which they were born; but this, far from being a cause of similitude between the two sections, is one great cause of their difference. The early emigrant burst away from the puritanical restraints in which he had been bred, blue laws and all, to find a land where wheat would grow a land uncursed by the savage barbarity which hung the Quakers, and manifested a murderous thirst for difference of religious opinion. Loca mutantur et nos mutamur cum illis; they became independent in bearing, chivalrous in privation, and nurtured a hardy race of sons, now planting the stakes in the western wilderness, and looking beyond the Rocky Mountains. The early settlers of NewYork were like some plants that only improve and come to a full maturity by being transplanted. They soon gave evidence of their superiority to those who remained at home; and the magnificence of her public improvements, the energy that never rests while any thing remains to be done, shows that New-York bears upon her soil a race uniting the better parts of New-England character, with a love of enterprise and contempt of difficulty, which nothing can restrain.

While such is and has been the character of New-England emigration, she herself, although exercising a most useful influence in our country, on many accounts, remains stationary, bigoted, and aristocratic. Because the emigrant from her soil is a fine character, it by no means follows he is so at home. We hazard the assertion that New-England is a land of petty aristocrats. Is any one so ignorant as to suppose the reverence for rank and title which the pilgrims brought from England could be done away by the mere intervention of the Atlantic ocean? We refer not particularly to the Plymouth band, but to the early population of the East. They had nursed, in their mother's milk, a love for show, a respect for birth; their being had been imbued with these feelings, and they insensibly taught them to their children. We know that the great object of the Puritans was religious freedom; we know that the pure religion Jesus Christ came to establish, is a religion of liberty, and tolerance, and meekness, and love one toward another; but how can we expect from their early departures from some of these noble principles any high regard for the others? Beside, there is no aristocracy like the aristocracy of superior sanctity. They tasted of power, and became besotted in their love of it, and truckled to rank, and paid reve rence to titles. And why not? They had been educated to it. Men arrive at pure principles by reasoning, and thinking, and studying the Bible, and they do, indeed, try to feel and act up to their principles; but it is hard to guard the heart against the alluring sophistries of the world, and to help from being carried along by the current. Heaven forbid, that we should be understood as wanting in respect to the virtue and strength of character of the pilgrims! - but may the same Heaven forbid us to subscribe to their dogmas or be blind to their vices.

The widest distinctions in society were known at the time of our revolution, and served to hasten it on. Old habits have continued to this day; and there is throughout the states east of the Hudson, a family pride select circles - upper and lower class doctrine—at war with the spirit of our institutions and the general advancement of that section, in intelligence, manners, and refinement. Consequently we find there one class eminently distinguished for elegance, learning, and taste, while the great body of the people are inferior-much inferior to the general

level of American character. This upper class are often too refined to attend to their political duty. They are too much immersed in letters and pleasure too sublimated, to descend to the vulgar arena of elections. They may talk of public affairs, erect monuments to distinguished men, give of their abundance to all the showy, magnificent operations of the day, and yet do this with an exclusive spirit, and with a haughty patronage, that robs the thing of all republican odor.

It is vastly pleasant to live thus, we acknowledge; it is agreeable to meet none but well dressed, genteel people; and it may be flattering to one's self-love to be acknowledged to be above the mass to belong to the elite; but this is ruinous to the self-respect of those less fortunate than ourselves in education, wealth, and opportunities. The political badinage about 'ruffled shirt gentry' is by no means unfounded as to fact; only that as many of the said luxurious gentlemen probably belong to one political party as to the other. That there will be an aristocracy in every government, as long as all men are not upon a level in moral and intellectual acquirements, is true; a set of agro-the best of men, and the more the better: but that people should set themselves up as grandees, look down upon the working classes, instruct their children, by example and precept, to give themselves airs, and make them believe they are of a higher race than the rest of their countrymen, is shocking and disgusting, in a country where merit is acknowledged to be the only path to respectability, and where poverty is felt to be no disgrace.

If in certain towns in the state of New-York this doctrine prevails, it is not general. New-York has no aristocracy, no hereditary grandeur to maintain. There are those who would like such a state of things, undoubtedly, but an overwhelming majority is arrayed against them. Her great population is the growth of a few years. The inhabitants of her thriving villages have grown up together, from small beginnings; some to wealth, some to reputation, and nearly all to ease and comfort. They have had no bad examples before their eyes to nullify the precepts of the declaration of equality. They have been united in poverty and labor; they are united in prosperity and happiness. In no section of our country is there so little parade of family. If wealth gives a man power, he exercises it to advance his pecuniary interests, not to separate himself from his former acquaintances. Some of her leading men are mechanics. They retain their occupation and their sign, though placed far beyond the necessity of manual labor, as if proud to be found in the paths of honest industry. What an incentive to the young mechanic is here! - and we see its effects. NewYork is emphatically the government of the people. New-England is emphatically the government of the few.*

While the religious worship of New-England partakes of the drowsy nature of her politics - wishing no change - remaining satisfied with old notions, to escape the trouble of forming new ones the same life and energy which pervades the political character of New-York shows itself in her sacred observances. Here has risen up the doctrine of re

Politicians, so called, in New-England, are neither of the highest nor lowest class, but a kind of medium. Legal and political ambition are rarely united there. When we say that New-England is the government of the few, we mean that political influence is so little cared for, that almost any one may obtain it.

vivals, four days' meetings, extemporaneous oratory, engrafting upon a church remarkable for its quiet dignity of manner and fixedness of opinion, something of the rant of Methodism and disorder of campmeetings. A people rife with life and ardor could not enjoy the plain, unvarnished truth, written out and delivered in periods never so smooth. They must have the thunders and lightnings that roared and blazed upon the top of Sinai pictured to them- vivid representations of happiness and misery-something striking, decided, and overpowering. And this, by the way, is the reason of the popularity of the Methodist worship in our western states. It has the stamp of originality, the independence of times and places, the disregard of human art and splendor, in keeping with the unwrought solemnity of the majestic woods, and the ceaseless music of the mighty waters.

