wall of circumvallation, and flinging it down in huge fragments. The assault and defence were alike desperate. The night grew pitchy dark, and the only evidence that men were around me, was the clang of arms.

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Christians; and a singular prophecy of their | Master was declared to be the warning of their escape. It is certain that of his followers, including many even of our priests and learned men, scarcely one remained. They declared that the evil menaced by the Divine Wisdom through Moses-(may he rest in glo

ter was the consummating crime; and that, in the Romans, the nation "of a strange speech," flying on "eagle wings from the ends of the earth," was already commissioned against a people stained with the blood of the Messiah.

A sudden flash showed me that 1 had reached the foot of the rampart. The besieged, carried away by their native impetu-ry!) was come; that the death of their Masosity, poured down in crowds. Their leader, cheering them on, was struck by a lance and fell. The sight rallied the enemy. I felt that now or never was the moment for my escape. I rushed in front, and called out my name.-At the voice the wounded leader uttered a cry which I well knew. I caught him from the ground. A gigantic centurion darted forward, and grasped my robe. Embarrassed with my burden, I was on the point of being dragged back; the centurion's sword glittered over my head. With my only weapon, a stone, I struck him a furious blow on the forehead.The sword fell from his grasp; I seized it, and keeping the rest at bay, and in the midst of shouts from my countrymen, leaped the trench with the nobler trophy in my arms. I had rescued Constantius!

Jerusalem was now verging on to the last horrors. I could scarcely find my way through her ruins. The noble buildings were destroyed by conflagration, or the assaults of the various factions. The monuments of our kings and tribes were lying in mutilation at my feet. Every man of former eminence was gone. Massacre and exile were the masters of the higher ranks; and even the accidental distinctions into which the humbler in birth or opulence were thrown by the few past years, involved a fearful purchase of public hazard. Like men in an earthquake, the elevation of each was only a sign to him of the working of an irresistible principle of ruin. But the most formidable characteristic was the change wrought upon the popular mind.

Three factions divided Jerusalem, even while the Roman battering-rams were shaking her colossal towers. Three armies fought night and day within the city, carrying on the operations of war with more than civil fury. Streets undermined, houses battered down, granaries burned, wells poisoned, the perpetual shower of death from the roofs, made the external hostility trivial: and the Romans required only patience to have been bloodless masters of a city, which yet they would have found only a tomb of its people.

I wandered, an utter stranger, through Jerusalem. All the familiar faces were gone. At an early period of the war many of the higher ranks, forseeing the event, had left the city; at a later, my victory over Cestius, by driving back the enemy, gave a free passage to a crowd of others. It was at that time remarked that the chief fugitives were

Fatally was the word of the great prophet of Israel accomplished; fearfully fell the sword to smite away root and branch; solemnly, and by a hand which scorned the strength of man, was the deluge of ruin let loose against the throne of David. And still, though almost two thousand years, the flood of desolation is at the full; no moutain-top is seen rising; no spot is left clear for the sole of the Jewish foot; no dove returns with the olive. Eternal King, shall this be for ever! Wilt thou utterly reject the children of him whom thy right hand brought from the land of the idolater! Wilt thou forever hide thy might from the tribes whom thy servant Moses led through the burning wilderness!Wilt thou not bring back the broken kingdom of thy servant Israel! Still we wander in darkness, the tenants of a prison whose wails we feel at every step; the scoff of the idolater; the captive of the infidel: have we not abided without king or priest, or ephod or teraphim, many days, and when are those days to be at an end!

Yet, is not the deluge at last about to subside! Is not the trumpet at the lip to summon thy chosen; are not the broken tribes now awaiting thy command to come from the desert-from the sea-1 -from the dungeon-from the mine-like the light from darkness? 1 gaze upon the stars, and think, countless and glorious as they are, such shall yet be thy multitude and thy splendor, people of the undone! The promise of the King of kings is fulfilling; and even now, to my withered eyes, to my struggling prayer, to the deep agonies of a supplication that no tongue can utter, there is a vision and an answer. knees, worn by the flint, I hear the midnight voice; and weeping wait for the day that will come, though heaven and earth should pass away.

