went round with pails of coffee and soup when the flood drove the inhabitants from their homes on the river, and sheds and tents were put up for them on the hill there? Who but they nursed us when the cholera broke out? He sent Mrs. Lane's deaf and dumb boy to the Asylum, and put him in the stage himself and paid his fare. He bought the bible printed for the blind in raised letters for Mr. Wise, and Mrs. White sat by him whole afternoons teaching him to read. Who but he got the old jail, which was too dirty for pigs torn down, and the new one yonder built, and carries books to the prisoners and talks with them, and finds them work when they come out? There are no black dungeons there we can tell you, where the crazy people are kept caged and whipped and starved on dirty straw, for he had all of them sent to the Hospital. And if you should go some day to the public school, you would find him there asking the children questions and bidding them good bye with some pleasant words that they never forget. And his wife, bless her angel heart, is just like him. Whom have they not helped? It would take all day to tell the half they do of acts of love. They are friends to the friendless, practical christians." But perhaps some of the "unco guid" as Burns calls them, would have responded: "Nay! not so! Mr. and Mrs. White are neighborly, quiet, harmless, kind; but they do not believe right, and are not orthodox. Pity such moral people should be Infidels."

If you had asked now good Mr. and Mrs. W. to give account of themselves against this heavy charge of heresy, they might have changed the subject, or kept silence, or plead guilty, or made a cheerful repartee; but the heart would have said through their calm smiling eyes and cloudless brows, we are fellow mortals who believe that life as it is, is far too hard for the most, and that there is not the least danger of making it too happy; that we need not be afraid to help others, for we owe all we have and are to others help of us; that men seem worse than they really are, and that even the worst can mend; that society breeds the crimes it punishes, and that kind words are surer cures of evil than legal penalties. We have too many faults ourselves to judge others; we hope for a time when justice and love will do away with these unnatural and monstrous contrasts of condition; and meanwhile we share as we can what our father has entrusted to our stewardship."

One thing Mr. White had done, which particularly deserves mention and imitation from all who have means, even moderate. In the first place, he had built a block of clean, commodious houses, in an airy situation, well arranged on the different floors for several families, which he let out at moderate rents to honest and temperate laboring men. For the plan of moving old tumble down buildings into narrow quarters on the outskirts of towns, and filling them at exorbitant rates from garret to cellar with wretched inmates, where children learn to swear and quarrel, to lie and steal and to deprave themselves with every bad habit amid the drunken brawls of parents made desperate by discomfort, seemed to him the worst of the many bad ways of screwing the interest of capital out of the poor. In the centre of this block he had fitted up a reading room and library, always warm and lighted, where lectures were from time to time given, and where the young apprentices were welcome to come and study. In one corner he had established an honest grocer, who would not barter away his conscience by charging double prices for damaged or adulterated articles sold by driblets. Lastly, he had arranged the cellars in parti.

tions, giving one store room to each family, that for once the poor might have an opportunity which they most need, and seldom can command, though the wealthy who need it least always avail themselves of it, to buy wholesale when fuel and food are cheapest, and so be encouraged to economy and thrift. And to crown his wise charity, he weekly or daily visited his humble friends and gave them his advice; and when it seemed prudent and useful loaned them small sums, and thus saved them from the greedy clutches of the pawnbroker, and the worse clutches of despair, the demon that drives so many to guilt. In an upper room of this truly happy neighborhood did our good friends establish for the winter the poor Norwegians; and so after their measure give the hospitalities of this free land to the hard laborers, who in waves of industry pour in year by year to aid its redemption to the service of man. These hospitalities we all, as children of emigrants, most surely owe. Providence sees how we render to others the gifts we have received.

III.

Four months or more had passed away. The boys had put aside their skates, thrown stones through the rotting ice, and paddled on boards along the canal; the crows skimming on low wings flew over the meadows; the blackbirds in crowded orchestra chaunted their chorus to spring on the beaches and maples; in low grounds the long bending willows began to show their yellow green; and wind flowers opened their graceful bells in sunny nooks; once again the locks were to be opened, and canal boats awoke from their winter's sleep. Bugles blew a merry note, flags waved, stages rattled, loaded carts bore the accumulated goods from bursting storehouses, lazy hands were drawn from the pockets, loungers became bustling business men; all were alive and laughing and cager in the warm bright morning; when a little heart scene was acted in Mr. White's parlor, that angels smiled to see.

