cially in winter, when the bareness of all other trees shows the low arch of the Saxons. In the woods in a winter afternoon, one will see the origin of the stained glass window with which the Gothic Cathedrals are adorned, in the colours of the western sky seen through the bare and crossing bran ches of the forest. Nor can any lover of nature enter the old piles of Oxford and the English cathedrals, without knowing that the forest overpowered the mind of the builder, and that his chisel, saw, and plane still reproduced its ferns, its spikes of flowers, its pine, its oak, its fir, its spruce. The Gothic cathedral is a blossoming in stone, subdued by the insatiable demand of harmony in man. The mountain of granite blooms into an eternal flower with the lightness and delicate finish, as well as aerial proportions and perspective of vegetable beauty."

As comparison may help to bring out more prominently our remarks upon Mr. Emerson's rare endowments as a poetical and philosophical Essayist, we shall, for a moment, place by his side an equally original and forcible Essayist, viz., John Foster; and the passages we adduce are fair illustrations of the essential difference between the two. Foster, when referring to the hilarity and playfulness with which Sir Thomas More met his ignominious, violent, and unjust death, gallantly defends the innocent wit which flashed forth around the sombre scene, and even glanced, in lightning beauty, along the edge of the fatal axe; but it is plain that he regards the display as exceptional, and as almost individual to the idiosyncracy of More.

"His gaiety," he observes apologetically, "did not imply a dereliction of the habitude of mind proper to a wise man. He could emit pleasantries, and be seriously weighing in his mind an important point of equity or law, and could pass directly from the play of wit to the acts and the genuine spirit of devotion. And if he could, at all other times, maintain a vigorous exercise of serious thought and devout sentiment, unhurt by the gleaming of these lambent fires, there was no good reason why they might not gleam on the scaffold also. He had before almost habitually thought of death, and most impressively realized it; and still he had wit, and its soft lustre was to his friends, but the more delightful for gilding so grave a contemplation: well he could only realize the awful event one degree more impressively, when he saw the apparatus, and was warned that this was the hour."

But Emerson finely generalizes this sporting air, and makes it a characteristic of the highest form of heroism, in the march of life, and at the stage of death.

"That," he says," which takes my fancy most, in the heroic class, is the good humour and hilarity they exhibit. It is a height to which common duty can very well attain, to suffer and to dare with solemnity. But these rare souls set opinion, success, and life, at so cheap a rate, that they will not soothe their enemies by petitions, or the show of sorrow, but wear their own habitual greatness. Scipio, charged with peculation, refuses to do himself so great a disgrace as to wait for justification, though he had the scroll of accounts in his hands, but tears it to pieces before the tribunes. Socrates' condemnation of himself to be maintained in all honour in the Prytaneum, during his life, and Sir Thomas More's playfulness at the scaffold, are of the same strain. Sport is the bloom and glow of a perfect health. The great will not condescend to take any thing seriously; all

must be as gay as the song of a canary, though it were the building of cities or the eradication of old and foolish churches that have cumbered the earth long thousands of years. Simple hearts put all the history and cus. toms of this world behind them, and play their own play in innocent defiance of the police-laws of the world and such would appear, could we see the human race, assembled in vision, like little children frolicing together, though, to the eyes of mankind at large, they wear a stately and solemn garb of works and influences."

Now, which of the two Essayists, we ask, is the most poetical and philosophical? We cannot hesitate for a moment in awarding the palm to the American.

2. Though Emerson is an Essayist of such high character, he is exceedingly clear in his style. There are not only the freshness and the richness, but also the openness of a summer morning, in his productions. The most subtle and abstract thoughts are musically expressed and distinctly articulated. We are often led to wonder at the perfect success with which he interprets the finest moods of consciousness in the soul; and the most delicate appearances in nature. He has often been called unintelligible, but the charge must injure his accusers and not him. They are of the bread-and-butter class of intellects; and their reading is eating. Their substantial taste scorns all your etherealities, and they only like what will make their minds corpulent with information, and fat with knowledge that can be measured. To such persons an idealist appears a madman or a fool. A new dictionary would not help them; a new mind is the thing wanted. Ere Emerson's obscurity can cease, they must have new insight. Young ladies are his sworn enemies, for his fine essay on "Love" is not so pointed and practical as Byron would have made it; Grand-dames say that they are at a loss to know what his "Prudence" means, and that he would make a very mysterious and confused house-wife. Clergymen quit him in disdain, and take to Addison-their latest, most modern and fashionable author. The poor Essayist will be left as a riddle to the next generation. His fervid and most expressive face confronts gross eyes. What some are pleased to reckon plainness, is absolutely unattainable in an essay on lofty subjects. The most spiritual of ideas-with a proper vehicle-haunt the dim moonshine and not the radiance of the sun. Most of your very plain writers are very shallow thinkers. They keep on the outside of a theme-all their body visible enough. But let them go down to the depths, and you must, at least, look down after them. For example, the concise answer of the Shorter Catechism to the question, "What is God?" God is a spirit, infinite, eternal and unchangeable, &c." is very simple; but when you seek to form a conception of spirit, of infinity, eternity and absolute identity,-the more worthy that your conception is, and the more of profound thought that it includes, the difficulty of expressing it ever increases. The shortsighted reader complains of mistiness; but the truth is, that his own vision is hopelessly impotent.