On my

My first object was to ascertain the fate of my family. From Constantius I could learn nothing; for the severity of his wound had reduced him to such a state, that he recognised no one. I sat by him day after day, watching with bitter solicitude for the return of his

every other name that I loved. The affecting|| but hatred of the enemy, iron fortitude, and a eloquence of his appeals sometimes plunged me determination not to survive the fall of Jeru into the deepest depression; sometimes drove me out to seek relief from them even in the horrors of the streets; I was the most solitary of men. In those melancholy wanderings, none spoke to me; I spoke to none. The kinsmen whom I had left under the command of my brave son, were slain or dispersed; and on the night when I saw him battling with his native ardor, || the men whom he led to the foot of the ram-mand: but ambition was dead within me. part were an accidental band, excited by his brilliant intrepidity to choose him at the instant for their captain. In sorrow, indeed, had I entered Jerusalem.

No. 10.

Beauties of Salathiel.

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me. Yet when I looked round the room, and thought of what I had been, of the opulent enjoyments of my palace, and of the beloved faces that surrounded me there, I felt the sick

fierceness of frenzy. The eye shot fire un-multitude. I retired to my chamber of afflicder the sharp and hollow brows; the nostrils|tion, and busied myself in preparing for the contracted and opened like those of an angry guard of the Temple, to withdraw my mind steed; and every muscle of a singularly elas- || from the gloom that was beginning to master tic frame was quivering and exposed from the effects alike of mental violence and famine. "Ho! Prince of Naphtali! we meet at last!" was his exclamation: his countenance fell; and a tear gushed from lids that lookedness of the heart. incapable of human weakness. "I found her, my beauty, my bride! She was in the dungeon. The seal-ring that I tore from that villain's finger was worth a mine of gold, for|| it opened the gates of her prison. Come forth, girl!" With these words he caught by the hand, and led to me a pale creature, with the traces of loveliness, but evidently in the last stage of mortal decay. She stood silent as a statue. In compassion I took her hand, while the multitude gathered round us in curiosity. I now remembered Sabat the Ishmaelite, and his story.

"She is mad," said Sabat, shaking his head mournfully, and gazing on the fading form at his side. "Worlds would not restore her senses. But there is a time for all things." He sighed, and cast his full eye on heaven."I watched her day and night," he went on, "till I grew mad too. But the world will have an end, and then all will be well. Come, wife, we must be going. To-night there are strange things within the walls, and without the walls. There will be feasting and mourn ing; there will be blood and tears: then comes the famine-then comes the fire-then the sword; and then all is quiet again, and forever! But heaven is mighty. To-night there|| will be wonders; watch well your walls, people of the ruined city. To-night there will be signs; let no man sleep, but those that sleep in the grave. Prince of Naphtali!have you too sworn, as I have, to die?" He lifted his meagre hand.

"Come, ye thunders; come, ye fires: vengeance cries from the sanctuary. Listen! undone people; listen! nation of sorrow, to the trumpets of the ministers of wrath. Woe -woe-woe!"

The chilling air that blew through the dilapidated walls, the cruse of water, the scanty bread, the glimmering lamp, the comfortless and squallid bed, on which lay, in the last stage of weakness, a patriot and a hero,-being full of fine affections and abilities, reduced to the helplessness of an infant, and whom, in leaving for the night, I might be leaving to perish by the poniard of the robber,-unmanned me. I cast the scimetar from my hand, and sat down with a sullen determination there to linger until death, or that darker vengeance which haunted me, should do its will.

The night was stormy, and the wind rolled in long and bitter gusts through the deserted chambers of the huge mansion. But the mind is the true place of suffering; and I felt the season's visitation in my locks drenched about my face, and my tattered robes swept by the freezing blasts, as only the natural course of things.

I was sitting by the bed-side, moistening the fevered lips of Constantius with water, and pressing on him the last fragment of bread which I might ever have to give, when I, with sudden delight, heard him utter for the first time articulate sounds. I stooped my ear to catch accents so dear and full of hope. But the words were a supplication. He prayed to the Christian's God!