A good Norwegian priest who had left his own land to follow with words of comfort and counsel the scattered brethren of his church in America, had arrived from his winter's journeying at

-, and visited

among others Ulric and his family. The whole dammed up river of their gratitude, which they had no words to tell in English, had been poured into his confiding bosom; and now when they were to bid farewell to their benefactors, he had come with them as their interpreter. There they stood, dressed in their native costume, neat though threadbare, parents and children hand in hand, and their honored pastor in front. And just risen from the breakfast table surprised and full of sensibility, at once joyful and sad, the good patriarch and his wife with a little boy whom they had adopted clinging round them, came forward with their welcome. There were too many thoughts and feelings on both sides for much speaking. Warm pressures of the hands, smiles mingling in the tears like gleams amid the showers, thanks spoken with sobs and deep tones in their broken tongue; and then as by one impulse the grateful band knelt down, and their minister in words simple and sweet, and gushing warm from the heart, called down the blessings of heaven upon those who had smoothed the path for weary feet, and been brother and sister to wanderers far away from fatherland and kindred. What heralds are such scenes of mankind's reunion upon earth in one great family, with one name and speech; what prophecies of the grand reunion of all spirits hereafter in the mansions of our Heavenly Father.

SONNET.

BY WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING.

An endless round of formless circumstance
The unthinking men go treading day by day,
As in the sparkling sunbeams the motes play,
And, like the busy crowd, keep timeless dance.

Struggles their food, anxiety their mind,

A pile of straws all disarranged and broke;
And tossing in the eddy of a wind,

Or played upon by some quick flail's sharp stroke.

Drink, drink, O men, yon azure's beverage,

Admit the sun's eye to your bandaged brain;
Let the free airs, as free, your thoughts engage,
And exercise to cast the tightening chain
Which now grips round this sinking, fainting age,
In cold paralysis of leperous pain.

THE NATURE AND DESTINY OF MAN.

EXTRACTED FROM PIERRE LEROUX'S L'HUMANITE.

His

MAN, by nature and essentially is sensation-sentiment-intelligence, indissolubly united. Such is the psychological definition of man. life then consists in the exercise and employment of these three faces of his nature, and his normal life consists in never separating them in any act. By means of these man holds relations with other men and with the world. It is other men then and the world which, uniting with this nature, determine and reveal the man, or enable him to reveal himself; they constitute his objective life, without which his subjective life remains latent and unmanifested.

The life of man then, and of every man, by the will of his Creator, is dependent upon an incessant communication with his fellow beings, and with the universe. That which we call his life, does not appertain entirely to him, and does not reside in him alone; it is at once within him and out of him; it resides partially, and jointly, so to speak, in his fel. lows and the surrounding world. In a certain point of view therefore it may be said, that his fellow beings and the world appertain also to him. For, as his life resides in them, that portion of it which he controls, and which he calls Me, has virtually a right to that other portion, which he cannot so sovereignly dispose of, and which he calls Not Me..

Hence arise two relations, between man and his fellow beings, and man and the universe, relations which may be productive of good or of evil. Man places himself in communion and society with his fellow men which is peace; or he seeks by violence to use them for his own purposes, which is war. Again when cultivated he establishes communication with the existences different from himself in kind, which make up the universe, by studying their qualities and laws; or as a savage he makes them his prey, and lives in hostility with a nature that he does not comprehend, which in turn resists and often subdues him. Man at his nearest approxi

mation to the brute lives in perpetual war with all creatures and with his kind. But notwithstanding this, so strong is his need of peaceful relations with surrounding existences, that it is impossible to conceive of him as being without family, nation, and property. For it is absolutely necessary to his existence, and to his consciousness of existence, that he should have grouped harmoniousiy around him other beings, so that the Me which constitutes him, by incarnating itself in them may appear objectively and be present to him at every moment.

Property, the Family, the Nation, correspond, in part, to the three terms, Sensation, Sentiment, Intelligence, of the psychological definition of man, already given. Man manifests himself to himself and to others in this triplicity, because his nature is triple. The trinity of his spiritual nature, when sensation is predominant, gives rise to property; when sentiment is predominant to family; when intelligence is predominant to the city or state.

