of all ages have sought to scale the heavens, to attain a perfectness, harmony and beauty, which they could not find on earth, to represent the ideal of the fancy, which had never embodied itself in actual life. The present state has always struck the minds of men, even in the rudest times, as imperfect and fragmentary. This has been the case with the outward world. Nature is indeed fair and glorious, yet not a perfect Paradise. Her scenes of beauty are often deformed and laid waste, the serpent lurks in the garden, the wasp in the flower-cup. There are frightful solitudes, arid deserts, blighting winds sweep over field and forest, the deadly thunderbolt destroys the hope of man. And then there is no scene, where the lines of beauty are so nicely rounded off, that the imagination cannot conceive of something more perfect; nor is there anything on the earth or in the visible heavens so grand but that man may imagine something more vast and sublime. Hence the fictions, that have always prevailed with regard to a past, a future, or a distant Paradise, where there is no blight or death, no deformity, cloud, or storm. It was in this striving after outward perfection, that classic fable produced the bowers of Calypso and the far off Isles of the Blessed, and clothed the vale of Tempe and the Arcadian groves in traits of ideal beauty.

Still more has mankind felt in all ages the seeming inequality and injustice of human fortunes. The race has not been to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. The pure of heart have been trodden under foot, and the vile have been exalted. The cup of hemlock has been mingled for genius and piety; the world's homage has been laid at the feet of fools and ruffians. In human affairs, cause and effect, conduct and its just consequences have seemed to be disjoined; retribution has marched with tardy steps; injustice has enjoyed long and signal triumphs. Yet there is native in man's heart an idea of justice, perfect and supreme. And the constant effort of the old pagan philosophy was to solve the enigma of life, to account for the seeming inequality of human fortunes. To this end theories without number were devised. This aim lay at the foundation of the oriental philosophy, which referred the prevalence of wrong and evil to a malignant principle, contending with the supreme God for the government of the universe. Fiction cuts the knot which philosophy thus sought to untie. Fiction shapes its own world after the eternal idea of justice in the

heart, invents personages, whose fortunes coincide with their characters and deserts, deals righteous retribution, crowns virtue in the sight of all men, and makes punishment follow close upon the heels of crime.

Then again, there is the same signature of imperfection upon the virtues, the doings, and the darings of the brave and the good. The outlines of the purest individual character are marred by petty foibles and follies. Splendid virtues are often neutralized by gross faults. The brave are sometimes mean. Heroes show too plainly that they are mortal. Great enterprises are retarded, and great results shortened and weakened by the frailty or the mistakes of their agents. No series of efforts or events rolls on so smoothly or gloriously but there is some ripple or eddy in the current. But there is within man the native consciousness of capacity for the loftiest virtue and the noblest daring, of the power of controlling the course of events in the happiest direction and to the most glorious issues. This consciousness expresses itself through the medium of fiction, which gives us characters of godlike purity and power, enterprises undertaken and achieved in the freest and boldest spirit, obstacles fearlessly encountered and triumphantly subdued, a march of affairs stately and majestic throughout.

Thus has fiction had its foundation in man's dissatisfaction with the present state of things, and his yearning after something higher and better, in his effort to realize those innate ideas of the beautiful, the grand, and the good, which have no counterpart in the actual world. Different classes of fiction correspond to different forms of this effort. The epic represents grandeur in action, high and commanding virtues displayed on a broad and conspicuous theatre. Tragedy delineates the gigantic proportions of the ideal man, considered as a being of sentiment and emotion. Pastoral fiction exhibits the affections and the gentler virtues, blooming in a congenial paradise of innocence and love. The novel deals primarily with events, and makes character subsidiary. Its aim is to replace the lost thread of cause and effect, to bind actions to their legitimate consequences, to administer impartial retribution, as the ideal of justice in the author's heart may dictate. The romance mingles all of these forms. It combines the stately epic tread of heroes on an elevated stage, with the passion and sentiment of the tragic muse. It borrows the tenderness of the pastoral, and often its haze of voluptuous tranquillity to shed over the

scenes of nature, while with the novel its plot turns on the principle of retributive justice.

