meeting-room, and the brothers on the other, with broad napkins half unfolded across their knees, on which they softly beat time, with rising and falling palms, as they sang. The sisters, young and old, all looked of the same age, with their throats strictly hid by the collars that came to their chins, and their close-cropped hair covered by stiff wire framed caps of white gauze; there was greater visible disparity among the brothers, but their heads were mostly gray, though a few were still dark with youth or middle life; on either side there was a bench full of sedate children.

When the singing was ended, the minister read a chapter of the Bible, and one of the elders prayed. Then a sister began a hymn in which all the sisters joined. At its close, a young girl arose and described a vision which she had seen the night before in a dream. When she sat down the elders and eldresses came out into the vacant space between the rows of men and women, and, forming themselves into an ellipse, waved their hands up and down with a slow rhythmic motion, and rocked back and forth on their feet. Then the others, who had risen with them, followed in a line round this group, with a quick, springing tread, and a like motion of the hands and the arms, while they sang together the thrilling march which the others had struck up. They halted at the end of the hymn, and let their arms sink slowly to their sides; a number of them took the places of those in the midst, and the circling dance was resumed, ceasing and then beginning again, till all had taken part in both center and periphery; the lamps quivering on the walls, and the elastic floor, laid like that of a ball-room, responding to the tread of the dancers. When they went back to their seats, one woman remained standing, and began to prophesy in tongues.-From W. D. Howells' "An Undiscovered Country.”

USE AND MISUSE OF WORDS.

WE congratulate that large, respectable, inexpressive, and unexpressed class of thinkers who are continually complaining of the barrenness of their vocabulary as compared with the affluence of their ideas, on the appearance of "Thesaurus of English Words." If it does nothing else, it will bring a popular theory of verbal expression to test; and if that theory be correct we count upon witnessing a mob of previously mute Miltons and Bacons, and speechless Chathams and Burkes, crowding and tramping into print.

best of a numerous class whose aim is to secure the results without imposing the tasks of labor, to arrive at ends by a dexterous dodging of means, to accelerate the tongue without accelerating the faculties. It is an outside remedy for an inward defect. In our opinion, the work mistakes the whole process by which living thought makes its way into living words, and it might be thoroughly mastered without conveying any real power or facility of expression. In saying this we do not mean that the knack of mechanical rhetoric may not be more readily caught, and that fluency in the use of words may not be increased by its study. But rhetoric is not a knack and fluency is not expression. The crop of ready writers, of correct writers, of elegant writers, of writers capable of using words in every sense but the right one, is already sufficiently large to meet the current demand for intellectual husk, chaff, and stubble. The tendency of the time to shrivel up language into a mummy of thought, would seem to need the rein rather than the whip. The most cursory glance over much of the "literature" of the day, so called, will indicate the peculiar form of marasmus under which the life of the language is in danger of being slowly consumed. The most hopeless characteristic of this literature is its complacent exhibition of its distressing excellences,—its evident incapacity to rise into promising faults. The terms are such as are employed by the best writers, the grammar is good, the morality excellent, the information accurate, the reflections sensible, yet the whole composition neither contains nor can communicate intellectual or moral life; and a critical eulogium on its merits sounds like the certificate of a schoolmaster as to the negative virtues of his pupils.

The fluent debility which never stumbles into ideas nor stutters into passion, which calls its commonplace comprehensiveness, and styles its sedate languor repose, would, if put on a short allowance of words, and compelled to purchase language at the expense of conquering obstacles, be likely to evince some spasms of genuine expression; but it is hardly reasonable to expect such verbal abstemiousness at a period when the whole wealth of the English tongue is placed at the disposal of the puniest whipsters of rhetoric,-when the art of writing is avowedly taught on the principle of imitating the "best models,"-when words are worked into the ears of the young in the hope that something will be found answering to them in their brains.