We believe that the charge of obscurity so often brought against Emerson, is founded, not on his character, but on that of many of his disciples, who, with very crude intellects, affect to be as oracular as

their master. They utter jargon, which is mystic enough. They are unintelligible, not because they are giving those profound and spiritual views of truth, which can hardly be shadowed forth by language, but simply because all their notions are confused. They belong to the era of the scattering of the builders of Babel's tower, and not to the reign of German genius. Thus the author is injured by a few silly and absurd admirers.

To meet the railing of superficial critics who accuse Emerson of mysticism, we extract a few sentences from Thomas Carlyle's article on the "State of German Literature."

"In the field of human investigation," he writes, "there are objects of two sorts: first, the visible, including not only such as are material, and may be seen by the bodily eye; but all such as may be represented in a shape, before the mind's eye, or in any way pictured there; and, secondly, the invisible, or such as are not only unseen by human eyes, but cannot be seen by any eye; not objects of sense at all; not capable of being pictured in the mind, or in any way represented by a shape, either without the mind or within it. If any man shall here turn upon us, and assert that there are no such invisible objects; that whatever cannot be so pictured, is nothing, and the science that relates to it nothing,-we shall regret the circumstance. We request him, however, to consider deeply, what he means simply by these two words—God and his own SouL; and whether he finds that visible shape and true existence are here also one and the samo? Now, whoever has a material and visible object to treat, may represent it to his own mind, and convey it to the minds of others, as it were, by a direct diagram, more complex, indeed, than a geometrical diagram, but still with the same sort of precision; and if his diagram be complete, and the same both to himself and his reader, he may reason of it, with the clearness of geometry itself. If he do not so reason of it, this must be for want of comprehension to image out the whole of it, or of distinctness to convey the same whole to his reader :-the diagrams of the two are different: the conclusions of the one diverge from those of the other, and the obscurity here, if the reader be a man of judgment and attentiveness, results from incapacity in the writer, who confuses what, with ordinary faculty, might be rendered clear, and who is not a mystic but a dunce. Another matter, it is, however, when the object to be treated of belongs to the invisible and immaterial class. In this case, the difficulties of comprehension are increased an hundred-fold. There it will require long and skilful effort, both from writer and reader, before the two can so much as speak together; before the former can make known to the latter-not how the matter stands, but what the matter is, which they have to investigate. He must devise new means of explanation, describe conditions of mind in which this invisible idea arises, the false persuasions that eclipse it, the false shows that may be mistaken for it, the glimpses of it that appear elsewhere; and strive, by a thousand methods, to guide his reader up to the perception of it;-in all which the reader must faithfully co-operate with him, if any fruit is to come of their mutual endeavour. Should the latter take up his ground too early, and affirm to himself, that now he has seized what he still has not seized, the consequences are plain enough;-disunion, darkness, and contradiction between the two; the writer has written for another man, and this reader, after long provocation, quarrels with him finally, and quits him as a mystic."

The application to Emerson, of these profound observations, needs not formally to be made by us.

We had intended to say something of the Essayist's practical sagacity and shrewdness; but, this paper having exceeded the common limits, we must forbear.

