light,

stings. But woe to those who in disgust shall | The sunshine had fed it with warmth and venture to crush her! And happy are those who, having dared to receive her in her degraded and frightful shape, shall at length be rewarded by her in the time of her beauty and her glory.

There is only one cure for the evils which newly-acquired freedom produces, and that cure is freedom. When a prisoner leaves his cell, he cannot bear the light of day; he is unable to discriminate colors or recognize faces. But the remedy is not to remand him into his dungeon, but to accustom him to the rays of the sun. The blaze of truth and liberty may at first dazzle and bewilder nations which have become half blind in the house of bondage, but let them gaze on, and they will soon be able to bear it. In a few years men learn to reason. The extreme violence of opinion subsides; hostile theories correct each other; the scattered elements of truth cease to conflict and begin to coalesce; and at length a system of justice and order is educed out of the chaos.

Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition that no people ought to be free till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story who resolved not to go into the water till he had learnt to swim. If men are to wait for liberty till they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait for ever.

T. BABINGTON MACAULAY.

THE SONG OF A SUMMER.

PLUCKED an apple from off a tree,
Golden and rosy and fair to see;

The dews had freshened it night by night,
And high on the topmost bough it grew,
Where the winds of heaven about it blew ;
And while the mornings were soft and young
The wild-birds circled and soared and sung.
There in the storm and calm and shine
It ripened and brightened, this apple of
mine,

Till the day I plucked it from off the tree,
Golden and rosy and fair to see.

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES.

FELICIA HEMANS.

Mrs. Hemans, like several modern writers, is most popular in her minor poems. Delicacy of feeling, warmth of affection and devotion, depth of sympathy with nature and harmony and brilliancy of language are the features of these charming little pieces. Her larger works have the same characteristics, but become languid and fatiguing from their very uniformity of sweetness. Her translations from modern languages and her chiv

EMALE authorship in England is of comparatively modern date. After the period when the maiden queen condescended to figure as a little Occidental luminary in poetry, a single star or two glitters in the sky of the seventeenth century; they begin to assemble in greater numbers in the eigh-alric poems exhibit great spirit and splendor teenth, and in the conclusion of that century and the commencement of the present the literature of England presents the names of many females, in all departments of knowledge, who are of pre-eminent or respectable merit.

of association and imagery. Over her whole poetry, in the phrase of Sir W. Scott, there is too much flower for the fruit.

The larger works of Mrs. Hemans are The Sceptic;" "The Vespers of Palermo" (a tragedy); "The Forest Sanctuary;" "Rec

DANIEL SCRYMGEOUR.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

WAS born in Boston some time about

Mrs. Hemans, originally Miss Felicia Doro-ords of Woman." thea Browne, was the daughter of a merchant, a native of Ireland, and born in Liverpool in September, 1793. The failure of her father. in trade caused the retirement of the family into Wales, and the childhood of the poetess was spent among the inspiring scenery of Denbighshire. From a child she was a versifier, and produced her first publication at the age of fifteen. At that of eighteen she was married to Captain Hemans. The union was unhappy; her husband six years afterward, for his health, went to Italy, and, without any formal deed of separation, "they never met again." Mrs. Hemans continued in her Welsh seclusion, the exertions of her pen, the education of her children and the duties of religion and benevolence furnishing her with ample employment. She died in Dublin during a visit to her brother, Major Browne, in 1835. Her death-bed was an affecting scene of Christian fortitude, resignation and hope.

the year 1803. His father was a Unitarian clergyman, and the son was educated for the pulpit of the sect. After taking his degree at Harvard, in 1821 he studied divinity, and took charge of a congregation in Boston as the colleague of Henry Ware, Jr., but, soon becoming independent of the control of set regulations of religious worship, retired to Concord, where, in 1835, he purchased the house in which he has since resided. It has become identified, as the seat of his solitary musings, with some of the most subtle, airy, eloquent, spiritual productions of American literature.

Mr. Emerson first attracted public attention as a speaker by his college orations. In 1837 he delivered a Phi-Beta-Kappa oration, Man Thinking;" in 1838, his address to

66

the senior class of the Divinity College, Cambridge, and "Literary Ethics: An Oration.' His volume Nature, the keynote of his subsequent productions, appeared in 1839. It treated of freedom, beauty, culture in the life of the individual, to which outward natural objects were made subservient. The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy and Religion, of which Mr. Emerson was one of the original editors and chief supporters, was commenced in July, 1840. It was given to what was called transcendental literature, and many of its papers affecting a purely philosophical expression had the obscurity, if not the profundity, of abstract metaphysics. The orphic sayings of Mr. A. Bronson Alcott helped materially to support this character, and others wrote hardly less intelligibly, but it contained many acute and original papers of a critical character. In its religious views it had little respect for commonly-received creeds.

The conduct of the work passed into the hands of Margaret Fuller, while Mr. Emerson remained a contributor through its four annual volumes. His chief articles were publications of the "Lectures on the Times" and similar compositions which he had delivered. The duties of periodical literature were too restricted and exacting for his temperament, and his powers gained nothing by the demand for their display in this form. The style of composition which has proved to have the firmest hold upon him in drawing out his thoughts for the public is a peculiar species of lecture, in which he combines the ease and familiar turn of the essay with the philosophical dogmatism of the orator and modern oracle.

commenced with the publication, in 1841, of a first series, followed by a second in 1844. His volume of Poems was issued in 1847. In 1848 he travelled in England, delivering a course of lectures in London on the "The Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century," including such topics as Relation of Intellect to Science; Duties of Men of Thought; Politics and Socialism; Poetry and Eloquence; Natural Aristocracy. He also lectured on the "Superlative in Manners and Literature," and delivered lectures in other parts of England, in which country his writings have been received with great favor.

In 1850 appeared his volume Representative Men, including portraits of Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Napoleon, Goethe.

His notices of Margaret Fuller form an independent portion of her Memoirs, published in 1852.

The characteristics of Emerson are, in the subject-matter of his discourses, a reliance on individual consciousness and energy independent of creeds, institutions and tradition; an acute intellectual analysis of passions and principles, through which the results are calmly exhibited with a species of philosophical indifferentism tending to license in practice, which in the conduct of life he would be the last to avail himself of. His style is The collection of his essays and lectures brief, pithy, neglecting ordinary links of asso