random form of literaIt has its root in unibetter, that ideal self,

Fiction is not then, it would seem, a ture, a mere vehicle of amusement. versal nature. It grows out of that which is perpetually shooting above and beyond the actual, and which, in every department, carries our aims far beyond our power of execution, our conceptions far beyond aught that we can hope to realize. Fiction is no less the spontaneous language of nature, than are the wailings of infancy or the groans of the suffering. It is too a universal language. With one exception, which we shall shortly notice, no nation, that has created for itself a literature, has failed to utter itself in this form. Nay, even savage nations, destitute of the use of letters, have embodied their ideas of perfection in traditional tales or in rude epics. This form of literature, thus universal, indicates the universality of the ideas which give birth to it. There is in every human heart a dissatisfaction with the actual, the seen, and the felt, both as regards outward nature, the march of events, and human character and experience. There is in every heart the ideal world of more perfect forms, of more exquisite beauty, of higher purity. There is a tendency in every mind to conceive of these ideas as embodied in some past, future, or distant paradise. Faith in paradise is a branch of the universal faith of the human heart. Now, so far as we can analyze the nature of man, we find no innate idea without its corresponding object. In the cant phrase of the day, the subjective always has its counterpart in the objective. Man's innate ideas are the inward expression of great truths or facts in the divine government. And this idea, so universal, of a more perfect order of things and state of being, points us for its realization to a past and a future paradise. Yes, the human heart in all ages bears testimony, and has engraven its testimony deep on the literature of the world, that all things were perfect once, and are to be again restored.

Ancient fiction dwelt chiefly on the past, and pictured a golden age, when the gods pitched their tents with men, when kings were patriarchs, when peace, innocence and plenty reigned, before violence had sharpened the sword or the dart, or cupidity launched a keel upon the deep. Who cannot see in this the soul's memory of her first estate and birthright forfeited by sin, nay, of her forthcoming also from that Para

dise of God once on earth, which, when man fell, like the child in the Apocalypse, was caught up to the eternal throne, and which the latter days shall see descending again from heaven, when there shall be no more pain or sickness, night, or death?

"The soul that rises with us, our life's star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar;

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come,
From God, who is our home."

"Hence in a season of calm weather,

Though inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,

Can in a moment travel thither,

And see the children sport upon the shore,

And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.”

Fiction has, however, always combined with its retrospective tendency an onward pointing, a prophetic character, blending the functions of the seer and the poet; for mankind have always had a latent faith, that what has been will be again; that the golden age will return, and righteousness and truth, mercy and peace, dwell in close embrace upon the earth, that effete nature will renew her strength and put on her birthday apparel; that

"all fear

Of barrenness shall cease, and every field

Laugh with abundance, and the land once lean,
Or fertile only in its own disgrace,

Exult to see the thirsty curse repealed,

The various seasons woven into one,

And that one season an eternal spring."

Hardly is there a fiction of antiquity, however deep in the past the plot is laid, which presents not these foreshadowings, or, as they should rather be termed, these foreshinings of a paradise to come. Either the living seer is brought upon the stage to unrol the scroll of the future, or else the hero threads without dying, the dark way of death, and crosses the black river with the gloomy ferryman, to seek out the Shade of some illustrious ancestor, who may reveal the fates, and fortify him for conflict and danger by the hope of better things to come. And may we not take this universal consent, in a brighter and

happier future as a pledge lodged in man's heart by its Author, that a future better than the past ever awaits our race; that humanity shall move on in an ever brightening path, evil evolving good, till hope shall become sight, and men shall copy into their annals the richest pages of prophecy?

One nation only, we have said, writes no fiction, the Jewish, a striking fact, and one which seems to evince that they had in authentic revelations that for which other nations strove through the medium of fiction. They, (except in their times of national apostasy,) they alone, of all nations upon earth made no idols; for they had the true Jehovah, whose only image is that created by his indwelling in the soul of his worshipper. And it would seem as if they had extended to the golden past and to the golden future, the law which was given them against idolatry. They made no likeness of the Eden which was, or of the Eden which is to be. History and prophecy to them filled and transcended the highest sphere of fable. They could not equal that which was written by the unerring pen of inspiration, or heighten colors borrowed from the sky; and they wisely refrained from fiction, which must have fallen so far short of the delineations in their truthful records. They had in their sacred books a Paradise, in which were soft streams and gentle dews, every tree pleasant to the sight and good for food, and in which, above all, the parents of our race heard the voice of the Lord God in the cool of the day, and talked with him as a man talks with his neighbor. They had also the promise of one who should restore lost Eden, under whose reign the wolf and the lamb should lie down together, the desert blossom as the garden, and men learn war no more. Their yearnings were satisfied, their ideas of perfectness met and filled by this past and this future, which their earnest faith brought so nigh together as to overlap the dull and doubtful present. These revelations solved for them the enigma of life, which perplexed the whole Gentile world. They saw amidst all the confused and conflicting elements of nature and society a sovereign arm, a guiding Providence. The voice of the Lord was upon the waters, the winds were his angels, and flames of fire his ministers. In his hand were the hearts of men. By him kings reigned, and princes decreed justice. It was his to bring low and to raise up, to wound and to make whole. The people might rage and the nations take counsel; but he could make the wrath of man to praise him, and while