We cannot close without earnestly calling upon Mr. Emerson to turn the whole scrutiny of his genius upon Bible Christianity, and not upon that mock Christianity which is native to, and no higher than, the soul of man. Let him patiently examine those doctrines, which, from their originality, completeness, and peculiarity, are stamped as the revelations of God; and not those doctrines which are mere responses from the depths of human consciousness. The soul of man, low and earthly as it has become since the Fall, vibrates to divine truth; but let him not think that the sound arises thence, and that the soul itself strikes out the heavenly tones which it hears. His system may or may not wrong nature, by making nature entirely subjective-a thing of the human mind: yet this does not strip nature of its majesty, beauty, and utility. But, in making Christianity a product of the human mind, he strips it of all its celestial charms, he extracts from it all its sovereign efficacy; and, theoretically, it becomes mean, and practically, it becomes worthless.

Lectures on the Acts of the Apostles. By JOHN DICK, D.D. New Edition. Maurice Ogle & Son, Glasgow.

This is a new edition, at once neat and cheap, of an excellent work by an able and sound divine, "whose praise is in all the churches." Dr. Dick has now for half a century occupied a respectable place among Scottish theologians; and is remarkable as one of the first Scottish Seceders, who taught the more narrow-minded members of that communion, that the substitution of the graces of pure and classical English, in place of the harsh and uncouth jargon of the fathers of the Secession, was not necessarily a sin against strict Calvinistic orthodoxy. His first elevation to the rank which he occupies as a theological writer, he owed to his "Essay on the Inspiration of the Sacred Scriptures;" and the reputation which that classical and carefully digested treatise secured him, was not only sustained but considerably extended by his "Lectures on Theology," published from his manuscripts by his son, shortly after his death. The present work, which with a few others of a more fugitive character, appeared in the interval between them, possesses fewer pretensions than either of these productions, being mainly of an expository and practical character. But we esteem it not the less on that account. Indeed, we greatly doubt whether in general popularity, it is not destined to outlive both. The Essay on Inspiration was greatly superior to the works on the subject which were usually read at the time of its publication; and it accordingly threw them in a great measure into the shade. Of late, however, it has lost a large portion of its authority; as the more profound

and independent thinkers on theological questions, are gradually emancipating themselves from the fetters of prescription, and making slow and steady advances towards a Theory of Inspiration, which shunning the two extremes of excessive vigour, and dangerous laxity, is more in accordance with the phenomena presented by the sacred writings, and more independent of the doubtful aid of a priori assumptions, than those advocated by Dr. Dick and his timid predecessors and followers of the same school.

The reputation of the "Lectures on Theology" rests we conceive upon a more stable basis. In their leading features and more prominent topics, they can never become obsolete, so long as Scriptural truth, lucidly stated, acutely vindicated, and embodied in language of transparent clearness and simple elegance, are duly appreciated. Their very defects, in fact, as "Lectures on Theology," will in no slight degree contribute to their general popularity and usefulness. For in their structure and tone, they partake much more of the character of popular pulpit addresses, than of scientific prelections addressed from the academic chair to students in divinity; and thus they address themselves, if to a less intellectual, yet to a far more extensive circle of readers. Notwithstanding these advantages, however, their day is already to a considerable extent gone. The interval from their first publication to the present day, though not a long, has been a peculiarly busy one; an interval governed in every thing by the spirit of change, and no where has this spirit been more actively at work than in the sacred province of religion. Hence while new fashions of infidelity-partly native productions of the British soil, and partly importations from Germany and France-have compelled the friends of religion in defending its outworks, to fortify all their old positions, and to take up new ones, the revival of old heresies of various kinds under new and imposing names and forms has, at the same time, imposed upon them a duty no less urgent and imperative-that of planting new and improved safe-guards round the sacred citadel itself-the ark of their holy faith. Were Dr. Dick therefore to return at the present moment to the scene of his former academical labours, he would find it necessary to reconstruct a very large portion of his course of lectures: In those on the evidences of natural and revealed religion, he would have to furnish his pupils with weapons of defence against the whole combined phalanx of intidel geologists, transcendentalists, and rationalistic divines, both of the Paulus, and the Strauss stamp. His lectures on the doctrines would requires similar additions, to meet other evils not more formidable perhaps in themselves, yet much more annoying from their nearness to his own door. For the leaven of heterodox opinion in regard to the nature and extent of the atonement, special grace, and kindred subjects, which has of late spread so extensively among the two great sections of the United (?) Presbyterian Church, has found some of its most active propagators among those whose early theological training ho himself superintended. Nor can we believe that his lectures on Church Government and discipline would satisfy

in their present shape, while he saw his whole esteem of ecclesias