one vast ruin falls,
While on the site the hero stands, with new illumined eyes,
And piles up with his giant hands a temple to the skies.

In that new church what faith or creed do we to all accord?
This is decreed in form and deed: Love as we list the Lord.
Takes one the Shasta, Brahmin-writ? the Llama? or the man
That held the fiery Korak's bit, and gave forth Al Koran?
Or chooses one Olympian Jove? or Talmud, with the Jew?
Or in the Sun sees God and Love, as they in fair Peru?

It matters not what track they tread to seek that high abode -
So they reach home when they are dead, why, any is the road.
For book or prayer I have no care; this pearl for me, ne'er priced,
Is for the faith to face grim Death- and that I find in Christ.
Nor will I man, my brother, blame, because we separate
Upon belief, or on a name, for That which rules our fate;

For He who made, and takes away, in the Hereafter knows
How best from disembodied clay our spirits to dispose.
Then, thank the Power that rules above, the first of this land's laws
Is freedom to bestow Faith's love where Conscience shows the cause.

W. W. F.

SATAN AND FAUST.

[From the German of Klinger.]

NIGHT Covered the earth with its raven wing. Faust stood before the awful spectacle of the body of his son suspended upon the gallows. Madness parched his brain, and he exclaimed, in the wild tones of despair, "Satan, let me but bury this unfortunate being, and then you may take this life of mine, and I will descend into your infernal abode, where I shall no more behold men in the flesh. I have learned to know them, and I am disgusted with them, with their destiny, with the world and with life. My good action has drawn down unutterable woe upon my head; I hope that my evil ones may have been productive of good. Thus should it be in the mad confusion of earth. Take me hence; I I wish to become an inhabitant of thy dreary abode; I am tired of light, compared with which the darkness in the infernal regions must be the brightness of mid-day."

But Satan replied: "Hold! not so fast, Faust. Once I told thee that thou alone shouldst be the arbiter of thy life, that thou alone shouldst have power to break the hour-glass of thy existence thou hast done so, and the hour of my vengeance has come, the hour for which I have sighed so long. Here now do I tear from thee thy mighty wizard-wand, and chain thee within the narrow bounds which I draw around thee. Here shalt thou stand and listen to me, and tremble; I will draw forth the terrors of the dark past, and kill thee with slow despair.

"Thus will I exult over thee, and rejoice in my victory. Fool, thou has said that thou hast learned to know man! Where, how, and when? Hast thou ever considered his nature? Hast thou ever examined it, and separated from it its foreign elements? Hast thou distinguished between that which is offspring of the pure impulses of his heart, and that which flows from an imagination corrupted by the artificial? Hast thou compared the wants and the vices of his nature with those which he owes to society and the prevailing corruption? Hast thou observed him in his natural state, where each of his undisguised expressions mirrors forth his inmost soul? No! thou has looked upon the mask that society wears, and hast mistaken it for the true lineaments of man; thou hast only become acquainted with men who have consecrated their I. - 14.

condition, wealth, power and talents to the service of corruption; who have sacrificed their pure nature to your idol-Illusion. Thou didst at one time presume to show me the moral worth of man, and how didst thou set about it? By leading me upon the broad highways of vice, by bringing me to the courts of the mighty whosesale butchers of men, to that of the coward tyrant of France, of the Usurper in England! Why did we pass by the mansions of the good and the just? Was it for me, Satan, to whom thou hast chosen to become a mentor, to point them out to thee? No; thou wert led to the places thou didst haunt by the fame of princes, by thy pride, by thy longing after dissipation. And what hast thou seen there? The soul-seared tyrants of mankind, with their satellites, wicked women, and mercenary priests who make religion a tool by which to gain the objects of their base passions.

"Hast thou ever deigned to cast a glance at the oppressed, who, sighing under his burden, consoles himself with the hope of an hereafter? Hast thou ever sought for the dwelling of the virtuous friend of humanity, for that of the noble sage, for that of the active and upright father of a family?

"But how would that have been possible? How couldst thou, the most corrupt of thy race, have discovered the pure one, since thou hadst not even the capacity to suspect his existence?

