difference from every human heart, as it was from the sublime utterer of those words! To be happy by creating happiness is each one's mission here. The fallacious creeds are passing away which taught man to imagine mortification here necessary to happiness hereafter. Whom do men regard as the most certain heritors of heaven? The most innocent. Whom do men behold the greatest enjoyers of happiness on earth? The most innocent. Happiness must be the aim and end of creation, since benevolence is evidently the first characteristic of the Universal Supreme. Laws made in wisdom must be irrevocable, and the consequences attendant on their infraction must be as certain as the consequences attendant on their fulfilment. Thus, ignorant as we are, and unapt to learn, thus it is we fall and suffer here: but where man forsakes us, and earth passes from us, a new power takes us up, a new field opens upon us. Hope, here unfulfilled, must have fruition elsewhere, or why was hope bestowed upon humanity? Aspirations, which have here taught us to soar in vain, must elsewhere have 'scope and verge enough,' or why are such aspirations given to us? A man of the merest commercial integrity, will not give another a bill which he knows will be protested; and shall we imagine that the Creator has given us a spirit longing after immortality which he knows will be annihilated? Impossible. A philosopher said, 'I feel, therefore I live,' and I say I feel that there is an immortal principle within me, and therefore, spiritually, I shall never die.

This feeling, however blended and obscured by others, has been co-existent everywhere with humanity: the savage and the civilized, every age of which we have the remotest record, every clime of which we have the slightest trace, have held man to be here a passenger pregnant with a spirit bound to a future state. In the eager desire to manifest this innate consciousness, various religions have been established, and their peculiar ceremonies enacted; till the spirit of religion has been smothered and overlaid by form, like fire with too much fuel. Men have descended to the worship of a mere shadow, and to employ themselves upon mere show; and, throughout, each has seen in each that error, ignorance, and inconsistency, which God sees in all. In like manner as regards morals; each shatters the crystal amulet of his own innocence, but remarks only the broken fragments of his neighbour's; each crouches and stumbles beneath the burthen of ignorance, or deviates at the invitations of falsehood, which holds out to us fruits that keep the promise to the eye but break it to the spirit, but each sees only the feebleness and aberrations of his brother. The fact is we do not love one another.' If that precept were fulfilled in spirit and in truth, all the misery which now is, would be impossible; when that precept is so fulfilled, all misery will pass away.

Education is the great engine for the advancement of this ob

ject; we must be taught from birth upwards to love, to feel, to forbear. We must be taught what is happiness, and how it is to be generated and preserved. The delicate perceptions with which infancy is universally invested, and which may be regarded as the nerves of moral life, must not be obtunded and paralyzed as now they are: peace, good will, charity, and truth, though perfectly consistent with every organization, are the spontaneous growth, perfectly and uniformly, of none. Schools, therefore, are the true temples of religion, whence may issue beings, of each of whom the Supreme may say, This is my beloved child in whom I am well pleased.

If man's duration on this earth may be calculated by the extent of knowledge presented to him for investigation, remote indeed may we regard the period when the last man shall look upon the blackening sun and say,

'Go, tell the night that hides thy face,

Thou saw'st the last of Adam's race

On earth's sepulchral clod,

The darkening universe defy
To quench his immortality,

Or shake his trust in God.'

How important, then, that man should make good progress in the science without which all else is mockery! He is poor in the midst of wealth, ignorant however possessed of knowledge, who cannot apply them to the purposes of happiness. The great of past ages have left us fine precepts, fine models-one stands out pre-eminent in beauty and purity-but what have these availed? We have no plan of process by means of which these precepts may be fulfilled, by means of which such models may be realized again, realized permanently and universally. With all our boasted progress, human nature and its management is as much a mystery as ever. Physical science (either increasing or reviving, for who shall say how much the past may have engulfed which the present may be only restoring?) is being dif fused beyond any precedent on record; the mighty arm of machinery is working wonders; the power of locomotion has received an impetus which seems to promise eventually to unite the poles. But, amid all this material progress and change, there is no analogous moral progress and change discernible. The diffusion of that moral knowledge which would teach participation of all that is good, and mitigation of all that is evil, which would let none want half a loaf while another had a whole one is unknown. Feasting and famine are not merely co-existent, they are in juxta-position, and the palace of luxury and the lazar-house of misery are almost side by side, making the reflective laugh to scorn the idea that this is the age of diffusion.

We may annihilate distance by means of railroads and steamcarriages; but we want a moral power analogous to the tremen

dous scientific power which spans miles in minutes, and ties remote localities together; we want one which shall annihilate social distance, and unite the antagonized.

What is the state of human society? Wolves and vultures do not tear even their prey as human beings in political and civil strife tear each other. Manners are more equally polished, and mischief is therefore less obvious; but are truth and kindliness more common, or malice, envy, and slander less rare?

But to leave the little nests of social venom in which folly and falsehood fabric their poisoned shafts, and turn to a larger scene of sorrow and turbulence. What makes the misery of this magnificent country? Is it an ineffective government which paralyzes, at least impedes, the advancement of the spirit of freedom? Is it a State Church which sits like an incubus on the country, arresting its vital circulation? Is it an hereditary legislation which, like a taint in the blood, defies every remedy which reform can devise? It is none of these; these are but the consequences, inevitable, miserable, fatal consequences, of the universal departure from the divine precept which I have taken for my text. We do not love one another'; nay, we hate one another. Each one is buckled up in the black armour of selfishness, with a quiver full of lies at his back, which, at the call of interest, caprice, and a thousand petty motives, he scatters around him. The few who go forth with the naked breast of sympathy in a scene like this, soon recoil, fatally, if not mortally, wounded, and then, if it be possible, they retire from the unequal contest presented to them in the hateful conflicts of the world, and the breast that might have been the home of a social heart, becomes the hermitage of a lonely one.

