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Theso and a thousand more have wrestled hard,
Beneath Misfortune's unrelenting ban;
The selfish world withheld the due reward,-
Worshipped the poet, but o'erlooked the man.
Such is the minstrel's lot; yet do not deem
That all things unto him are sad and cold;
For he hath joy amid the realms of dream,
And mental treasures which can not be told.

His is the universe,-around, above,

Beauty is ever present to his eye;

He breathes the elements of hope and love,

And shrines his thoughts in words which ne'er will die.

When ills oppress, he grasps the soothing lyre,

And throws his cunning hand athwart the strings,

Feels in his soul the pure etherial fire,

And links his language with eternal things.

Beneath the grandeur of the palace dome
The living music of his song is heard;
Beneath the roof. tree of the humble home,

The strongest soul, the coldest heart is stirred.

Then who would change the poet's dark career

For all that power can grant, that wealth can give?
Man's common lot may be his portion here,

But when he dies he does not cease to live!

A nature which can rest in such consolations is rich; it has looked with a sharp eye into God's creation; it has comprehended existence; and drawn from the deepest well of philosophy. Indeed, one of the most striking things in Prince, as we have before hinted, is the fidelity with which he has remained true to his higher interests in the midst of so much to prevent and even destroy them. It is the rare secret of genius.

Yet is it not a strange thing that a man of genius in a world like this, should be left to draw such consolations? A man of genius! he is the brightest revelation that God has yet given of himself; he is an accredited strong link between ourselves and Heaven; he confers on us the richest blessings; he teaches us the noblest methods of looking at this Universe! Yet such a being is everywhere left to suffer, to drag out his life in the midst of toil, poverty, opposition, and even hatred. Like that Highest Man of Genius-towering so high indeed, that he loses himself in God-like that man, we say, every man of Genius, great and small, in this past-perverted world of ours, has been compelled to struggle through fierce, heart-rending agonies,-through the bloody-sweats of Gethsemane, and the darker horrors of the Cross. Yet what consolations do we bring such as these? None! Their only consolation is to be derived from their own hearts! Nay, from the far more equivocal source of reflection upon the fact, that all of the same sort who have gone before them, had been condemned to the same lot! What a strange consolation! " In my darker moments," says Prince, in the little poem we have just cited, "in my darker moments," says he, in the simplicity of his heart, "I think of the poor old blind Homer; of the poor old blind, heart-broken Milton; of the god-like Shakspeare, herding with the godless deer-stealers and debauched play-wrights; of Tasso, gone mad in his dark prison-house; of famished Otway, dying in the streets; of proud, suffering Chatterton, 'the sleepless boy, who perished in his pride ;' of tender, yet sturdy Burns, waging his honest battle against poverty, till he sunk exhausted in the

grave; of dear loving Shelley, pierced with the sharp swords of a lifelong persecution, till He did lay down like a tired child and weep away this life of care;'" and of a thousand other noble and capacious spirits, sent upon the earth, to be its intellectual light, but whose course continued and closed in a thick darkness of struggle and destitution-athletic Sampsons compelled to grind at the mill of imperious Wrong. It was in remembering these facts that our Prince found his consolation. Well, it is a glorious consolation to feel that one belongs, by right of birth, to this class; yet how much more glorious would it be to know, that their lives had not been an ineffectual warfare against influences which crushed them down, and trantpled out their finer essences in the dust! What a consummation it would be to see a man of genius once recognized in this world, for what he was worth?