"Proudly didst thou pass by the cottages of the poor and the humble, who live unacquainted with even the names of your artificial vices, who earn their bread in the sweat of their brow, and who rejoice at their last hour that they are permitted to exchange the mortal for the immortal. It is true, hadst thou entered their abode, thou mightst not have found thy foolish ideal of an heroic, extravagant virtue, which is only the fanciful creation of your vices and your pride; but thou wouldst have seen the man of a retiring modesty and noble resignation, who in his obscurity excels in virtue and true grandeur of soul your boasted heroes of field and cabinet. Thou sayest that thou knowest man! Dost thou know thyself? Nay, deeper yet will I enter into the secret places of thy heart, and fan with fierce blast the flames which thou hast kindled there.

"Had I a thousand human tongues, and as many years to speak to thee, they would be all insufficient to develop the consequences of thy deeds and thy recklessness. The germ of wretchedness

which thou hast sown will continue its growth through centuries yet to come; and future generations will curse thee as the author of their misery.

"Behold, then, daring and reckless man, the importance of actions that appear so circumscribed to your mole-vision! Who of you can say, Time will obliterate the trace of my existence ! Thou who knowest not what beginning, what middle, and end are, hast dared to seize with a bold hand the chain of fate, and hast attempted to gnaw its links, notwithstanding that they were forged for eternity!

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But, now will I withdraw the veil from before thy eyes, and then-cast the spectre DESPAIR into thy soul."

Faust pressed his hands upon his face; the worm that never dieth gnawed already on his heart.

TRUE PRINCIPLES OF EMANCIPATION.

By a Native of Carolina and a Citizen of the World.

WHILE fellowship with the "powers that be" at the South seemed a sine qui non of all efficient movements towards emancipation, the Northern agitations, however well intended, rather exasperated than tended to procure the reform of those evils against which they hurled the ineffectual thunders of the word. John Brown's sermon is the first that has ever been seriously heeded. The universality of the homeopathic law-elastic reactions and electric repulsions operating alike in the sphere of personal or passional, as in that of material, forces - warned us that foreign intervention, unless coming either in the shape of the dollar or the cannon ball, and plying those mightiest levers of our fallen humanity, interest and fear, could but retard the spontaneous solutions of which our Southern problems are susceptible. These solutions, if influenced by philanthropy, should be informed, too, by a higher aim than the conversion of chattel slavery into that of labor for wages, chang→ing the form, but not the facts, of slavery and oppression. The perfidies of commerce, the horrors of the slave trade continued by the speculator and the negro-driver, striking at the heart of personality, poisoning the fountain of social affections, perverting the conscience of a nation, deteriorating the master by fraudulent idle

ness, the slave by dishonored toil - this prolonged crucifixion of a martyr race demands a resurrection more humane than the liberty of selling oneself by the day, the cut-throat competitions of labor for wages, the outrages sanctioned by prejudice against color, careworn indigence or paralyzed pauperism. It must be confessed, however, to the shame of civilization, that the general condition of its laboring masses presents to the negro only an exchange of evils, and that masters the most tyrannical can but embody, personify, and dramatize in striking forms the manifold cruelties that labor elsewhere suffers at the hands of capital, classes or castes, from their social superiors, in the order of the hells upon earth.

No genius of social creation had revealed either the spontaneous evolution of character and faculties potential in the negro race, nor the natural accords of social harmony which it is calculated to sustain with the white races severally. Slavery or extermination was the voice of Cain fulminated against the negro by our chairs of ethnology-Humboldt nobly protesting. Even Emerson echoed the sophisms of " nature's exterminating races by stronger races, black by white faces," and the ascendant of power once ceded to the white, it seemed to be conceded, also, that the natural function of power was to oppress and destroy. All the virtues, organic or passional, all the harmonic attributes or tendencies of the negro, either physical or social, the luxuriant yet plastic spontaneity of climates beloved by the sun, his eminent susceptibility towards Christian influence, his patience under hardship, his cheerfulness under exhaustive toils, his resistance of malaria, his fidelity in servitude, his constant aspiration towards the decencies of social refinement in language, manners and habits, all have been ignored before that domineering spirit inherent in the Anglo-Norman stock.

But nature, in the evils of oppression, seemed to have prepared their remedy; for the habit of obedience, combined with the aptitude to be swayed by gentle emotions and sensuous harmonies, facilitates the preliminaries of a social structure rich in its elements of character, genial in its sympathies and passional accords, and crystalizing under the influence of one great hierarch. Far otherwise, complex and bristling with difficulties, is the problem of a true social organization resulting in justice and prosperity for peoples accustomed to the abuses of personal license or of political anarchy, and whose social education, in retrograde march from the