The practical adoption of the divine principle 'love one another' can alone banish the spirit of Cain which so universally brands society. But as the twig must be bent while it be young, while the gnarled oak resists every attempt made to bend it, so must the principle be sedulously brought into exercise upon the young, and, as for the adult, all that we may hope is to modify their natures through the medium of their interests: reflection and experience, if they can be induced to cultivate the one and look back upon the other, will tell them that the peace which passeth show can neither be found, or, if found, preserved, upon the present plan of social life, which deludes us with a promise of pleasure, but surrenders the innocent to injury, and the mischievous and malignant to the re-action of the injury they inflict —that in like manner do benefits and forbearance re-act. The truth of this assertion I can attest; even the present feeble attempt to save others from the acute anguish attendant upon the recollection of the least failure in duty and tenderness has reacted happily upon the feelings of my own heart. I have opened the ark of sorrow and desolation, and sent forth the dove of good

will upon the troubled waters of the world, and already it has returned to me with a branch of olive. In the large harbour of universal interests, universal love, I desire more than ever to cast secure anchor, since the individual affections which convoyed me thither are becoming, one after another, beacon lights beyond the grave.

PARACELSUS.*

THIS poem is what few modern publications either are, or affect to be; it is A WORK. It is the result of thought, skill, and toil. Defects and irregularities there may be, but they are those of a building which the architect has erected for posterity, and not the capricious anomalies of the wattled pleasure house, which has served its turn when the summer day's amusement is over, and may be blown about by the next breeze, or washed away by the next torrent, to be replaced by another as fantastic and as transient.

It was not written, nor is it to be read, extempore. This circumstance has sorely puzzled the critics, especially the Weeklies, to whom by common consent the periodicals of a larger orbit seem to have abandoned the task of illumining the world of literature; of measuring its times and seasons, and chronicling its productions. They cannot comprehend how the perusal of poetry should be a thoughtful operation. That a drama should be a study, is to their understandings a monstrosity. They would as soon think of making subjects for a surgeon of the figures of a phantasmagoria. Accustomed only to poems that come like shadows, so depart, they are startled out of their critical senses by one which boldly steps into the world like a thing of soul and substance, actually come to claim and maintain its place amongst realities. Put out of their track, neither feeling safe in praise nor in condemnation, they give a short dissatisfactory growl, and turn aside to hunt other game, which indeed is sufficiently abundant, and which they can chase, catch, and worry, selon les règles of their art, or, more correctly, according to the custom of their tribe. They stare at 'Paracelsus' as did the doctors of his own day. And thus far, by implication, though not in purpose, their verdict is already given in favour of its being a work of genius, or else a worthless abortion; the world may find out which and when the world has found it out, the critics will discover the reasons, and set them forth in learned dissertations.

A lasting poem must have a great purpose, moral, political, or philosophical. Aimlessness is fatal; and even an erring aim is perilous. The world's heart is only to be won by love and worth. It will only enshrine and cherish there for perpetuity the imagi

*Paracelsus,' by Robert Browning,

nation which intelligence has directed to its good and glory. The bagatelles which it may willingly let live for a day, may have no aim beyond their own disportings; but a settled purpose, and the bending up of each mental agent to the feat, must characterize the productions which it will not willingly let die.' The author of Paracelsus' has essayed the solution of one of those great enigmas, which human life in its different phases presents. His Paracelsus' is, not a personification indeed, but an individualization of humanity, in whom he exhibits its alternate conditions of aspiration and attainment. Truly here is something for the mind to grapple with, but the labour is only of that species which accords with the proper enjoyment of poetry, and which raises that enjoyment to its due degree of loftiness and intensity.

6

Paracelsus left that sort of mingled reputation which exactly suited the author's purpose. It is neither too bad for a blessing nor too good for a curse. He had a right to assume that it might yet struggle into brightness, through all the clouds of obloquy by which it has been so long overshadowed. What says Dr. Uwins of him, in his very judicious and instructive outline of the history of medicine, recently delivered as an introductory lecture to his class? At the close of the fifteenth century Paracelsus was born. He was a native of Switzerland, and soon became conspicuous as a bold innovator, ridiculing all that had gone before him, and making of medicine a sort of alchemic art. His converts were many; but the most learned and respectable physicians of the time continued to abide by the doctrines of Galen.' Yet Galen had not the infallibility of inspiration or of science. The simplicity of Hippocrates,' says Dr. Uwins, he conspicuously interlarded with his own theories.' The history of his influence in medicine is not unlike that of Aristotle amongst the school-men; in the time of Paracelsus it had become a mental tyranny, which a man might deserve well of the world for vigorously assailing. The man who first employed the stupendous powers of mercury and opium in his prescriptions, producing effects at which the learned and the illiterate alike stood amazed, crying out on miracle or magic, had some right to raise a standard of rebellion in his own province; while the demurring of learned and respectable physicians,' was only what happened a century afterwards to Harvey, with his discovery of the circulation of the blood. Not that we demur, for an instant, to the estimate of so able a judge on these matters as Dr. Uwins, or have any idea of doing battle for the medical glory of Paracelsus. We only show cause on behalf of the poet's selection. Further argument might be found in any biographical dictionary. The poem adheres to the broad outline of ascertained facts, of which it is the exposition, and out of which it constructs a beautiful and universal theory. Aureolus ParacelAt the free Hospital, Greville Street, Hatton Garden; published in Dr. Ryan's Medical Journal' for October,