uniformly regular; it becomes monotonous; it is like riding or walking a vast distance over a level macadamized road; a difficult mountain would be an interval of relief. We feel the need of something to break up the uniformity, and startle the mind; and we would like here and there to pass through an untrodden wilderness, or a gloomy forest, or to have some unexpected solemn apparition rise before us. There is more of the romantic in Foster than in Hall, and Foster's style is sometimes thickset with expressions, that sparkle with electric fire of imagination.

Hall's mind, in the comparison of the two, is more like an inland lake, in which you can see, though many fathoms deep, the clear white sand, and the smallest pebbles on the bottom. Foster's is rather like the Black Sea in commotion. Hall gives you more of known truth, with inimitable perspicuity and happiness of arrangement; Foster sets your own mind in pursuit of truth, fills you with longings after the unknown, leads you to the brink of frightful precipices. There is something such a difference between the two, as between Raphael the sociable angel, relating to Adam in his bower, the history of creation, and Michael, ascending with him the mountain, to tell him what shall happen from his fall.

Hall's mind is like a royal garden, with rich fruits, and overhanging trees in vistas; Foster's is a stern, wild, mountainous region, likely to be the haunt of banditti. As a preacher, Hall must have been altogether superior to Foster in the use and application of ordinary important evangelical truth, "for reproof, correction, and instruction in righteousness." But Foster probably sometimes reached a grander style, and threw upon his audience sublimer illustrations and masses of thought. Foster was not successful as a preacher; his training and natural habits were unfortunate for that; and the range of thought, in which his mind spontaneously moved, was too far aloof from men's common uses, abilities of perception, tastes and disposition. But Hall was doubtless one of the greatest preachers that ever lived. Yet there were minds that would prefer Foster, and times at which all the peculiar qualities of his genius would be developed in a grander combination of sublimity and power. As a general thing, Hall must have been more like Paul preaching at Athens in a Roman toga; Foster, like John the Baptist in the wilderness, with a leathern girdle about his loins, eating locusts and wild honey. He speaks of one of his own sermons, which a man would give much to have heard; we can imagine some of its characteristics. It was on the oath of the angel, with one foot upon the sea, and another on the land, swearing that Time should be no longer; and his own mind was in a luminous, winged state of freedom and fire, that seems to have surprised himself; but no record of the sermon is preserved.

The vigor and uptwisting convolutions of Foster's style are the

results simply of the strong workings of the thought, and not of any elaborate artificial formation. For though he labored upon his sentences with unexampled interest and care, after his thoughts had run them in their own original mould, they were always the creation of the thought, and not a mould prepared for it. The thought had always the living law of its external form within it. We know of scarce another example in English literature, where so much beauty, precision, and yet genuine and inveterate originality are combined. It is like the hulk of a ship made out of the smoothed knees of knotty oak.

There is a glow of life in such a style, and not merely quiet beauty, whether elaborate or natural, that is like the glow in the countenance of a healthy man, after a rapid walk in a clear frosty morning. But it sometimes reminds you of a naked athletic wrestler, struggling to throw his adversary, all the veins and muscles starting out in the effort. Foster's style is like the statue of Laocoon writhing against the serpent: Hall's reminds you more of the Apollo of the Vatican. The difference was the result of the intense effort with which Foster's mind wrought out and condensed, in the same process, its active meditations. Everywhere it gives you the impression of power at work, and his illustrations themselves seem to be hammered on the anvil. It gives you the picture he has drawn of himself, or his biographer for him, in the attitude of what he called pumping. At Brearly Hall he used to try and improve himself in composition, by taking paragraphs from different writers and trying to remodel them, sentence by sentence, into as many forms of expression as he possibly could. His posture on these occasions was to sit with a hand on each knee, and moving his body to and fro, he would remain silent for a considerable time, till his invention in shaping his materials had exhausted itself. This process he used to call pumping." Foster's style is the very image of a mind working itself to and fro, with inward intensity.

66

The characteristics of power and rugged thought in Foster, are admirably set forth in some of his own images. Speaking in his journal of a certain individual's discourse, he says, " he has a clue of thread of gold in his hand, and he unwinds for you ell after ell, but give me the man who will throw the clue at once, and let me unwind it; and then show in his hand another ready to follow."

He speaks of the great deficiency of what may be called conclusive writing and speaking. "How seldom we feel at the end of the paragraph or discourse, that something is settled and done. It lets our habit of thinking and feeling just be as it was. It rather carries on a parallel to the line of the mind, at a peaceful distance, than fires down a tangent to smite across it." Foster always smote across the mind.

"Many things," says he, "may descend from the sky of truth,

without deeply striking and interesting men; as from the cloudy sky, rain, snow, &c., may descend without exciting ardent attention; it must be large hailstones, the sound of thunder, torrent rain, and the lightning's flash; analogous to these must be the ideas and propositions, which strike men's minds." Foster's own writings are eminently thus exciting. And it may be said of him, as he remarked of Lord Chatham, speaking of the absence of argumentative reasoning in his speeches; "he struck, as by intuition, directly on the results of reasoning, as a common shot strikes the mark, without your seeing it's course through the air as it moves towards its object." But Foster thought, and reasoned in thinking, most intensely and laboriously; it was not mere intuition that has filled his pages with such condensed results.

Foster and Hall were both men of great independence of mind; but Hall's independence was not combined with so great a degree of originality, and it received more gently into itself in acquiescence the habitudes of society, and the characteristics of other minds. Foster's independence was that of bare truth; he hated the frippery of circumstance, the throwing of truth upon external support. He would have it go for no more than it was worth. And anything like the imposition of an external ceremonial, he could not endure. He went so far as to wish that everything ceremonial and sacerdotal could be cleared out of our religious economy. He wanted nothing at all to come between the soul of man and free unmingled truth. The hearty conviction of truth, and the pure acting from it, was what he required. He abhorred all manner of intolerance with such vehemence and intensity of hatred, that if he could have had a living Nemesis for the retribution of crimes not punished by human law, it would have been for that. He hated everything that tempted man to dissemble, to seem or assume what he was not. He hated oppression in every form. He hated a state-established hierarchy, as "infinitely pernicious to Christianity."

