This little work consists of eight short chapters, and an introduction altogether as brief. It begins manfully.

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy our original relation to the universe? Why should a man have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of them?

Yes-even to this demand the perusal of Coleridge and Wordsworth has excited the American mind: to it, it is a possibility. A direct revelation to these times! Has the old world lost the faith in it, and is it reserved for the new? "The Sun," says Alcott, truly, "shines to day also!"

The universe, according to Alcott, is composed of Nature and the Soul. Strictly speaking, therefore, all that is separate from us, all which philosophy distinguishes as the Nor ME, that is, both Nature and Art, all other men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, Nature.

He begins his contemplation of this Nature with recognising the beauty of the stars, and the reverence that, from their inaccessibility, we feel for them. "All natural objects" says he, “make a kindred impression, when the mind is open to their influence. Neither does the wisest man extort all her secrets, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection. Nature never became a toy to a wise spirit. The flowers, the animals, the mountains, reflected all the wisdom of his best hour, as much as they had delighted the simplicity of his childhood. Yet the delight that we feel in Nature is not owing to Nature. The delight resides in man, or in the harmony of him and Nature. To a man labouring under calamity, the heat of his own fire hath sadness in it. Then there is a kind of contempt of the landscape felt by him who has just lost by death a dear friend. The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the creation."

We cannot read such passages, without recollecting Words worth's Ode on Immortality and Coleridge's Ode on Dejection.

The analysis of the rest of the Book is indicated in two sentences. "Whoever considers the final cause of the world, will discern a multitude of uses that enter as parts into that result. They all admit of being thrown into one of the following classes; Čommodity, Beauty, Language, and Discipline."

Commodity embraces our sensuous advantages.

Nature, in its ministry to man, is not only the material, but is also the process and the result. All the parts necessarily work into each other's hands for the profit of man. The wind sows the seed; the rain evaporates the seed; the wind blows the vapour to the field; the ice, on the other side of the planet, condenses rain on this; the rain feeds the plant; the plant feeds the animal; and thus the endless circulations of the divine charity nourish man.

The useful arts are but reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favouring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Eolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, ani

mals and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon. The private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post office, and the human race run on his errands; to the book shop, and the human race read and write of all that happens for him ; to the court-house, and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and cut a path for him.

Beauty, the author considers in a three-fold manner. The simple perception of natural forms-the mark that God sets upon virtueand the relations of things to thought. Touching the second, we are told, that, in proportion to the energy of his thought and will, man takes up the world into himself. "All those things for which men plough, build, or sail, obey virtue;" said an ancient historian. "The winds and waves," said Gibbon, "are always on the side of the ablest navigators." So are the sun and moon, and all the stars of heaven. When a noble act is done, perchance in a scene of great natural beauty; when Leonidas and his three hundred martyrs consume one day in dying, and the sun and moon come each, and look at them once in the deep defile of Thermopylæ; when Arnold Winkelried, in the High Alps, under the shadow of the avalanche, gathers in his side a sheaf of Austrian spears to break the line for his comrades; are not these heroes entitled to add the beauty of the scene, to the beauty of the deed? When the bark of Colombus nears the shore of America ;-before it the beach lined with savages, fleeing out of all their huts of cane; the sea behind; and the purple mountains of the Indian Archipelago around, can we separate the man from the living picture? Does not the new world clothe his form with her palm-groves and savannahs to fit drapery? Ever does natural beauty steal in like air, and envelope great actions. When Sir Harry Vane was dragged up the Towerhill, sitting on a sled, to suffer death, as the champion of the English laws, one of the multitude cried out to him, "You never sate on so glorious a seat." Charles II., to intimidate the citizens of London, caused the patriot Lord Russel to be drawn in an open coach, through the principal streets of the city, on his way to the scaffold. "But," to use the simple narrative of his biographer, "the multitude imagined they saw Liberty and Virtue sitting by his side." In private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its temple, the sun as its candle. Nature stretches out her arms to embrace man: only let his thoughts be of equal greatness. Willingly does she follow his steps with the rose and violet, and bind her lines of grandeur and grace to the decoration of her darling child: only let his thoughts be of equal scope, and the frame will suit the picture. A virtuous man is in unison with her works, and makes the central figure of the visible sphere. Homer, Pindar, Socrates, Phocion, associate themselves fitly in our memory with the whole geography and climate of Greece. The visible heavens and earth sympathise with Jesus. And in common life, who ever has seen a person of powerful character and happy genius, will have remarked how

easily he took all things along with him-the persons, the opinions, and the day—and Nature became ancillary to a man.

The love of beauty is Taste-the creation of beauty is Art.

In treating of language, the writer also considers it in threefold wise; i. e.

1. Words are signs of natural facts.

2. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts.

3. Nature is the symbol of spirits.

Whence it follows that nature is only the language of spirits.

