Territory, then considered in the region of the Far West. The family settlement was on the Huron river, in the midst of the primitive and unfettered influences of a world of natural beauty, well adapted to graft on the heart of an ingenuous, susceptible youth, a lifelong love of nature. This vigorous existence, combining the toils of a frontier residence with the sports of the field, supplied the stock of poetical associations since fiberally interwoven with the author's prose and poetical compositions. In the midst of the labors of the field, inspired by the books which had fallen in his way, he penned verses and planned various comprehensive poetical schemes. From this at once toilsome and visionary life he was called by the death of his father to a survey of the actual world. He applied himself resolutely to study, and having pursued the course of instruction in the General Theological Seminary of the Protestant Episcopal Church in New York, was in 1840 admitted to orders. He about this time published a few poems, Pewatem in the New World, and Nimahmin in Graham's Magazine, both Indian romances, and pure inventions of the author, together with a number of miscellaneous descriptive poems. Louiz L. After his ordination, Mr. Noble was settled for a time in North Carolina, in a parish on the Albemarle river. Still devoted to nature, he passed his summers in extensive tours in the Alleghanies. In 1844 he became rector of a church at Catskill, on the Hudson, where he enjoyed an intimate acquaintance with the artist Cole; the two friends being drawn to each other by a common love of nature and poetical sympathies. An ample record of this intercourse is preserved in Mr. Noble's eloquent memorial of his companion, modestly bearing its title from the artist's chief pictures, The Course of Empire, Voyage of Life, and other Pictures of Thomas Cole, N.A., with Selections from his Letters and Miscellaneous Writings: illustrative of his Life, Character and Genius. Mr. Cole died in 1848, and this work was undertaken, with full possession of his numerous manuscripts, shortly after. It did not, however, appear from the press till 1853. Its best characteristic is its sympathy with the genius of its subject. It may pass for an autobiography of the artist, so faithfully is his spirit represented by a kindred nind. Mr. Noble, in 1854, removed to Chicago, Illinois, where he is at present rector of a parish. His poems are numerous, existing, we believe, more largely in manuscript than in print. They are marked by their faithful description of nature, and a dreamy, poetical spirit, in harmony with the landscape. TO A SWAN, FLYING BY NIGHT ON THE BANKS OF THE HUEON. Oh, what a still, bright night!-the dropping dew Why on the wing, with chant so wild and shrill?— Lone minstrel of the night, if such thou roamest, Whether thou wheel'st into a thinner air, Or sink'st aslant to regions of the dew, From misty isles, steal softest symphonies. It hath strange might to thrill each living heart. A gentle tingling feels in every vein, And all forgets his home and toilsome hunt. Bird of the tireless wing, thou wilt not stoop; The chasing moonbeams, glancing on thy plumes, There, thou art lost-thy bugle-tones are hushed!- HENRY NORMAN HUDSON. MR. HUDSON was born January 28, 1814, in the town of Cornwall, Addison County, Vermont. The first eighteen years of his life were mainly spent on the farm and in the common school. For his early religious instruction he was indebted to the Rev. Jedediah Bushnell, whom he speaks of as a minister of the old New England school, a venerable and excellent man, a somewhat stiff and rigid Calvinist, indeed, but well fraught with the best qualities of a Christian pastor and gentleman." At the age of eighteen, Mr. Hudson removed to Middlebury, a town adjoining Cornwall, where he became apprenticed to Mr. Ira Allen, for the purpose of learning the trade of coach-making. Here he continued as apprentice and journeyman about four years, when he resolved to secure the benefit of a college education. He began the work of preparation in the fall of 1835, entered the Freshman class of Middlebury College the following August, and was graduated in 1840. His next three years were spent in teaching at the South, one year at Kentucky, and two years in Huntsville, Alabama. Having early acquired a taste for reading, and especially occupied himself with the study of Shakespeare, he found time to write out a course of lectures on his favorite author, which he first delivered at Huntsville, and shortly after at Mobile, in the winter of 1843-1. The next spring he repeated the course at Cincinnati. Induced by his success in these places he visited Boston the following winter, where the lectures were listened to by large and intelligent audiences, bringing the author both fame and profit. The first result was to enable him to discharge his pecuniary obligations to the friends by whose aid he had been assisted while in college. The lectures were repeated in New York, Philadelphia, and other cities with varying success, and finally appeared from the press of Baker and Scribner, in New York, in 1848. Mr. Hudson's early religious views had undergone considerable change from the Congregationalism in which he was brought up, when in 1844 he became acquainted in Boston with the late Dr. H. N. Hudion William Croswell, who had then just entered on his ministerial work in the parish of the Advent. Earnestly attached to the man and his