NOTES BY A RETIRED SCHOLAR.

Memini bene; sed meliori

Tempore dicam.-HORACE.

Quod cumque inciderit in mentem.—TERENCE.

PATRIOTISM.

IS PATRIOTISM a mere name? A vague notion, which the smart of oppression alone makes a reality? Was Leonidas, who died for it, an enthusiast? Is our admiration of Roman virtue a dream? A simple-hearted man, who, from a limited experience, looks out upon the intrigues of politicians, their pliancy, their low fellowships, their self-contradictions, their falsehoods, might well doubt. Yet the love of our country hath reason in it; it belongs to humanity, and cannot be severed from it. It has a virtue too. It warms the blood, strengthens our best purposes, adds to our sense of personal dignity. Our country is our larger home. Our fellow citizens are our kinsfolk. Our words are the same - is not our heart one? Therefore, we love our country. But to love deeply, the heart craves always somewhat outward and visible, to which it may attach itself, and which shall become to it a symbol of the idea it loves. The oak which shaded

our boyhood, the fountain which moistened our parched lips, when the day's sport had wearied us, as they are abiding memorials of our home, will not suffer our love of that home to perish or decay. Our country gives us few memorials of itself, and has no visible form. Our constitution is that oak, not ' gnarled,' but 'unwedgeable.' That fountain of plenteous prosperity is our union, from which we drink, all of us. But it requires an effort to regard them so, and men seldom love abstractions; and the wise may well fear, lest, in a country so vast as ours, and under a government so simple in its forms, a shortsighted selfishness may finally come to govern the mass of our people, and a worse and meaner selfishness its more active spirits.

In the more heroic exhibitions of patriotism, there has always been another element than love. It may be called the element of wrath. Grounded on a sense of right, when that right is invaded, it becomes indignation; when trampled on, fierce resistance. This it is which brings life into peril. He who in quiet times shows his love for his country, by industry, and good faith, and orderly obedience to her laws, when her hour of trouble comes, and her name may be dishonored, or her freedom circumscribed, shall stain his hearth-stone with his blood for her sake. We have been led to these thoughts, if they are worthy of the name, by reading again the Leyer und Schwert' of Theodore Körner. The source of his inspiration was an ardent patriotism. The feeling lived in him. It was his life. He possessed it in all its elements, of personal interest and hope, of fond attachment to the land of his fathers, reverence for its time-honored institutions, jealousy for its fame, sympathy for the suffering, and a righteous hatred of the invader. Originally of a poetic temperament, endowed with a fine fancy and meditative enthusiasm, this passion furnished

an object, and gave a direction, to them all. If he gazes on a bust by Rauch, of Queen Louise, he is alive to its beauty, but stronger is the sentiment which prompts the earnest prayer to her, to be ein guter engel für die gute sache,' a guardian angel to the righteous cause. A forest of oaks reminds him of only his country, in their grandeur and in their decay; and solemnly sad, even, is the closing line of his brief poem, Die Eichen:'Thy oaks yet stand, but thou art fallen.' Whatever is the theme of his song, the current of his feelings ever leads to the sorrows, hopes, and revenge of his country. If a prayer, it is addressed to the god of battles; if a drinking song, it is for his brethren in arms. His poems, thus inspired, move us like the neighing of a war-horse. They rouse the blood, like the voice of a trumpet. Let the patriot soldier, who would find a generous companionship for his own noble devotion, or, if such there be, who would rekindle the expiring flame of a true and heroic love of his country, with the war songs of Tyrtæus, and the Bannockburn of Burns, become daily familiar with the bright inspirations of Körner.

THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION.

Most writers on the internal evidence of the Christian Religion, have drawn their arguments from the pureness of its morality, and its peculiar fitness to the circumstances and necessities of man. These sources of evidence, as they have been skilfully explored, have been also wisely chosen. For in morals, whatever doctrine is pure, is so far forth true; and that which is a fitting and exact counterpart to what, in our experience, we have known to be, has the evidence of truth and reality in that very similitude. Yet other views may be taken, which may open some minds to a clearer conviction, and add somewhat to this vast argument.