Unitarianism obtains among many of the intellectual and refined in New-England, but it wants the life, eloquence the elocution to recommend it to people who see God, rather in the manifestations of his power, than in the evidences of his love. There is not enough of party zeal about it, to furnish points upon which to hang and wrangle about. It is, perhaps, necessarily sectarian, but it is sectarianism deprived of its gross misrepresentation, its heart-burnings and rank bitterness. It is rather the cause of religion, than of any system of theology, as furnishing the touch-stone of virtue. It is the cause of true liberality; not, as some suppose, of that liberality which would prostrate the temples of God, and tear out from the heart the idea of human responsibility; but that liberality which opens the soul to the mild and purifying influences of charity and love toward our fellow-men; makes human life a voyage of the affections; soothes down the asperities of our nature, and fills the mind with aspirations after something higher and better than merely temporal prosperity, while it encourages enlightened views of the nature and capabilities of man.

When our country shall have passed through the fiery youth of her existence, become satiated with excitements, have grown thoughtful with age, wise by experience when society shall have become settled we may hope, not for the establishment of Unitarian sentiments, particularly, nor of any other specific doctrines, but for a system of truth so plain and obvious as to be beyond the ground of cavil and dispute, which shall not fluctuate with men, or accommodate itself to the passing tempests of popular feeling.

We have said New-England exerts a valuable influence in our country and she does. It is the land of steady habits, of a truth. The hardness and unproductiveness of the soil forces men to labor for subsistence; and when they labor they cannot play. The habits of industry they form there, they carry with them to the fertile west, and in a few years they are placed beyond want, and possess the means to give for the public good. Unless we are much mistaken, the unexampled progress of our western country is owing, in no small degree, to the directness and plain common sense of New-Englanders, applied to its great resources. Theorists and wild speculators can project large plans, and indulge in plausible designs, but one matter-of-fact man is worth them all, in a new country.

But in New-England was made the earliest attempt to establish an institution of learning. Harvard College has nurtured many pure

scholars, who have kept clear the fountain heads of literature, and exerted their unobtrusive influence from one extremity of our country to the other. Around the hallowed precincts of Yale, and Hanover, and Harvard places having a relative antiquity in the literary history of our country-still lingers the book-worm, the recluse, the martyr to letters men untrained to the graces of the world without, but trained within to a grace and dignity and elevation of mind, rarely appreciated, because rarely understood; but for every drop of blood dried up in their veins, a pure gem is added to the treasures of the soul. No other part of our country can produce such men, because no where else are the old walls of colleges, and walks trodden by successive generations of scholars, and shades rendered sacred by hours of silent meditation; where the air is redolent of poetic thought, and where inanimate nature herself seems to partake of the intellectual life around her.

But do we estimate the influence of New-England so highly, with all her faults? Her faults are hereditary: she hardly knows them herself, and it is only when away from her beautiful valleys and peaceful villages, that we feel that the real genius of liberty and equality, and republican principles, finds a truer sympathy in the lands which her own hands have helped to adorn, than in herself.

While we may improve ourselves in pointing out the characteristics of the different sections of our country, we neither express nor feel surprise at our dissimilarity. We believe- and we say it rather in a spirit of thankfulness than of boasting that we are the best specimen of human government upon the earth strong in our very difference. We are good hints to each other. Each has its own sphere of influence. We can never believe that governments are not as much under the guidance of Heaven as the physical world. Creation is progressive. Human affairs must progress, upon the whole, from the very laws of mind. We cannot, as a world, retrograde. Particular states may rise and fall, but there is a symmetry in things worked out by mighty hands. We believe ourselves the favored child of Heaven created as an example to the world. There is an organization of feeling and action, apparently discordant, adapted to the growth of the whole. Here are the gardens of mind, there the physical force to be directed; here are the fields that produce our sustenance, there the deserts that make us prize them; here are the waves lashed into fury, there the oil that flows over and calms them; here is the wild luxuriance, the rank growth of too rich a soil, there the restraining hand to crop it. On this hand is too much liberty, on that too much law. As a whole, we are a fine compound, and if we were asked which part of our country we most admired, our answer would be like the child's, who, being teased to tell which one of all his family he loved the best, answered,‘ I love you all best.'

Cortlandville, (N. Y.,) August, 1836.

J. N. B.

* THE above ode was composed by SILVIO PELLICO while he was confined, in chains and darkness, within the damp walls of an Austrian dungeon, in Sclavonia. It has not heretofore been published nor translated. Every thing that comes from Pellico has an interest independent of any particular merit or importance in itself.