doctrines, Mr. Hudson became a member of the congregation, and not long after a candidate for orders in the diocese of New York. He was ordained by Bishop Whittingham, in Trinity Church, in 1849. The following year, at the solicitation of Messrs. Munroe and Co., of Boston, he engaged to edit the works of Shakespeare in eleven volumes, on the plan and in the style of the Chiswick edition published in 1826. This work is now in course of completion, having reached its eighth volume, the publication having been somewhat delayed by the elaborate care bestowed upon it by the editor, and the necessity he has been under of associating with it more remunerating pursuits. The chief points in the edition are a thorough revision and restoration of the text according to the ancient copies, notes carefully selected and compactly written, and an introduction, historical, bibliographical, and critical, to each play. In November, 1852, Mr. Hudson became party to an arrangement to edit the Churchman newspaper in New York. He entered upon the work, which he discharged with eminent ability, on the first of January, 1853, and continued in it till September 9, 1854, when he withdrew in consequence of what seemed to him unreasonable encroachments of the proprietor upon his province. In addition to these editorial and other labors, Mr. Hudson has written a number of elaborate * articles in the monthly and quarterly periodicals, including Thoughts on Education, in the Democratic Review, a paper which contains the substance of a well digested volume; On Lord Mahon's and Macaulay's Histories, an essay on The Right Sources of Moral and Political Knowledge, in the Church Review; and a masterly review of Bailey's Festus in the American Whig Review. In 1850 Mr. Hudson published a sermon, Old Wine in Old Bottles, originally preached at the Church of the Advent, in Boston. The style of Mr. Hudson is marked by a certain rugged strength and quaintness; occasionally reminding the reader, in its construction and the analytical subtleties of which it is the vehicle, May and July, 1845. of the old school of English theological writing. His composition is labored, sinewy, and profound. As a moralist, his views are liberal and enlarged, while opposed as far as possible to maudlin philanthropy and sentimentality. As a critic of Shakespeare he is acute, philosophical, reverential; following the school of Coleridge, and reproducing from the heart of the subject the elements of the author's characters, which are drawn out in a fine amplification. THE WEIRD SISTERS FROM THE LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE. The Weird Sisters are the creatures not of any preexisting superstition, but purely of Shakespeare's own mind. They are altogether unlike any thing else that art or superstition ever invented. The old witches of northern mythology would not have answered the poet's purpose; those could only act upon men, these act within them; those opposed themselves against human will,-these identify themselves with it; those could inflict injury,—these inflict guilt; those could work men's physical ruin,— these win men to work their own spiritual ruin. Macbeth cannot resist them, because they take from him the very will and spirit of resistance. Their power takes hold of him like a fascination of hell: it seems as terrible and as inevitable as that of original sin; insuring the commission of crime, not as a matter of necessity, for then it would be no crime, but simply as a matter of fact. In using them, Shakespeare but borrowed the drapery of pre-existing superstition to secure faith in an entirely new creation. Without doing violence to the laws of human belief he was thus enabled to enlist the services of old credulity in favor of agents or instruments suited to his peculiar purpose. The Weird Sisters are a combination of the terrible and the grotesque, and hold the mind in suspense between laughter and fear. Resembling old women save that they have long beards, they bubble up into human shape, but are free from all human relations; without age, or sex, or kin; without birth, or death; passionless and motionless; anomalous alike in looks, in action, and in speech; nameless themselves, and doing nameless deeds. Coleridge describes them as the imaginative divorced from the good; and this description, to one who understands it, expresses their nature better than any thing else I have seen. Gifted with the powers of prescience and prophecy, their predictions seem replete with an indescribable charm which works their own fulfilment, so as almost to leave us in doubt whether they predestinate or produce, or only foresee and foretell the subsequent events. Such as they are, So withered and so wild in their attire; And yet are on't, such is the language in which they mutter their horrid incantations. It is, if such a thing be possible or imaginable, the poetry of hell, and seems dripping with the very dews of the pit. A wondrous potency, like the fumes of their charmed pot, seems stealing over our minds as they compound the ingredients of their hell-broth. In the materials which make up the contents of their cauldron, such as Toad, that under coldest stone, Nose of Turk, and Tartar's lips; -sow's blood, that hath eaten there is a strange confusion of the natural and supernatural, which serves to enchant and bewilder the mind into passiveness. Our very ignorance of any physical efficacy or tendency in the substances and conditions here specified, only enhances to our imagination their moral potency; so that they seem more powerful over the soul inasmuch as they are powerless over the body.