It may be said, that the Christian Scriptures alone contain a system of morals, which is true of an absolute truth, in its fundamental principle. Here, most of all, the wit of man is at fault. Here is the jarring point, the beginning of discrepancies, which have made fools laugh, and wise men weep, and have taught all an unwise and perilous distrust of human reason. Moralists have erred in the starting point, and their labor has been often vain, and often has it led them into wild wastes and quick-sands. Utility is not the sole ground of obligation, nor the sole virtuous quality of actions. Sympathy is not the source of all our moral sentiments, and is at best a questionable guide. Naturam sequere, needs a wiser interpreter than most men are, and if it be a sound rule, it is difficult to be applied. Now the excellence of a theory of morals, considered as a theory, is, that the elementary idea be, if it may be, absolutely and universally true, or as nearly as the nature of the case will admit, an axiom. But in the whole range of moral ideas and obligations, there is no one which carries with it so ample a conviction of its truth and reality, as that the love of God is the primary duty of all moral creatures. There is no proposition in morals from which this duty can be deduced, which does not need demonstration as much, or more than it; there is none therefore more elementary. Moreover, all other duties appropriately moral (as distinguished from such as are merely natural, as compassion,)

are consequences, or rather exemplifications, of this. State it, let the terms be made intelligible, and be the will ever so perverse, be the heart most thoroughly polluted, no moral being can withhold his assent to its justness and binding force. It is self-evident. The Bible is the only treatise on morals, in which this principle is made the centre, is assumed as the indemonstrable, from which all other duties are to flow. As a matter of mere logical arrangement, then, and much more, it might be shown, of moral efficiency, the Christian system approaches nearer the perfect than any other. Nay, it is the very ideal. None more perfect is conceivable or possible. The pure ideal is pure truth. In a similar manner, it may be shown, that the system of the universe revealed in the Bible, the theory of cause and effect, is the most perfect. The being of a God is assumed as axiomatic; an elementary truth, into which, as a first principle, all effects are to be resolved. In truth, the order in which we acquire ideas, is the reverse of their true logical order; first the particular, then the general; first, the finite-after, the infinite. The particular does not contain or infer the universal; it is merely the token or exponent of it, pointing out to our minds that, which once perceived, shines by the clearness of its own truth. We attain the knowledge of a God, our conviction of his being as the great cause, by our previous knowledge of effects, especially of our own spirits, his most mysterious creation. When once we have apprehended this idea, it becomes to us an absolute truth, as necessary as that of space, or any other. It is not then so properly a demonstrable, as an elementary truth, involved indeed in every proposition, at least in every one which expresses a fact, and imparting to them all their meaning and force, while it derives neither from them. The teachings of the Scriptures in this, coincide with the conclusions of the highest reason, and partake of their absolute verity.

Yet, after all that can be said in the way of reasoning, it must never be forgotten, that a truly effective belief of the Christian religion, is an essentially moral conviction, inwrought upon the soul by its own spiritual experience. He has not yet overstepped the threshhold of the temple of heavenly science, who has still to learn, that spiritual truth must be 'spiritually discerned ;' that the heart, no less than the head, hath its eye; that not only to appropriate, but to understand it, even, we must first love. The moral affections are doubtless subject to their own law, yet within its scope, they are free as the roving and chainless air; and so this faith must be spontaneous and chosen, for it is of the heart. Though it often arises in every heart, it does not force itself upon any. The great law of duty, unchanging and spiritual, ever above us, and ever binding upon us, follows us with its unevadable claim, through every modification of our being, like the flaming sword which turned every way,' guarding the entrance to Paradise; yet we may close our eyes upon its intolerable brightness, and turn away from it to the dreariness of our own chosen circuit. A flash from that light may sometimes reach us in our sad wanderings, but, without our own will, it shall not restore us. Still, let not the searcher after divine truth imagine that this faith, though it be a moral election, can be created by a mere will. Often it groweth upon us like the morning light, so dim and feeble in its early coming, that the sense