We have in these volumes a record of the life and correspondence of this most original and powerful mind; yet it was a mind in some respects strangely constructed, or rather, we should say, strangely self-disciplined, and in some respects out of order for want of self-discipline. Looking through the whole seventy years and more of Foster's life, and remembering the magnificent intellectual endowments with which it pleased God to create him, and the almost uninterrupted health and comparative leisure enjoyed for nearly fifty years, there will seem to have been by him but little accomplished, there will seem to have been almost a waste of power. We might, in some respects, compare Foster with Coleridge; in respect of originality and power of intellect, they were very much alike; not so in variety, comprehensiveness and profoundness of erudition; for while Coleridge's ac

quisitions were vast and varied, Foster's were much rather limited. But both were blest with transcendent powers of mind and grand opportunities, and yet accomplished comparatively little; and a severe censor might say, are instances of a lamentable disuse of intellect. Taking Coleridge's miserable health into view, and the fact that he was not, like Foster, at an early period brought under the impulse of true religion, we ought perhaps to say, that of the two, Coleridge accomplished the most. But taking the character of Foster's efforts into consideration, their more immediate bearing on men's highest interests must incline us to put the adjudged superiority of amount to his score.

The development of character and opinion in these volumes is intensely interesting and instructive; so is the display and observance of influences and causes forming and directing opinion; so, likewise is the struggle between conscience and habit, between grandeur of impulse and judgment, conflicting with native and habitual indolence and procrastination. There was, in the first place, a strong, peculiar, obstinate, iron mould, which might have made the man, under certain circumstances, as hinted in one of Foster's own Essays, a Minos or a Draco; but which, had it been filled with apostolic zeal in the love of Christ and of souls, would have made almost another apostle. There were tendencies to deep and solemn thought, and to great wrestlings of the intellect and spirit, which, brought under the full influence of the "powers of the world to come," and developed in the intense benevolence of a soul by faith freed from condemnation, and habitually communing with God in Christ, would have given as great a spiritual mastery over this world as any human being could well be conceived to exercise. But for this purpose there must have been a holy and deep baptism in the Word of God, an unassailable faith in, and most humble acquiescence with, and submission to, its dictates; a familiarity with it as the daily food of the soul, and an experience of it, as of a fire in one's bones, admitting no human speculation to put it out; no theory of mere human opinion, or feelings, or imagination, to veil, or darken, or make doubtful, its realities.

Now the want of this kind of familiarity with the Scriptures, this profound study and experience of them; this unhesitating, reception of them as the infallible Word of God; may have been the secret of some of Foster's greatest difficulties. There was nothing but this fixedness in God's Word, that could be the helm of a mind of such unusual power and original tendencies. Foster wanted an all-controlling faith; he wanted submission to the Word of God as the decisive, supreme, last appeal. Foster's character was somewhat like that of Thomas among the Apostles; gloomy tendencies in it, inveterate convolutions of opinion, seclusion in its own depths, and sometimes only faith enough just to save him from despair.

He had a strong self-condemning conscience, a clear, massive view and powerful conception of human depravity, but not an early and accurate view, or powerful sense, of the infinite odiousness of sin, as manifested by the divine law, the divine holiness, and the divine atonement. He had an instinctive, vigorous appreciation of the ignorance, crime, and evil in human society, a sense of its misery, and a disposition to dwell upon its gloomy shades, which made him, as an observer, what Caravaggio or Espagnoletto were as painters; tremendously dark and impressive in his delineations. But it was quite as much the instinct and taste of the painter, as it was the light of the Word of God, revealing the depths of Satan. It was the native intensity of observation, combined with a saturnine turn of mind, and intermingled with revelations. of things as they are, beneath the light of the Divine Attributes.

Mr. Foster came early under the power of religious conviction, but evidently not in the happiest manner, and not so as to bring him at once thoroughly, heartily, confidingly, to Christ. Perhaps there may be traced much of what is called legal (at least for a long time), mingled with his acceptance of Christ as the only refuge of his soul, or as he would sometimes have denominated it, with his views of the economy of human redemption. There was more of the general reliance of the mind upon that as an economy, than of the personal reliance of the soul upon Christ as a Saviour. One cannot but be impressed with the fact of the great absence, throughout the whole tenor of his letters, his conversations, and the mould of his life and character till a late period,-the great absence and want of habitual, and even occasional reference to the love of Christ, the claims of the cross, the authority of the Word of God, and all that is peculiar to the gospel. Perhaps there may have been an intentional exclusion of these topics, as trite and technical, induced by an extreme of the same feelings with which he wrote so severely concerning the customary diction of evangelical piety, and which passed unawares into a fastidiousness, and almost aversion in his own mind, which became habitual. His letters to Miss Saunders at the close of these volumes, show how entirely he threw off any such embarrassment, when roused to the work of presenting eternal realities to an immortal spirit on the threshold of eternity. But from an early period, his disgust at the peculiar diction of the Gospel, as used by men who seemed to have lost all perception of the sublime ideas intended to be conveyed by it, may have operated insensibly in the way of a prejudice against some of those ideas themselves.

He had indeed a sense of guilt, which became, at a later period, absorbing and powerful; and a sense of the atonement, which grew deeper and deeper to the last, with a most entire reliance upon it; but mingled with this, and influencing his whole habit of thought and feeling, and even of belief, far more than he would himself have