What is really wanted, therefore, "to faciliSeriously, we consider this book as one of the tate the expression of ideas" is something

which will facilitate the conception of ideas. to the height of nearly thirty feet, and which at What is really wanted "to assist in literary this time was rent and shivered, wherever it composition" is a true philosophy of expres- presented an open front to the weather, by a resion, founded on a knowledge of the nature and cent frost. A heap of loose fragments, which operations of the mind, and of the vital pro- had fallen from above, blocked up the face of cesses by which thought incarnates itself in the quarry, and my first employment was to words. Expression is a purely mental act, the clear them away. The friction of the shovel work of the same blended force and insight, soon blistered my hands; but the pain was by will and intelligence that thinks. Its power and no means very severe, and I wrought hard and clearness adds to the power and clearness of the willingly, that I might see how the huge strata mind whence it proceeds. Its peculiarities cor- below, which presented so firm and unbroken a respond to the peculiarities of the individual frontage, were to be torn up and removed. nature it represents. Its perfection consists in Picks and wedges and levers were applied by identifying words with things,-in bending lan- my brother-workmen; and simple and rude as guage to the form, and pervading it with the I had been accustomed to regard these implevitality of the thought it aims to arrest and em- ments, I found I had much to learn in the way body. In those cases where thought transcends of using them. They all proved inefficient, the sensuous capacities of language to utter its however; and the workmen had to bore into conceptions, the expression will still magically one of the inferior strata, and employ gunpowsuggest the idea or mood it cannot correctly der. The process was new to me, and I deemed convey, just as a more than earthly beauty it a highly amusing one: it had the merit, too, looks out from the beautiful faces of Raphael's of being attended with some degree of danger as Madonnas, indicating the subtile passages into a boating or rock excursion, and had thus an form of a soul and sentiment which no mere interest independent of its novelty. We had a form could express. · Abridged from Ed- few capital shots: the fragments flew in every win P. Whipple's "Literature and Life." direction; and an immense mass of the diluvium came toppling down, bearing with it two dead birds, that in a recent storm had crept into one of the deeper fissures to die in the shelter. I felt a new interest in examining them. The one was a pretty cock goldfinch, with its hood of vermilion, and its wings inlaid with the gold to which it owes its name, as unsoiled and smooth as if it had been preserved for a museum. The other, a somewhat rarer bird, of the woodpecker tribe, was variegated with light blue and a grayish yellow. I was engaged in admiring the poor little things, more disposed to be sentimental, perhaps, than if I had been ten years older, and thinking of the contrast between the warmth and jollity of their green summer haunts, and the cold and darkness of their last retreat, when I heard our employer bidding the workmen lay by their tools. I looked up and saw the sun sinking behind the thick fir wood beside us, and the long, dark shadows of the trees stretching downward toward the shore.

HUGH MILLER'S FIRST DAY IN A QUARRY.

Ir was twenty years last February [1841] since I set out a little before sunrise to make my first acquaintance with a life of labor and restraint, and I have rarely had a heavier heart than on that morning. I was but a slim, loosejointed boy at the time-fond of the pretty intangibilities of romance, and of dreaming when broad awake; and, woful change! I was now going to work at what Burns has instanced in his "Twa Dogs" as one of the most disagreeable of all employments to work in a quarry.

Bating the passing uneasiness occasioned by a few gloomy anticipations, the portion of my life which had already gone by had been happy beyond the common lot. I had been a wanderer among rocks and woods-a reader of curious books when I could get them-a gleaner of old traditionary stories; and now I was going to exchange all my day-dreams, and all my amusements for the kind of life in which men toil every day that they may be enabled to eat, and eat every day that they may be enabled to toil! The quarry in which I wrought, lay on the southern shore of a noble inland bay, or firth, rather, with a little clear stream on the one side, and a thick fir wood on the other. It had been opened in the Old Red Sandstone of the district, and was overtopped by a huge bank of diluvial clay, which rose over it in some places

To

There was no very formidable beginning of the course of life I had so much dreaded. be sure, my hands were a little sore, and I felt nearly as much fatigued as if I had been climbing among the rocks; but I had wrought and been useful, and had yet enjoyed the day fully as much as usual. It was no small matter, too, that the evening converted, by a rare transmutation, into the delicious "blink of rest" which Burns so truthfully describes, was all my own.Hugh Miller.

ALPHABET RHYMES AND PICTURES FROM THE NEW ENGLAND PRIMER.

TALK ABOUT BOOKS.