hardly takes notice of its approach, or wonders whence and wherefore it comes at all; more and more it swells, and stretches itself abroad, and gilds every mountain top, and passes down into the deep sunken valleys, till, flung back from every radiant point, rock and river, lake and leaf, it gains an intenser radiance from its very reflection. It is an unfolding apprehension of the eternal and eternally diverging discordancy of holiness and sin, a sense of personal sinfulness, growing up to the full pressure of law upon the heart. With this comes the full need of a religion, not originating in the sentiments, or fashioned after the models of this world, bringing principles simpler and purer, and hopes higher and holier. When the awakened soul gives itself up, in perfect trust in the revelations of its own consciousness, to the contemplation of hopes and principles thus disclosed, and rests in the rule and model testified to by its inner and higher being, and knows that to realize them is not of its own might, but from above, the discipline is begun; the region of fire that far around encircles the eternal throne, is entered. The law hath entered the soul, and though the law is the minister of death, it is a death which precedes life. Then, when the soul ungirds itself of its own strength, and finds a power descending to meet its aspirations, and breathing strength upon them, is given an appreciation of the surpassing worth and beauty of holiness, and a sense of sin hated and loathed, which are the first buddings of spiritual and eternal life, and hope reaches upward, and faith becomes consummate, resting peacefully on the divine word, and goes on to its perfect work.

THE first lesson of a true philosophy, is to distinguish things which differ; its perpetual method and end is, to ascertain the harmony of these differences, or that in which they converge, and which constitute the system to their variety; its highest attainment the toil at once and the delight of our immortality, shall be the perception of that unity in which all things originate, which pervades them all, and gives them being, and makes them truth.

FRIENDSHIP AND INGRATITUDE.

AN ALLEGORY.

INGRATITUDE, by Friendship's fostering hands
Planted and reared, her shadowy boughs expands,
But boughs with blossoms clustered, not with fruits;
And as to heaven her head aspiring shoots,
To Tartarus nearer still descend her grovelling roots.

But lo the storm! its fury Friendship shuns,
And to the towering trunk she fostered, runs:
That treacherous tree her very height applies
To lure the livid lightning from the skies,
And lifeless at her foot the hand that rear'd her lies!

THE ROSE I GAVE HER.

THEIR sheltering branches the forest-trees threw
O'er the spot in the wild where the sweet-briar grew;
And its loneliness added a grace to its form,
As it waved in the zephyr, or bent in the storm.

The last of its roses still hung on its breast,
Like a hue of the evening that hangs in the west:
Through the gloom of the forest, it came to the sight,
As through gathering storm-clouds an opening of light.

I had seen it in sunshine and sought it in shade,
And had loved it in gems by the rain-drops array'd;
I gather'd the rose ere the rain-drop was dried,
For a place in her bosom who stood at my side.

I mark'd, as I gave it, the drop in its bell,

Like a tear of regret at it's severing, fell:

Oh well might it weep, for too soon it was thrown,
Where it perish'd neglected, forgotten, alone!

I would I had left it to hang where it grew,

To smile with the sunlight, to weep with the dew;
For I then might have thought, that, if given, 't would be
Still kept in her bosom, a token of me!

DEFENCE OF OLD WOMEN.

BY AN OLD MAN.

I CAN be silent no longer. Old as I am, I have a little gallantry left; and that little has for sometime been tingling from my fingers' ends into the point of my pen, urging me to take it up in defence of a much-abused portion of the community.

Let me, in the first place, take a short view of the estimation in which the fair sex generally is held in the United States. For twenty years, this subject has occupied more or less of my attention. I have read, and observed, and anxiously watched for that sure token of high civilization, and intellectual advancement, which places woman on an equality with man, in the scale of rational beings, as his companion and friend. I speak not of political equality, or those 'rights of women,' which are not so readily explained as their duties; I have been watching, I say, for these blessed signs; and in place of them, I see a vast deal of empty gallantry, upon which, as a nation, we begin rather to pride ourselves. It certainly is a fine trait of national character, the politeness that marks our public treatment of women; but it loses half its beauty, and many of its beneficial consequences, when divested of that sincere and respectful regard, which exalts the character of both sexes, and gives an indescribable and lasting charm to their intercourse. Notwithstanding the insidious flattery and weak indulgence, lavished on the softer sex in this country, in a style truly American, it is only too evident that this heart-felt defe