We had many things to say, suggested by this volume and the history of its author: but our want of space, and other reasons, admonish us that they must now be left unsaid. Perhaps the simple facts we have narrated indicate to the minds of our readers, more,-much more than we could put down on paper. We leave the "practical inferences," as the old sermonizers say, to the minds of our auditory. One thing occurred, however, while writing these lines, which aggravated the painful impres sion left by the subject. While mourning over the sad condition of poor Prince, we saw in the newspapers, two facts most strangely in contrast with the results of his experience. We saw that a popular female dancer had amassed some fifty thousand dollars by a few month's exertion of her legs. We saw, too, that the writer of a system of book-keeping, about forty pages in all, had been paid forty thousand dollars for the copyright, for a period of time, it being the third time in which he had been paid that sum. Now, have we not a right to infer from these significant facts, that society sets a higher value upon arts which gratify its prurient tastes and fills its pockets, than upon the sublime art which nourishes the imagination and heart? Nay, if we look through the world do we not find something similar to this, a pervading characteristic of our whole civilization? Pursuits which are simply innocent or pleasant, pursuits which are worthless, pursuits which minister to our vices, pursuits which are the rank outgrowth of our festering commercial corruption, seem to be those which attract honor and payment in the inverse gradation of their worthlessness and pernicious tendency. Your Fanny Ellsler will pirouette at the rate of an hundred dollars for every shake of the toe, while your Burns and Princes go starving, behind the plough or in dark garrets. Your stock jobbers and merchant-gamblers, whose daily trade is public robbery, your lawyers, who, like loathsome earthworms, draw their subsistence from reeking foulness,-your preachers, dwarfing and warping men's minds with their silly theological janglings, are your great men, the Corypheii in your grand chorus of social duplicity and discord; while your two-handed, hard toiling, full-grown men, who actually do something in the world, either in subduing the stubborn globe, or guiding the wildwinds of the ocean-your artists and poets, who introduce among you from Heaven, the radiant and divine forms of beauty-your brave thinkers and actors, who achieve your triumphs over the Powers of Hell and Darkness, are deserted by you, despised, persecuted, pining in dark recesses, without bread or clothes or fire, they and their children, their wives often, dearer to them than their heart's core, left to freeze or starve. We know

there are exceptions,-casual variations from the general fact-but these are, as the term implies, casual, accidental, chance-instances of success. The fact still remains a fact, that under the existing order of society, there is a frightful disproportion between work and wages-an awful chasm that separates things done from things gained, a large interval between Justice and Honor, between Genius and Success. Why this is so, and why it should not be so, we may hereafter undertake to show.

THE EDUCATION OF THE HUMAN RACE.

FROM PIERRE LEROUX'S L'HUMANITE.

WHO does not know Lessing's little book, entitled "The Education of the Human Race?" It is a sublime book-a book of prophecy; one of those books interposed boldly at a solemn moment between the past and the future. It is pretended that when Paganism fell, the last oracle uttered these words, "The gods are departing," which the Christians interpreted by saying that the evil spirits, who, according to them, were those false gods, were yielding the world to Jesus Christ. At the close of the eighteenth century, it might well have been said, "the gods are departing." All religions were overthrown, all creeds dissipated. Christianity was on its way to rejoin the Mosaic dispensation in the tomb. But where was the new principle, destined to save the world, and before whom were the old gods fleeing? Lessing, the greatest thinker of Germany was, to pursue the comparison, one of those magi who went to see the new born in his manger, and announced him to the universe. How touching to hear this theological enthusiast for Christianity proclaim his perception of a new light! "I have placed myself upon an eminence where I can see beyond the road which my times have marked out. But I do not call on the weary traveller who is only anxious to reach his resting place quickly, to leave the beaten track. I do not pretend that the point of view which has delighted me, must equally delight all spectators. And so methinks I might well be left up here in ecstasy, where I have chosen to stop to indulge my ecstasy. And yet if I were coming from the immense distance which the soft evening twilight neither conceals nor entirely opens to my view, to announce a sign, the absence of which has so often disturbed me!"

And what was the sign he was declaring to that eighteenth century, which had heard the oracle re-echo, "the gods are departing?"

Madame de Stael says, "Lessing maintains in his essay on the education of the human race, that religious revelations have always been in proportion to the light which existed at the period when those revelations appeared. The Old Testament, the Gospel, and in many respects, the Reformation, were in their several periods entirely in harmony with the march of mind; and, perhaps, according to him, we are now on the eve of a development of Christianity, which will collect all the scattered rays into one focus, and will lead us to find in religion more than morality, more than happiness, more than philosophy, more than the sentiment of religion itself; because each of these will be multiplied by being united with the others." This summary of Madame de Stael's is a very imper.

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fect expression of Lessing's book. His profound idea is precisely that which we are maintaining throughout the whole of this work, to wit: "Mankind is a collective being, animated with a life of its own, whose education God is conducting.' And below this, and deeper still, we find in Lessing this other idea, which we are now trying to elucidate, to wit: that "Moses was right in not teaching the Jews the immortality of the soul, as the pagans generally understood it, as the vulgar in so many nations have received it, and as it is commonly received at this present time; for immortality so understood is an error and a chimera. Lastly, below this even, and deeper still, we find in Lessing the fundamental truth that we are proclaiming, to wit: that "the immortality of the souls of men is inseparably connected with the progress of our race; that we who live are not only the children and posterity of those who have lived before, but at bottom and really those generations themselves; and that it is thus, and only thus, that we shall always live, and be immortal."

