gun to shoot the cats when they grow clamorous, tearing the ear of night with all that is inharmonious. Courteous, reader, I beg your pardon; that impudent fellow with his sporting pretences, whom I met on the Clapham stage, three weeks ago, would not from my memory. But I wish you. would have let me go on or continue going off at that cockney. Stopping me is as awkward to my sensations as when you check the swing; there the white head in the sun, and now the little heels here in the shade, and a chirrup swinging to and fro in companionship with the hobby; and now that jolt, and the little fellow is nearly thrown on his face among the nettles-I mean the last word as a simile, and find myself nettled by the critics, who are calling question, question,' while you only, Mr. Editor, are liberal of voice, and bid me go on, go on.' Well, sport for the country is, to rise with the sun, to empty the scent-bottles of your toilet, and make them depositories of a cottage wall-rose, presented with 'good morrow' from little rosy-cheek; or if the fair hand have culled the roses of so many and ten summers, then raise thy wish to virtue, she may be a worthy wife forbut you are above a farmer's daughter: then pray pass on and keep the flower, and remember that Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these;' and it was a gift from a maiden's hand, (or from any hand, if you are called to the wonders of its mechanism and the lecture of Sir Charles Bell,) and make that a text on the rights of humanity; or go on without a thought to the Hand and Flower,' and drink deeply of mine host's home-brewed, if you have not been by the way deeply intoxicated with the every-day sights and sounds of a country walk at dawn; the little children up three hours beyond the going-out of father and the elder lads to plough or reaping. If you have never before seen a joy sunning the countenance, look there, the one who speaks, how freely part the pearly teeth-row! how full the voice comes, without a hint that the lungs procured a double gulp of pure air with that effort! And then the laughers -see! the quiet cheek as still as the sky before dawn; and now -travel not to witness a glorious sunrise, it is here; it is gone. Another word. See! again that countenance, without an effort, is all joy, bright as happiness, and easy as innocence. Very innocent amusement,' quoth my reader, repeating the question, what is to do in the country?' Do something, or do not wander from the nothing-doing of town. If you can use the pencil, or touch the flute, or tell a story, you will have enough to do, unless you would keep happy neighbours from you, for you will be in request wherever these accomplishments are beyond the leisure of your company. But cricket, or bowls, or quoits, are the classical sports of the green, and thus, while work takes his new title, and perhaps shows to the setting sun a different costume from that worn at his rising, you will learn that they are always doing in the country. I hardly think they could fold their arms and fix their attention while you should pass the hours in telling all the on dits of the season, all the failures in the East, all the faux pas of the West; but you may find it otherwise; try, see how many 'Ages' and 'Satirists' come to the post-office, and whither directed; follow them, and take up the theme; your coterie may be as clever and their consultations as dark as the conclave of crows that blacken yonder acres; yet, whatever their mischief to the corn, they are catering for their species, and therefore speak more profitably than your neighbours, though they only say 'caw.' But, should you escape these corners, you may find a cottager who has been to the top of the highest hill in the adjoining county, or a yeoman who is learned in the rise and fall of markets, a lass who has danced at the assize town, or a mechanic who has been on tramp, or a wooden leg which bespeaks a son of Neptune or of Mars. Oh, that oak of Dodona, whose fabled bird-tone was (as Mitford tells us) an Egyptian emigrant, was not more eloquent than are yon elm-boughs that screen the cottage eaves. How cozily curls the blue smoke from amid the foliage! I dare say the Dodonaan oak was an old smoker too while giving out his wondrous tales. But you despise my attempt to read these elm rows classical. Well let the country speak to you in its own language of whispering boughs, of sunny uplands, of dark deep streams, of generous labour and unequivocal repose. Become a part of the healthful society, a spirit of the grand and beautiful, an echo of the silence that is eloquent as the mirror of heaven; then go in your strength to your hearth, and take down the old author from your shelves; you will meet him half way in his opinions, anticipate his imagery, cling round his meaning with affection, and meditate upon him in the hushing hour which precedes good night;" then thy dreams will be holy, slumber light, and thy morrow a new birth of creation, and of the creature who welcomes earth and blesses heaven. But this will come without recourse to old authors at midnight. Here a circle engaged in a talk of their crops, or a discussion of the game at bowls, or of the fighting at Waterloo, may hold you long in digesting their opinions, or analyzing their characters, while the evening clear-obscure shuts out all objects that excite the organs of sense; in the stillness, the booming of the gnat is loud in terrors, the waving of the boughs an intrusion; you turn your head, (perhaps at the warning of a gnat's wing,) there, above the boughs that have lost their dayhue in one sombre purpling blackness, the moon is up, a wonder of light, the seal upon the season of coolness, the fountain of rays that should thread the beady dews--or what you will, for you start from the long twilight as if these gentle beams and that silver orb were strange and new, and you are deaf to your neighbour, and his markets, or his politics; do you not bless the out of-door home, the country walk that gives the spirit room to mingle with the beauty and beneficence reflected on the face of nature? G. S. SELF-DEPENDENCE. POPULAR patriotism,-not the love, but the boast of country, a beating out of the leaf-brass of self-conceit,-is out of vogue. It seems to have been declining ever since the days of Dibdin, that poet-laureate of loyalty; then it was at its zenith. At that period the belief in the superiority of a true-born Englishman' over every other creature on the face of the earth, especially a Frenchman, might have swelled the thirty-nine articles to forty, for it was part of the universal creed of the country. 