with waiting began to scold also, and wound up with denouncing my friend P. as the laziest, since I could not for so many weeks excuse him as the busiest, of mortals.

Prof. P.-That, my good friend, was because you did not know my habits. I never correspond with any one, though I write to any one of my acquaintances whenever the fancy takes me.

Rev. Mr. N.— And why, I pray, is there to be no give and take in the matter?

Prof. P.-Letter writing is neither an amusement which brightens all the powers like conversation, nor an exercise which disciplines them. To me it is a mere business expedient, to get at the thoughts of one whom I cannot personally approach. Now, yours I had without any trouble; and as I had already intimated mine to you on the same subjects, nothing was suggested by your letters, though they gave me great pleasure.

Rev. Mr. N.-Well, I shall remember what you say, and trouble you with no more letters.

Prof. P.-Why so? These were their own reward as all good letters are. By writing them you gave precision to what else would have remained vague or stagnant in your mind. If I had had as much to say, I would have written to you. If I ever do have as much to say, I will write, but I will not answer your letters, knowing, as I shall, that, when you receive them, your thoughts will have turned into some new channel.

Rev. Mr. N.-Sir Walter Scott answered all his letters as soon as he received them.

Prof. P.-Accordingly his letters are as inferior to Horace Walpole's or Lady Mary W. Montague's, as an obituary notice in the newspaper, to his own account of the death of Fergus Mac Ivor. Nothing good is done in that methodical way.

Rev. Mr. N.—Have your own whim about it, but show me some more books.

Prof. P.- Here is one "no gentleman's library

should be without," and of a more inviting aspect than most, that are so classed. "Mild Spenser

with his Faerie Queene.

Rev. Mr. N. So he is a favorite poet of yours.

Prof. P.-I think he would have been, if I had read him at Cambridge, England, instead of Cambridge, New England. But alas, when but a little, little boy at our university, I took his tome of fairy lore from the library, and tried to read it between the recitation bells; lest the hurry and worry of a professional life should leave no time for such studies in after days. But the great poet refuses to be seen like a raree show for once and away. I could not enter into his life; he refused to mingle with mine. Yet his music lingers in my ear, and I feel the truth of what one of my friends. writ in reply to some carping of mine.

"Though Spenser's green romantic glades,
You say, no mountains are,

Their atmosphere doth undulate

And fragrant warmth is there.

A table land he occupies

Spenser, whose strain I love;

Secure from damps of meadow fields,
Or snows that glare above."

And upon this table land you must abide long enough to forget the rest of the world, if you would feel the spirit of the place. So did not I; but I saw enough to make me glad that there should be an interest felt here in Spenser to induce the putting out of this handsome edition.

Rev. Mr. N. — Do you suppose it is much read?

Prof. P.-No, but much bought; and after it has been dismissed from the parlor table to the attic, after the hearsay praises at present called out by the sight. of its green cover have died away, youths and maidens may steal away with it to some freezing garret, or secret summer nook, and wander with Una and the Redcross Knight to some purpose.

Rev. Mr. N.-Indeed it is true that such is the only genuine reading. My two boys have made what they call a nest in the garret, where they read Ovid.

and Molière. I connive at their stealing away, knowing how dear and profitable these secret hours are, where they take a book because they want it themselves, and can really live in it without any person's asking them questions, to make them feel it is only a book and not life they enjoy. I hope to miss Shakspeare from the library soon; forlorn is the youth that has not made an oratory for him.

Prof. P.-Spenser is not so great a loss fortunately, for scarce any among us read him.

Rev. Mr. Ñ.-Do they any great poet?

*

Prof. P.- Scarcely, to my knowledge. The worship of the bards seems to be dying out within these few years. They are admired upon tradition. It was said of late there were not ten persons in this vicinity familiar with the writings of Spinoza. I doubt whether a greater number are familiar with the Faerie Queene. Rev. Mr. N.-You do not jest, I think.