And now observe the immediate result of this condition, which makes man necessarily dependent upon family, nation, and property. He needs the family; but in a family there are parents and children; the parent may be a tyrant, and then the child is a slave. The duality of good and evil, of peace and war, re-appears here. Vainly would man, at war with nature and society, intrench himself within his family, there at least to live at peace; the family in giving too much power to the father robs of his rights the son. The Patriarch indeed, the chief of the family finds his Me, his personality, impressed on all about him, in the obedient group which responds to every wish. But the mother, the younger brethren, the children are lost and sacrificed to him. It is the same with the nation. Man allies himself with his fellows; families united make a state. But a state cannot exist without there being chiefs and simple citizens. That which leads a man to wish for a nation, is his need of being sensible of himself in other men, of recognizing his Me in those who constitute his society. But if those, who have most energetically acting in themselves this sentiment, become despots, all other citizens become slaves. Thus here again recurs the duality of good and of evil, of peace and of war, of liberty and slavery.

Finally, it is the same with property; where man, by an illusion, imagines that slavery cannot touch him. As his relation here has for its object inferior existences, he believes that he shall always have power over them, and that property will result only in good. But he deceives himself when he regards property as thus productive only of good, for this property may be either increased or diminished, and so prove insufficient. In wishing property for his own sake too, man creates the desire of property in others. There are then impassable limits which he sets up for himself; in becoming a proprietor, he becomes a slave; for by that act, he abdicates his right to the enjoyment of all things which do not belong to him. His property becomes thus, the representative sign of his power, and his power thus represented by his property, depends upon it, and is limited by it, and so is he the slave of the beings which he owns.

Man, by the very fact of life, by the inherent necessity of his being, constitutes then the family, the nation, property; and finds that these three modes of good may become for him a triple source of evil. And now will the family, the nation, property ever disappear from among humanity? In the course of ages, from time to time, have risen up single thinkers,

and whole sects who have believed and taught this. In our own days such thinkers and sects have appeared anew. But so great is the error of these opinions, that those who have embraced them, have been invariably obliged to preserve in an exaggerated form one or the other of these three terms, either the family, the nation, or property, and to content themselves with sacrificing to the one they thus preserved, the other two. Anchorites alone have supposed it possible to live without either family, nation, and property; and with good reason has that kind of life been called a suicide.

You would have neither family, nor nation, nor property; but do you not see that this would be to destroy man, and even the name of man? You would no longer have the family; no more then marriage, and constant love; no more the ties of father and son, of brethren; you would be without relations then with any being in time; and so situated, you would be without a name. You would destroy the state, the nation. Behold yourself alone and isolated, then, among the myriads of men who people the earth. How should I distinguish you among such multitudes ? As you would no longer have a name for me, to me, you would really cease to live. Finally you would put away the distinctions of property; but could you live without a body? I do not now dwell on the point that you must nourish, clothe, preserve this body, and that you can satisfy these wants only by appropriating certain things; but I say that this body itself is property. This body is not you, though it belongs to you; in certain respects it is a thing, and it is merely property in relation to the power which manifests itself through it. Consequently as this power can show itself and act only through the body, to destroy property would be to suppress the power. It is a certain truth in metaphysics, that the idea of the individuality of each man would disappear, if we should cast off from this idea the relations of family, nation and property. For, in order that man should exist to his own eyes and the eyes of others, he must be not only a force, but a force manifested.

We recognise the fact, then, that man is at once produced and made manifest by; 1. His parents who gave him life, and the children to whom he has transmitted life; 2. The fellow beings with whom he lives in society; 3. The things of nature over which he exercises control. Hence, three spheres without which he cannot exist. 1. The family; 2. society, the city, the nation; 3. property.

But this triple limit, which surrounds man, may either crush and enchain his existence, or simply be the point of departure and means of this existence. I have descended from my ancestors; but if I can only do and think what my ancestors did and thought, I am enchained, I am a slave. I associate with men who surround me, but if this society is absolute and oppressive, again I am enchained, again I am a slave. I have in my possession a certain portion of external nature, or of nature modified by man's labor, but if I am limited to this portion which I actually own, I am once more enchained and a slave. Thus, as I have already said, these three relations, which are excellent in themselves, and absolutely necessary, may still by excess, become evils. The family, the nation, property, may swallow up the man. Man may become a slave by birth, by citizen. ship, by possession. And thus far in the history of man he has been enslaved in this threefold way, in proportion as one or the other of these relations has been predominant.