This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poets, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known of all men. It appears to men, or it does not appear. When in fortunate hours we ponder this miracle, the wise man doubts, if, at all other times, he is not blind and deaf; "Can these things be,

And overcome us like a summer's cloud,
Without our special wonder ?"

for the universe becomes transparent, and the light of higher laws than its own shines through it. It is the standing problem which has exercised the wonder and the study of every fine genius since the world began, from the era of the Egyptians and the Brahmins, to that of Pythagoras, of Plato, of Bacon, of Leibnitz, of Swedenborg. There sits the sphinx at the road-side, and from age to age, as each prophet passes by, he tries his fortune at reading her riddle. There seems to be a necessity in spirit to manifest itself in material forms; and day and night, river and storm, beast and bird, acid and alkali, pre-exist in necessary ideas in the mind of God, and are what they are by virtue of preceding affections in the world of spirits. A fact is the end or last issue of spirits. The visible creation is the terminus or the circumference of the invisible world. "Material objects," said a French philosopher, "are necessarily kinds of scoria of the substantial thoughts of the Creator, which must always preserve an exact relation to their first origin; in other words, visible nature must have a spiritual and moral side."

From the significance of nature, is inferrible nature as a discipline-for the exercise of the understanding-the will-the reason -the conscience. But in all there is the same central unity. Also to the one end of discipline, all parts of Nature conspire. Is this end the final cause of the universe? and does not nature outwardly exist? "It is," says Alcott, "a sufficient account of that appearance we call the world, that God will teach a human mind, and so makes it the receiver of a certain number of congruent sensations, which we call sun and moon, man and woman, house and trade. In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?" He would reduce all the apocalypse of the mind, without fear, since the active powers of man predominate so much over the reflective, as to induce him in general to resist with indignation, any hint that nature is more short-lived or mutable than spirit. Meanwhile, the best, the happiest moments of life, are those delicious awakenings of the higher powers, and the

reverential withdrawing of nature before its God, which happen to the idealist, who is both a philosopher and a poet.

Nature, speaking of spirit, suggests the absolute-it is a perpetual effect-a great shadow pointing always to the sun behind us. "Idealism saith matter is a phenomenon not a substance. Idealism acquaints us with the total disparity between the evidence of our non-being, and the evidence of the world's being. The one is perfect, the other incapable of any assurance; the mind is a part of the nature of things; the world is a divine dream, from which we may presently awake to the glories and certainties of day."

Spirit, according to Alcott, does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves. Therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. As a plant upon the earth, so a man rests upon the bosom of God; he is nourished by unfailing fountains, and draws, at his need, inexhaustible power.

The highest reason is the truest-empirical science clouds the the sight-the savant becomes unpoetic-the best-read naturalist is deficient in that knowledge which teaches the relations between things and thoughts. He has to learn that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experiments. Poetry, says Plato, comes nearer to vital truth than history.

Meditating which things, Alcott concludes his very excellent essay with some traditions of man and nature which, he says, a certain poet sang to him; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy.

The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit. But the element of spirit is eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies are young and recent. In the cycle of the universal man, from which the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation.

We distrust and deny inwardly our sympathy with nature. We own and disown our relation to it by turns. We are, like Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can set limits to the remedial force of spirit?

A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise.

Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents, out of him sprang the sun and moon; from man the sun; from woman the moon. The laws of his mind, the period of his actions, externised themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the

follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblance betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, "if his word is sterling yet in nature," it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is instinct. Thus my Orphic poet

sang.

Alcott indulges in the liveliest hopes of man's prospects. Understanding and reason are ever reconquering nature, though inch by inch. The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty, he finds is solved by the redemption of the soul. Prayer is a study of truth-a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite. No man ever prayed heartily without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation.

Then shall come to pass what my poet said; "Nuture is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house, and beyond its house a world, and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you the phenomena is perfect. What we are that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Cæsar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house heaven and earth. Cæsar called his house Rome. You, perhaps, call yours a cobbler's trade, a hundred acres of ploughed land, or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line, and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, mad-houses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary, and shall be no more seen. The odours and

filths of nature the sun shall dry up and the wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south, the snow-banks melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, and carry with it the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it shall draw beautiful faces, and warm hearts, and wise discourse, and heroic acts around its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man over nature which cometh not with observation,—a dominion such as is now beyond his dream of God, he shall enter without more wonder than the blind man feels who is gradually restored to perfect sight.

So much at present for Mr. Alcott. In regard to Mr. Emerson's Oration, we shall not imitate the Boston Quarterly Review on his Address, in being critical on the production. The Address was certainly remarkable as being delivered by a clergyman in a Divinity College to a class of young candidate preachers. The ethical rule laid down by Mr. Emerson is misinterpreted by the critic. The orator meant not, by "Follow thy instincts" and "Obey thyself”— Follow thy inclinations-Live as thou listest; but the contrary. The inclinations are not man's self nor his instincts, but acts of rebellion against both-against man's true personality, and the moral laws within him.

The reviewer, however, sees in all this but a system of pure egotism, such as runs through the writings of Thomas Carlyle and Carlyle's poet, Göthe. Now such critics misunderstand the indivi