-The Weird Sisters, indeed, and all that belong to them, are but poetical impersonations of evil influences: they are the imaginative, irresponsible agents or instruments of the devil; capable of inspiring guilt, but not of incurring it; in and through whom all the powers of their chief seem bent up to the accomplishment of a given purpose. But with all their essential wickedness there is nothing gross, or vulgar, or sensual about them. They are the very purity of sin incarnate; the vestal virgins, so to speak, of hell; radiant with a sort of inverted holiness; fearful anomalies in body and soul, in whom every thing seems reversed; whose elevation is downwards; whose duty is sin; whose religion is wickedness; and the law of whose being is violation of law! Unlike the Furies of Eschylus, they are petrific, not to the senses, but to the thoughts. At first, indeed, on laughing, so uncouth and grotesque is their appearmerely looking at them, we can hardly keep from ance: but afterwards, on looking into them, we find them terrible beyond description; and the more we look into them, the more terrible do they become; the blood almost curdling in our veins as, dancing and singing their infernal glees over embryo murders, they unfold to our thoughts the cold, passionless, inexhaustible malignity and deformity of their nature. In beings thus made and thus mannered; in their fantastical and unearthly aspect, awakening mixed emotions of terror and mirth; in their ominous reserve and oracular brevity of speech, so fitted at once to overcome scepticism, to sharpen curiosity, and to feed ambitious hopes; in the circumstances of their prophetic greeting, a blasted heath, as a spot deserted by nature and sacred to infernal orgies — the influences of the place thus falling in with the supernatural style and matter of their discourses; in all this we recognise a peculiar adaptedness to generate even in the strongest minds a belief in their predictions. What effect, then, do the Weird Sisters have on the action of the play? Are their discourses necessary to the enacting of the subsequent crimes? and, if so, are they necessary as the cause, or only as the condition of those crimes? Do they operate to deprave, or only to develope the characters brought under their influence? In a word, do they creste the evil heart, or only untie the evil hands? These questions have been variously answered by critics. Not to dwell on these various answers, it seems to me tolerably clear, that the agency of the Weird Sisters extends only to the inspiring of confidence in what they predict. This confidence they awaken in Banquo equally as in Macbeth; yet the only ef fect of their proceedings on Banquo is to try and prove his virtue. The fair inference, then, is, that they furnish the motives, not the principles of action; and these motives are of course to good or to bad, according to the several preformations and predispositions of character whereon they operate. But what relation does motive bear to action? On this point, too, it seems to me there has been much of needless confusion. Now moral action, like vision, presupposes two things, a condition and a cause. Light and visual power are both indispensable to sight; there can be no vision without light; yet the cause of vision, as every body knows, is the visual power pre-existing in the eye. Neither can we walk without an area to walk upon; yet nobody, I suppose, would pronounce that area the cause of our walking. On the contrary, that cause is obviously within ourselves; it lies in our own innate mobility; and the area is necessary only as the condition of our walking. In like manner both will and motive are indispensable to moral action. We cannot act without motives, any more than we can breathe without air; yet the cause of our acting lies in certain powers and principles within us. As, therefore, vision springs from the meeting of visual power with light, so action springs from the meeting of will with motive. Surely, then, those who persist in holding motives responsible for our actions, would do well to remember, that motives can avail but little after all without something to be moved. One of the necessary conditions of our acting, in all cases, is a belief in the possibility and even the practicability of what we undertake. However ardent and lawless .may be our desire of a given object, still a conviction of the impossibility of reaching it necessarily precludes all efforts to reach it. So fully are we persuaded that we cannot jump over the moon, that we do not even wish, much less attempt to do it. Generally, indeed, apprehensions and assurances more or less strong of failure and punishment in criminal attempts operate to throw us back upon better principles of action; we make a virtue of necessity; and from the danger and difficulty of indulging evil and unlawful desires, fall back upon such as are lawful and good; wherein, to our surprise, nature often rewards us with far greater pleasures than we had anticipated from the opposite course. He who removes those apprehensions and assurances from any wicked enterprise, and convinces us of its safety and practicability, may be justly said to furnish us motives to engage in it; that is, he gives us the conditions upon which, but not the principles from which, our actions proceed; and therefore