iron belt of martial music which now encompasses the earth, be exchanged for the golden cestus of peace, clothing all with celestial beauty. History dwells with fondness on the reverent homage that was bestowed, by massacring soldiers, upon the spot occupied by the sepulchre of the Lord. Vain man! to restrain his regard to a few feet of sacred mold! The whole earth is the sepulchre of the Lord; nor can any righteous man profane any part thereof. Let us recognize this truth, and now, on this Sabbath of our country, lay a new stone in the grand temple of universal peace, whose dome shall be as lofty as the firmament of heaven, as broad and comprehensive as the earth itself.

SPIRIT OF CLASSICAL AND OF MODERN LITERATURE From the Phi Beta Kappa Oration of 1846, entitled 'The Scholar, the Jurist, the Artist, the Philanthropist

THE

HE classics possess a peculiar charm as the models—I might almost say the masters-of composition and thought in all ages. In the contemplation of these august teachers of mankind, we are filled with conflicting emotions. They are the early voice of the world, better remembered and more cherished still than all the intermediate words that have been uttered,— as the language of childhood still haunts us, when the impressions of later years have been effaced from the mind. But they show with unwelcome frequency the tokens of the world's childhood, before passion had yielded to the sway of reason and the affections. They want the highest charm of purity, of righteousness, of elevated sentiments, of love to God and man. It is not in the frigid philosophy of the Porch and the Academy that we are to seek these; not in the marvelous teachings of Socrates, as they come mended by the mellifluous words of Plato; not in the resounding line of Homer, on whose inspiring tale of blood Alexander pillowed his head; not in the animated strain of Pindar, where virtue is pictured in the successful strife of an athlete at the Isthmian games; not in the torrent of Demosthenes, dark with self-love and the spirit of vengeance; not in the fitful philosophy and intemperate eloquence of Tully; not in the genial libertinism of Horace, or the stately atheism of Lucretius. No: these must not be our masters; in none of these are we to seek

the way of life. For eighteen hundred years, the spirit of these writers has been engaged in constant contest with the Sermon on the Mount, and with those two sublime commandments on which hang all the law and the prophets. The strife is still pending. Heathenism, which has possessed itself of such siren forms, is not yet exorcised. It still tempts the young, controls the affairs of active life, and haunts the meditations of age.

Our own productions, though they may yield to those of the ancients in the arrangement of ideas, in method, in beauty of form, and in freshness of illustration, are far superior in the truth, delicacy, and elevation of their sentiments, above all, in the benign recognition of that peculiar Christian revelation, the brotherhood of mankind. How vain are eloquence and poetry, compared with this heaven-descended truth! Put in one scale that simple utterance, and in the other all the lore of antiquity, with all its accumulating glosses and commentaries, and the last will be light and trivial in the balance. Greek poetry has been likened to the song of the nightingale, as she sits in the rich, symmetrical crown of the palm-tree, trilling her thick-warbled notes; but even this is less sweet and tender than those words of charity to our "neighbor," remote or near, which are inspired by Christian love.

THE DIGNITY OF THE JURIST

NTO the company of jurists Story has now passed; taking a

I place not only in the immediate history of his country, but

in the grander history of civilization. It was a saying of his, often uttered in the confidence of friendship, that a man may be measured by the horizon of his mind,-whether it embraced the village, town, country, or State in which he lived, or the whole broad country, ay, the circumference of the world. In this spirit he lived and wrought; elevating himself above the present both in time and place, and always finding in jurisprudence an absorbing interest. Only a few days before the illness which ended in his death, it was suggested to him, in conversation with regard to his intended retirement from the bench, that a wish had been expressed by many to see him a candidate for the highest political office of the country. He replied at once, spontaneously and

without hesitation, that "The station of President of the United States would not tempt him from his professor's chair, and the calm pursuit of jurisprudence." Thus spoke the jurist. As a lawyer, a judge, a professor, he was always a jurist. While administering justice between parties, he sought to extract from their cause the elements of future justice, and to advance the science of the law. He stamped upon his judgments a value which is not restrained to the occasions on which they were pronounced. Unlike mere medals,- of curious importance to certain private parties only, they have the currency of the gold coin of the republic, with the image and superscription of sovereignty, wherever they go, even in foreign lands.

