experience of life. With every individual, after the feeling that prompts to action has died away, and the action is achieved, the mind pauses, and without any conscious reviewing of the details of experience, looks with quiet eye into its present state, which is the result of all before. This state of lofty contemplation, of deepening knowledge of oneself and the universe, is the end for which feeling warms and action strengthens the intellect. He that doeth shall know. Love prompted the divine essence to pass into the varied existence of this fair outward creation. Then followed the pause, and the sentence passed in the three words, "it is good," contains all that the highest thought has since discovered of the universe in which we dwell. Sculpture is the pause of art in the swift current of the life of nations, which is depicted glowing in the drama and on canvass; poetry and color idealizing it somewhat for its master's hand. The drama and painting are transfigured by philosophy and sculpture, as the human countenance by death. The departing soul, in the pause between its two lives, impresses itself as it never did before on the form of our friend. We read in this last impress the interpretation of its past history, the clear prophecy of its high possibilities, always deciphered confusedly before amid the changing hues, the varying lights and shadows of its distracted earthly life.

It seems to me that sculpture has not completed its circle. It is finished for Grecian life, and so is philosophy; but the modern world, modern life, is yet to be stamped with the seal of both. The materials for a future philosophy will be less pure and simple, but richer and more varied than those of the elder world. There can be no pure epic, no single motive for a nation's action, no severely chaste drama (almost approaching sculpture in its simplicity), no bursting forth of burning lyric, one gush from the soul in its primal freshness. Modern life is too

complicated for this, but a nobler and sterner sculpture in words or marble, than our race has yet known, may be in reserve for it, gifted with a restoring power that may bring it back to unity. Jesus loved and lived, then came the pause-It is finished. This little sentence summed up all the agitated moments of his yet unrecorded individual earthly history. The Plato of Christianity is yet

waited for. "The hands of color and design" have reproduced to Christendom every event of Jesus's sacred history, working in the church and for the church. Will the gazing world wait in vain for the Christian Phidias, who shall lift this history out of the dim twilight of experience, and plant it in marble for eternity?

The old fable of the stones arising and forming themselves into noble structures at the sound of the lyre, has been used to prove that Music and Architecture are sister arts. Does it not prove quite the reverse, that Architecture arose at the bidding of Music, is kindred, but inferior; not a vassal or equal, but an humble friend, unless the Scripture announcement holds good in arts as in the moral world let him that is greatest among you be as a servant?

Such are the limitations of humanity that inequality is a proof of the inspiration of our work, perhaps also of our life. We are vessels too frail to receive the divine influx, except in wide measure, at wide intervals; hence the patched up nature, the flagging and halting of an epic, often of a drama of high merit.

Goethe has said that "art has its origin in the effort of the individual to preserve himself from the destroying power of the whole." This for the origin of the useful arts seems an adequate explanation, but not for the fine arts; for if any one thing constitutes the difference between the two, is it not that the useful resist nature, and the others work with it and idealize it? Architecture, as it arises protectingly against the unfriendly external powers, takes a lower place than the other fine arts, and at its commencement can hardly be considered as one of them. It is hardly a satisfactory definition of art, though nearly allied to Goethe's, that it perpetuates what is fleeting in nature; not even of statuary, which snatches the attitude and expression of the moment, and fixes it forever.

I have been watching the flight of birds over a meadow near me, not as an augur, but as a lover of nature. A certain decorousness, and precision, about their delicate course has, for the first time, struck my eye. They are free and bold-but not alone free and bold. Perhaps perfect freedom for man would have the same result, if he grew up in it, and did not ruffle his plumage by con

tending for it. If it were his unalienable birthright, and not his hard-earned acquisition, would he not wear it gracefully, gently, reservedly? Poor human being, all education is adjusting fetters to thy delicate limbs, and all true manhood is the strife to burst them; happy art thou, if aught remains to thee but strength!

But now I see I was not plucked for nought,
And after in life's vase

Of glass set while I might survive,

But by a kind hand brought

Alive

To a strange place.

That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours, And by another year

Such as God knows, with freer air,

More fruits and fairer flowers

Will bear,

While I droop here.

H. D. T.

BETTINA!

LIKE an eagle proud and free,
Here I sit high in the tree,

Which rocks and swings with me.

The wind through autumn leaves is rattling,
The waves with the pebbly shore are battling;
Spirits of ocean,
Spirits of air,

All are in motion
Everywhere.

You on the tame ground,

Ever walking round and round,

Little know what joy 't is to be
Rocked in the air by a mighty tree.

A little brown bird sate on a stone,
The sun shone thereon, but he was alone,
Oh, pretty bird! do you not weary
Of this gay summer so long and dreary?
The little bird opened his bright black eyes,
And looked at me with great surprise;
Then his joyous song burst forth to say-
Weary! of what?—I can sing all day.

PROPHECY-TRANSCENDENTALISM-PROGRESS.

ONE of the most philosophical of modern preachers has written, — “The practice of taking a passage of scripture, when one is about to give a discourse, is not always convenient, and seldom answers any very good purpose." I shall not discuss this proposition, but leave it for the decision of those, whom it more immediately concerns. I have found it convenient thus to preface a lay sermon, a word of "prophecy in the camp;" chiefly in the hope that it will answer the good purpose of bespeaking a favorable consideration of the doctrine it is believed to contain. The passage selected is contained in the 29th verse of the 11th chapter of the 4th book, called Numbers, of the history of the Hebrew nation attributed to Moses.

"WOULD GOD, THAT ALL THE LORD'S PEOPLE WERE PROPHETS."

I feel warranted in using the term prophet and prophecy in a larger signification than is usually attached to them. In the text, and other places where they occur in the Hebrew scriptures, and the writings of the Christian apostles, they cannot, without violence, be interpreted in the sense of literal prediction. Much unnecessary embarrassment, as it seems to me, has been placed in the way of Christianity, by resting its credibility upon the success of the attempt to establish the strict relation of literal prophecy between particular facts of the Christian history, and passages of the Old Testament. This is to degrade it from a system, bearing within itself the testimony of its divinity, and reposing upon the innate and indestructible convictions of the human mind, to a system of ambiguous authority, depending upon the authenticity of ancient records, and subtilties of verbal interpretation. Instead of being a revelation to the individual mind, it has become a mere inference from historical credibility; a conclusion of logic from certain possibly true premises, instead of a self-evident truth, whose witness is always the same, and always accessible, amid all the ambiguities and mutations of language, the revolutions of literature, and convulsions of empires.