does not, properly speaking, deprave, but only developes our character. For example, in ambition itself, unchecked and unrestrained by any higher principles, are contained the elements of all the crimes necessary to the successful prosecution of its objects. I say successful prosecution; for such ambition is, from its nature, regardless of every thing but the chances of defeat: so that nothing less than the conviction or the apprehension that crimes will not succeed, can prevent such ambition from employing them. E. H. CHAPIN Was born in Union Village, Washington County, New York, December 29, 1814. His first studies were given to the law, but he soon became engaged in the ministry. He was settled first over a congregation at Richmond, Va., in 1838, and subsequently from 1840 to 1848 was stationed at Charlestown and Boston. In 1848 he became a resident of New York, and is now pastor of the Fourth Universalist Society in the city, occupying the edifice in Broadway, re-erected for the congregation of the Rev. II. W. Bellows. Mr. Chapin's chief reputation is as a pulpit orator and lecturer, his lyceum engagements extending through the country. His style is marked by its poetical fervor and frequent happy illus trations, and an ingenious vein of thought. His delivery is calm and winning. E. H. Chopin, 599 His chief publications are of a practical devotional character, bearing the titles, Hours of Communion; Crown of Thorns; A Token for the Sorrowing; Discourses on the Lord's Prayer and the Beatitudes; Characters in the Gospels, illustrating Phases of Character at the Present Day. In 1853 and in 1854 he published Moral Aspects of City Life, and Humanity in the City-two shions, amusements, and vices; the relation of series of his courses on topics of social life; famachinery and labor, wealth and poverty; the temptations to crime, and other themes of a similar character, which are exhibited in a philosophical, devotional spirit, with equal earnestness and kindliness. 66 VOICES OF THE DEAD-FROM THE CROWN OF THORNS. He being dead yet speaketh." The departed have voices for us. In order to illustrate this, I remark, in the first place, that the dead speak to us, and commune with us, through the works which they have left behind them. As the islands of the sea are the built up casements of myriads of departed lives; as the earth itself is a great catacomb, so we, who live and move upon its surface, inherit the productions and enjoy the fruits of the dead. They have bequeathed to us by far the larger portion of all that influences our thoughts, or mingles with the circumstances of our daily life. We walk through the streets they laid out. We inhabit the houses they built. We practise the customs they established. We gather wisdom from the books they wrote. We pluck the ripe clusters of their experience. We boast in their achievements. And by these they speak to us. Every device and influence they have left behind tells their story, and is a voice of the dead. We feel this more impressively when we enter the customary place of one recently departed, and look around upon his work. The halffinished labor, the utensils hastily thrown aside, the material that exercised his care and received his last touch, all express him and seem alive with his presence. By them, though dead, he speaketh to us with a freshness and tone like his words of yesterday. How touching are those sketched forms, those unfilled outlines, in that picture which employed so fully the time and genius of the great artist-Bel shazzar's Feast! In the incomplete process, the transition-state of an idea from its conception to its realization, we are brought closer to the mind of the artist; we detect its springs and hidden workings, and therefore feel its reality more than in the finished effort. And this is one reason why we are more impressed at beholding the work just left than in gazing upon one that has been for a long time abandoned. Having had actual communion with the contriving mind, we recognise its presence more readily in its production; or else the recency of the departure heightens the expressiveness with which everything speaks of the departed. The dead child's cast-off garment, the toy just tossed aside, startles us as though with his renewed presence. A year hence they will suggest him to us, but with a different effect. But though not with such an impressive tone, yet just as much, in fact, do the productions of those long gone speak to us. Their minds are expressed there, and living voice can do little more. Nay, we are admitted to a more intimate knowledge of them than was possessed by their contemporaries. The work they leave behind them is the sum-total of their lives-expresses their ruling passion-reveals, perhaps, their real sentiment. To the eyes of those placed on the stage with them, they walked as in a show, and each life was a narrative gradually unfolding itself. We discover the moral. We see the results of that completed history. We judge the quality and value of that life by the residuum. As a prophet has no honor in his own country," so one may be misconceived in his own time, both to his undue disparagement and his undue exaltation; therefore, can another age better write his biography than his own. His work, his permanent result, speaks for him better, at least truer, than he spoke for himself. The rich man's wealth, the sumptuous property, the golden pile that he has left behind him-by it, being dead, does hè not yet