Many years before his death, his judgments in matters of Admiralty and Prize had arrested the attention of that illustrious judge and jurist, Lord Stowell; and Sir James Mackintosh, a name emblazoned by literature and jurisprudence, had said of them that they were "justly admired by all cultivators of the law of nations." His words have often been cited as authority in Westminster Hall, a tribute to a foreign jurist almost unprecedented, as all persons familiar with English law will recognize; and the Chief Justice of England has made the remarkable declaration, with regard to a point on which Story had differed from the Queen's Bench, that his opinion would "at least neutralize the effect of the English decision, and induce any of their courts to consider the question as an open one.”

Τ

ALLSTON IN ITALY

URNING his back upon Paris and the greatness of the Empire, he directed his steps to Italy, the enchanted ground of literature, of history, and of art; strown with richest memorials of the past, filled with scenes memorable in the story of the progress of man, teaching by the pages of philosophers and historians, vocal with the melody of poets, ringing with the music which St. Cecilia protects, glowing with the living marble and canvas, beneath a sky of heavenly purity and brightness, with the sunsets which Claude has painted, parted by the Apennines, -early witnesses of the unrecorded Etruscan civilization,— surrounded by the snow-capped Alps, and the blue classic waters of

the Mediterranean Sea. The deluge of war which submerged Europe had here subsided; and our artist took up his peaceful abode in Rome, the modern home of art. Strange change of condition! Rome, sole surviving city of antiquity, who once disdained all that could be wrought by the cunning hand of sculpture,

* "Excudent alii spirantia mollius æra,

Credo equidem; vivos ducent de marmore vultus,»

who has commanded the world by her arms, by her jurisprudence, by her church,—now sways it further by her arts. Pilgrims from afar, where neither her eagles, her prætors, nor her interdicts ever reached, become the willing subjects of this new empire; and the Vatican stored with the precious remains of antiquity, and the touching creations of a Christian pencil, has succeeded to the Vatican whose thunders intermingled with the strifes of modern Europe.

At Rome he was happy in the friendship of Coleridge, and in long walks in his instructive company. We can well imagine that the author of Genevieve' and the 'Ancient Mariner' would find especial sympathies with Allston. We behold these two natures, tremblingly alive to beauty of all kinds, looking together upon those majestic ruins, upon the manifold accumulations of art, upon the marble which almost spoke, and upon the warmer canvas; listening together to the flow of the perpetual fountains. fed by ancient aqueducts; musing together in the Forum on the mighty footprints of History; and entering together, with sympathetic awe, that grand Christian church whose dome rises a majestic symbol of the comprehensive Christianity which shall embrace the whole earth. "Never judge of a work of art by its defects," was one of the lessons of Coleridge to his companion; which, when extended by natural expansion to the other things of life, is a sentiment of justice and charity, of higher value than a statue of Praxiteles, or a picture of Raphael.

*«Others will mold more deftly the breathing bronze, I concede it,

Or from the block of marble the living features may summon."

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG

(1688-1772)

BY FRANK SEWALL

HE universal recognition of the epochal significance of the latter half of the eighteenth century would seem almost to corroborate Swedenborg's declaration that at that time there was transpiring in the spiritual world a great general judgment which was to mark the transition from an old to a new age. What in the political world was effected by the French Revolution, had its counterpart in the intellectual transforma

tions to which the two great lights that shone forth in the northern firmament Emanuel Swedenborg in Stockholm, and Immanuel Kant in Königsberg - were potent contributors. Both were epoch-makers: both, having acquired a universal survey of the world's learning and philosophical methods up to their time, brought the minds of men abruptly to a chasm over which they pointed to realms hitherto unexplored, -the realities that transcend the bodily With Kant the transcendence was

senses.

critical, God, the Soul, and Immortality EMANUEL SWEDENBORG were not "constitutive" but only "regulat

ive» elements of knowledge, incapable of demonstration or negation; with Swedenborg the transcendence was positive-into a world of things "heard and seen." Were Swedenborg merely the seer, or one of the many who have "seen visions" and left an account of them, his name, however regarded by his followers, could have no place in a history of letters or of philosophic thought. His extraordinary experience of intromission, as he claims, into open intercourse with angels and spirits for a period of some thirty years, cannot be said to constitute a philosophical moment in itself, being unique and incapable of classification. It is only the system of universal laws governing the relations of the two worlds, which he claims to have brought to light, especially the law of Discrete Degrees and their Correspondence, that gives his writings their philosophic value, and that entitles