All these thoughts, I say, are in Lessing, very explicitly, although they are neither developed nor demonstrated. He comprehended them rather by the heart, than by the intellect; though he was so great a philosopher, that many judges in Germany, and of the best too, declare him to be the prince of modern thinkers in that Germany, without excepting Kant, or anybody else.

But let us not anticipate what will find its proper place further on. We will quote as a part of our text, and almost entire, Lessing's short chef d'œuvre. The reader will then judge if his testimony is entitled to the weight we give it. We confine ourselves, in this place, to the answer he has furnished to the problem why Moses and all the old dispensations did not avow the doctrine of a future life.

Lessing answers, "Because mankind is progressive, because religion is progressive, because revelation, in the bosom of which the mind of man lives and developes itself, is progressive."

To explain this progress, or successive development of religious truth or revelation, in connexion with the natural development of humanity, he begins by likening revelation to a sort of education, and lays down his ideas thus: "Revelation is to mankind what education is to the individual. Education is a revelation made to the individual, and revela. tion is an education which has been given, and is still given to mankind."

We here see in the outset the Christian theologian, who is not willing to renounce a special revelation, distinct from the development of hu man reason. But what matters it, since Lessing agrees that revelation, as he understands it, is nothing more than a particular mode of that human reason, that it is that reason more enlightened, more directly inspired from God? Wherever reason beams, God shines. Only in certain men, in certain nations, at certain periods, reason beams with a greater brilliancy, that is to say, God, wishing to form mankind, shines more in certain points of mankind than in others. This is what Lessing says positively, when he adds, "Education does not give a man anything which he could not as well have had from himself, only it gives it to him quicker and more easily. In a like manner, Revelation does not give mankind anything to which human reason could not also have attained if it had been left to itself; but the latter has only given and is still giving important truths more rapidly."

Religion, then, at any period is not absolute truth, but only relative truth, the truth such as men at that period could conceive it. It can never be falsehood, but it is not the whole truth, it contains the germ of future truth, but the germ only and well wrapped round with leaves. One essential requisite, indeed, is that religion should be comprehended, and to be comprehended that it should not be too superior to the human race that accepts it. Of what advantage, I ask, would it be to that race if there were not between them and it any relation, affinity, harmony? This view, which is so true and reasonable in itself, shows us what feeling we should have at this day for the religions of the past. "Why," says Lessing, not rather see in all religions the necessary progress of the human mind in all times and places, in the past as well as in the future, than lavish our ridicule or anger on one of them. Nothing in the best of worlds should be thought worthy of our contempt or hatred, and shall religions only be excepted! Shall God have a part in everything, and shall he not have a part in our errors?"

Lessing lays it down, then, as beyond doubt, that Revelation to be true has necessarily been accommodated to human reason, and that as this reason is progressive, revelation has necessarily been equally progressive. "In the same way that the order in which education developes the facúlties of man is not a matter of indifference, and as it cannot give man everything at once, so God must have observed a certain order, a certain measure in revelation."

It would be well to ask Lessing, on the ground of these very principles, to embrace in a broader acceptation than he has yet done, this word Revelation. It would be well to tell him that Revelation is not to be confined to our West; that this western world itself, brought into being as it was, at a given period, had been brooded over in embryo in a former revelation; that it came at its appointed time, but had been preceded, prepared, and introduced; and that thus to limit revelation to the JewishChristian tradition, to Moses and to Jesus Christ, is to contract his scope of view most exceedingly, after having extended it so far. But let us not forget that he is a Christian theologian. It is only, therefore, in the Jewish Christian tradition, in the twofold Alliance, in Moses and Christ, that he sees the successive religious progress, the gradual development of revelation or true religion, and he explains this progress thus :

"Though the first man may have been immediately endowed with the idea of one God, still this idea being communicated and not self-acquired, could not long remain in its purity. As soon as human reason, left to itself, began to elaborate it, it divided this one immense Being into parts, and in still further measuring those parts, it gave each of them a distinction mark.

"Such is the natural origin of polytheism and idolatry. And who knows how many millions of years human reason might have wandered in this path of error, notwithstanding the individuals who everywhere and in all times knew that it was a path of error, if it had not pleased God by a fresh impulse to give man a truer direction! But not being able, and not wishing further to reveal himself specially to every individual, he selected a particular people specially to educate them, and with justice he selected the most rude and most depraved, that he might be able to make a complete beginning with them. Such were the Israelites. We do not know what was their worship in Egypt. Certainly

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