Prof. P.-Not I, truly. In no way is the tendency of our bustling and superficial ways of life more clearly shown than this. The poets are known through reviews and histories of literature, as the philosophers through the annals and compends. We are too much in a hurry to carry far the culture even of belles letters. Il faut attendre, our country will not always grow so fast. Perhaps when she is come to maturity she will have poets of her own; meanwhile, let us rejoice that respect, if not love, multiplies good copies of good books, and preserves for the possible use of posterity the poets of all time.

Rev. Mr. N. - What is read, if not the poets? No good novels come out now.

Prof. P.- Newspapers, Reviews, Travels, Sermons, and controversy, especially theological controversy.

* We dissent from this. Professor P. is a croaker. We do not believe there ever was an age which paid a sincerer homage to genuine poetry than ours; though happily it has taste and hands for something else. These complaints about the former days being better than the present are never worth listening to. · Ed. B. Q. Review

-

Rev. Mr. N.-Yes, there was always a taste for that in New England.

Prof. P. And she is unchanged. To the finest orphic hymn in praise of the gods, to the fairest sculpture of their forms, she prefers an inquiry into the nature of the Divine, a statement of opinion to a creative work. Here you see a pile of pamphlets which have been published during the winter.

Rev. Mr. N. — And we have heard much of these. What is your mind as to the matter in controversy ? The people of our town are all in favor of Mr. Norton.

Prof. P.-Naturally. The opinions he expresses chime in with the tune which has been playing since their birth. There is an air of candid infallibility, which suits the taste of those who have not thought too deeply to give up Romanism.

Rev. Mr. N.- Protestants, indeed, are rare. Prof. P. In any noble sense they are. If Protestantism ever deserved the praises which have been lavished on it, if the era of its birth could, with any propriety, be styled one of Reformation, it was as establishing the right of the individual mind to judge for itself. Protest against the usurpations of the Roman church had no dignity, except in so far as it expressed this principle.

Rev. Mr. N. Yet, without the excuse of an inherited sanction or a traditional faith, you hear the "Thus far, no farther," uttered as a warning on every side; and such is human nature, that, after two hundred years' discussion of the principle of toleration, that man, who can truly and thoroughly tolerate a dif ferent way of viewing truth from his own, may be called not only reasonable but generous.

Rev. Mr. N. — Will this gear ever be amended?

Prof. P.- -I think it will. The eyes of men are now wide open, if not cleared from films. The principle that sustained creeds and councils having been given up, though they will rise into existence again, it can be only to prank it in a brief authority. But many a petty pope must be put down, many individu

als smile at the excommunication of sects and coteries, before it shall be felt as well as acknowledged, that many men may look at the one indivisible truth many ways, and each be right, from his own point of view. These pamphlets will be of use by setting in a clear light the inconsistency of any person, who professes what is called liberal Christianity,* dictating to any other what his view should be. If this mode of belief does not substitute the church invisible for the church visible, by an appeal to the conscience of the individual it is mere dissent from other forms of faith, and has no ground-work and no value. But a truce to this. You know it is not under this aspect that I love to consider the world of thought.

And

Rev. Mr. N.—It is for that very reason, that I like to hear how these passages-at-arms affect you. you have read the pamphlets.

Prof. P.—I have; first from curiosity, then from interest. Mr. Norton's first publication seemed to me to annihilate the basis of religious faith, and the pretensions of liberal Christianity. I had a curiosity to see how he was answered. The subject was not taken up where I had looked for the answer, but a spirit that delighted me was displayed, and thoughts that commanded my attention were implied in what is said of these Germans.

Rev. Mr. N. - Were you not familiar with their views?

Prof. P.- Not as theirs. But they had come to me in a thousand forms. I cannot sufficiently admire at this terror expressed of the German philosophers and theologians, when I consider how impossible it is to become acquainted with the continental literature of a hundred years back, without coming under the influences which made them what they are.

Rev. Mr. N. And do you see nothing responsive among ourselves?

The Editor of this journal disapproves entirely of the phrase Liberal Christianity. In his estimation Christianity is the essence of liberality; and he is content to accept it without an adjective. Ed.