量 Such narrow and exclusive opinions have for some time been yielding to broader and better views; thanks to peace, a free intercourse with foreigners, and the power of a few masterminds, more or less in operation among us. It is the tendency of these minds to think, as it were, in masses; to merge the petty details of connexion, class, and clime, in the grand circle of universal humanity. This is a sublime disposition of mind. The philosophy it inculcates cannot be too warmly cherished, too firmly fixed; it will furnish the lever which will raise England out of the mercenary mud into which she has been in a great degree sunk; already its electric power has roused many from the torpor of exclusive interests, wrenched open the doublelocked doors of ignorant selfishness, and will in its irresistible course shatter the showy fabrics of specious power and pretension. This philosophy has breathed doom upon the Aristocracy, not of England only, but of the whole earth. Aristocracy is a tumour growing out of the diseased state of the body politic; a tumour which will die away under the alterative administered to the public mind by this philosophy,-a better process for its extinction than any violent excision could offer. The progress of this philosophy will create a new moral atmosphere, in which future generations, with their first, fresh, free energies, will awake at once, and take a character unknown to the cramped, crooked, contracted nurslings of past opinion. Yet while I recognise with delight this enlarged and beautiful philosophy, the conception, comprehension, and acting upon which is the nearest approach man has made to the Godhead, I feel,-even while my reason and experience bid me perceive and acknowledge the inextricable, unalienable, universal, and eternal linking of the whole chain of being,-I feel so strongly within me the principle of independence, the sense of oneness, if so I may express myself, that I cannot forbear to take my stand for a moment with the atom in opposition to the universal, and endeavour to see how far we have been wrong in the cherishing of individual and other exclusive interests, the excess of which a noble philosophy is now endeavouring to dissipate. When speaking of atoms, I may, without being largely guilty of egotism, refer to self; it is the only grain of the grand structure, universal humanity, I have at hand; when, then, I feel that I would rather be broke upon the wheel by instalments than acknowledge the arbitrary control of any earthly power, I am made sensible of how strong a principle of unblending selfconcentration is implanted in my nature; if in mine, more or less, in all; if in all, it is a primary principle of human nature; if a primary principle, incapable of extinction, an attempt it would be fallacy to make, and folly (if practicable) to effect. This principle is that which the phrenologists call firmness; they mark the seat of this organ at the crown of the head; there is to me a beautiful analogy in this, for I regard this principle as the crown of character, by which every man is monarch of himself, the only monarchy there should be on earth. For man should give a brother's hand To all beneath the sun; But the sceptre of despotic power The human atom whose relativeness I acknowledge, and therefore desire for it a comprehension of that philosophy which I shall call universality, this atom has a oneness so distinct that, in an equal degree, I claim for it a recognition of a principle I shall call individuality. It ca can as little surrender the one as it can stand aloof from the other; and, were I disposed to impute error to some past and present moralists, I should say that their error consisted in making but one, instead of both these principles, the organs of human action. The perfect reception and comprehension of both appear to me all that is necessary to the perfecting human nature. I utterly deny the so much talked-of notion of merging self in another or others; I entirely acknowledge the little understood tenet of the relativeness of self to all the created and the UNCREATED. How, it may be said, feels this atom towards the UNCREATED? surely there independence were impiety and presumption. How feels this atom? Not as a wretch whose best righteousness is filth and rags,' as the Orange Catechism has it, but as a creation noble in its source and termination, as a creation flowing from perfect power and tending towards it, as a creation flung from the ceaselessly-revolving wheel of nature; a wheel which the INCOMPREHENSIBLE, the UNCOMPREHENDED, hath set in motion; why or for what purpose is it for them to inquire who see but a point. and pause but a span, upon the immense circle which it sweeps? THOU art all, and I,-what thou hast made me-apparently insignificant as a grain of dust in the desert; probably as important as the more prominent agents of thy unfathomable designs! Among the principles of creation I perceive that the thing originated is not perfect, but instinct with the principle of perfectibility. This principle, decidedly perceptible in the human being, is latent in all, and through human agency developed in all. Fruits, flowers, vegetables, are by culture carried forward into varieties and excellencies unknown to the original stock. The same may be said of all the lower animals. I regard man as the youngest animal on earth, or, to speak more distinctly, as a species newly on it; that he is hastening towards a high and happy state, and will attain it by the working out of the principle of progression implanted in him. The work of the Supreme has its course; the accomplishment of that course is its completion; its completion takes it back to that whence it came; the circle is made, and the source everlasting. Instinct with the desire of progress, the human mind has an undeviating purpose of action, an unerring path of action, an unchanging object of action; the purpose is improvement, the path is power, the object or deity Perfection. In the creations of God I perceive two things-the highest adaptation of means, and the utmost economy of materials: in the working of these creations two others, force and facility. None of these principles have ever entered into the machinery of State religions on the contrary, the means have ever been clumsy and incompatible; the expenditure, whether we consider that of. life or money, immense; as to its force, one strong mind has opposed a conclave, one high heart defied a hierarchy; while, for facility, we perceive nothing but clogged wheels from the pewopener to the prelate. Man, as a species, is only just entering into the stage of youth which immediately follows childhood: his early and barbarous habits of excessive selfishness, which, under various modifications, is still perceptible in all his plans, is analogous to the action of the infant, who, under the influence of a vague impulse, carries everything it can grasp to its mouth. As its perceptive powers expand, and its knowledge extends, it learns that it is only edible substances that can be profitably applied in that manner. the same way man now begins to perceive that individuality has its limits for him, and universality a lien upon him; that he has faculties, the working of which is a moral arithmetic which must go forward in himself, but that the result is for society. In Individuality is in morals what the division of labour, or, as it has been said with more precision, the division of employment, is in commerce and manufacture. It continually concentrates the individual in himself, or on his immediate sphere of action; prevents his depending on extraneous aid or support; and thus forms No. 105, 2 U |