speak to us? Have we not, in that gorgeous result of toiling days and anxious nights, of brain-sweat and soul-rack, the man himself, the cardinal purpose, the very life of his soul? which we might have surmised while he lived and wrought, but which, now that it remains the whole sum and substance of his mortal being, speaks far more emphatically than could any other voice he might have used. The expressive lineaments of the marble, the pictured canvass, the immortal poem-by it, genius, being dead, yet speaketh. To us, and not to its own time, is unhoarded the wealth of its thought and the glory of its inspiration. When it is gone-when its lips are silent, and its heart still-then is revealed the cherished secret over which it toiled, which was elaborated from the living alembic of the soul, through gainful days and weary nights-the sentiment which could not find expression to contemporariesthe gift, the greatness, the lyric power, which was disguised and unknown so long. Who, that has communed with the work of such a spirit, has not felt in every line that thrilled his soul, in every wondrous lineament that stamped itself upon his memory for ever, that the dead can speak, yea, that they have voices which speak most truly, most emphatically, when they are dead? So does Industry speak, in its noble monuments, its precious fruits! So does Maternal Affection speak, in a chord that vibrates in the hardest heart, in the pure and better sentiment of after-years. So does Patriotism speak, in the soil liberated and enriched by its sufferings. So does the Martyr speak, in the truth which triumphs by his sacrifice. So does the great man speak, in his life and deeds, glowing on the storied page. So does the good man speak, in the charac ter and influence which he leaves behind him. The voices of the dead come to us from their works, from their results, and these are all around us. But I remark, in the second place, that the dead speak to us in memory and association. If their voices may be constantly heard in their works, we do not always heed them; neither have we that care and attachment for the great congregation of the departed, which will at any time call them up vividly before us. But in that congregation there are those whom we have known intimately and fondly, whom we cherished with our best love, who lay close to our bosoms. And these speak to us in a more private and peculiar manner,-in mementos that flash upon us the whole person of the departed, every physical and spiritual lineament-in conse crated hours of recollection that open up all the train of the past, and re-twine its broken ties around our hearts, and make its endearments present still. Then, then, though dead, they speak to us. It needs not the vocal utterance, nor the living presence, but the mood that transforms the scene and the hour supplies these. That face that has slept so long in the grave, now bending upon us, pale and silent, but affectionate still-that more vivid recollection of every feature, tone, and movement, that brings before us the departed, just as we knew them in the full flush of life and health-that soft and conse crating spell which falls upon us, drawing in all our thoughts from the present, arresting, as it were, the current of our being, and turning it back and holding it still as the flood of actual life, rushes by uswhile in that trance of soul the beings of the past are shadowed-old friends, old days, old scenes recur, familiar looks beam close upon us, familiar words reecho in our ears, and we are closed up and absorbed with the by-gone, until tears dissolve the film from our eyes, and some shock of the actual wakes us from our reverie;-all these, I say, make the dead to commune with us really as though in bodily form they should come out from the chambers of their mysterious silence, and speak to us And if life consists in experiences, and not mere phy sical contacts-and if love and communion belong to that experience, though they take place in medi tation, or dreams, or by actual contact-then, in that hour of remembrance, have we really lived with the departed, and the departed have come back and lived with us. Though dead, they have spoken to us. And though memory sometimes in duces the spir. of heaviness-though it is often the ngent of conscience and wakens us to chastise-yet, it is wonderful how, from events that were deeply mingled with pain, it will extract an element of sweetness. A writer, in relating one of the expe riences of her sick-room, has illustrated this. In an hour of suffering, when no one was near her, she went from her bed and her room to another apart ment, and looked out upon a glorious landscape of sunrise and spring-time. "I was suffering too much to enjoy this picture at the moment," she says, "but how was it at the end of the year? The pains of all those hours were annihilated, as completely vanish ed as if they had never been; while the momentary peep behind the window-curtain made me possessor of this radiant picture for evermore." this wide difference," she asks, "between the good and the evil? Because the good is indissolubly connected with ideas-with the unseen realities which are indestructible." And though the illus tration which she thus gives bear the impression of an individual peculiarity, instead of an universal truth, still, in the instance to which I apply it, I believe it will very generally hold true, that memory leaves a pleasant rather than a painful impression. Whence |