I turned away from this resistless conviction of his belief. But this was no time for debate, and I was won to listen again. His voice was scarcely above a whisper, but his language was the aspiration of a glowing heart. His eyes were closed; and evidently unconscious of my presence, in his high communion with heaven, he talked of things of which I had but imperfect knowledge, or none; of blood shed for the sins of man; of a descended Spirit to guard the path of the servants of heaven; of the unspeakable love that gave the Son of God to torture and mortal death for the atonement of that human ini

Pronouncing those words with a voice of the most sonorous, yet melancholy power, he threw himself into a succession of strange and fearful gestures; then beckoning to the female who submissively followed his steps, plunged away among the multitude. I heard the howl of "Woe woe-woe!" long ech-quity, which nothing but such a sacrifice could oed through the windings of the ruined streets; and thought that I heard the voice of the angel of desolation.

The seventeenth day of the month Tamuz, ever memorable in the sufferings of Israel, was the last of the Daily Sacrifice. Sorrow and fear were on the city; and the silence of the night was broken by lamentation from thell

atone. He named the names dear to us both; and praying "for their safety, if they were in life, or for their meeting beyond the grave, resigned himself to the will of his Lord."

I waited in sacred awe till I saw, by the subsiding motion of the lips, that the inward prayer which followed was done; and then, anxious to gain information of my family,

Spring Flowers-Our Country

No. 10.

own?

are never to expect to have every thing go exactly right in this world. At best, we can make only a distant approximation to perfection. This is all which we are to expect in others, and certainly it is all that a modest man can expect others to find in him. We are to endeavor to palliate the evils which come within our sphere, not to quarrel with them, and be constantly complaining of them, and of our want of complete success. We are

ity of scenery, what country can surpass our What country can equal the life-sustaining power that slumbers in her soil? With all her wealth, improvements, and intelligence, and with our 20,000,000 of inhabitants, still we have but just commenced the settlement of our country and are only on the borders of the mighty wilderness. Her undeveloped resources are capable of sustaining a free population of more than 100,000,000. A century hence, in 1939, the United States || also to bear with patience those which we of America, with 50 stars upon her banner, cannot remove. Though we cannot effect may welcome, at the dawning of that new-every thing that might be desirable, yet we year's morn, no less than 120,000,000 of hap- can all contribute something to the general py freemen. How exalted may then be the good. intelligence and virtue of the people. The Next to self-control, or an almost impertursuccess of our efforts in the improvement of bable equanimity, probably the most important our schools and the general diffusion of know-in a character for influence, is independence ledge, enables us to make an estimate of what our posterity of the third generation are likely to become.

Active must be the ardent imagination that can picture the scene at a glance. The ideal landscape cannot equal the reality, however lively may be the fancy. The idea of such a view as we have fancied to be beheld from the mountain-top a hundred years from this day, can never be conveyed by words-the picture must be painted by the wonder-working power of ideality.

Our country! such is thy physical greatness and such the intellectual and moral power that now give promise of a glorious destiny, far beyond all parallel in the annals of the world. For such a destiny may thy institutions be well sustained, and may a halo of glory play about the name of every man who honestly labors in behalf of his fellows and posterity, to uphold, purify, perpetuate, and extend them.

WEIGHT OF CHARACTER.

and firmness. And perhaps no two qualities are more commonly mistaken and misunderstood. Independence consists in a man's thinking for himself; firmness, in acting for himself, according to the dictates of his conscience. There is a wrong, as well as a right way of exhibiting both of these qualities.They ought rarely, if ever, to be called into operation upon matters of indifference or mere expediency; and when they are required, they usually have much more influence when exercised in a smooth, than in a rough and forbidding manner. It is a great error to imagine that a man cannot be independent unless he thinks differently from the great mass of mankind upon plain and common sense topics, so that he must be always disputing, and taking the opposite side. He also makes the same mistake as to firmness, by obstinately adhering to matters of little importance. People of this description are generally the last to yield to others the liberties they are constantly taking themselves, and though always inclined to dispute, are yet the most impatient when their own opinions are controverted, even in the most delicate manner. They are a kind of noli metangere, (touch me not) with which it is difficult to come in contact without a sting. Such a character never succeeds well in any situation, and it is most of all unhappy in a professional man.

In analyzing the human powers and faculties, and examining the springs of action, by which influence is easily exercised over others; in a word, to define what constitutes character, or weight of character, we often find it a difficult matter to explain. Integrity, industry, skill, and many talents of the first True independence and firmness keep a order, may be occasionally possessed, and yet man stable and consistent, without leading the unhappy person may have very little in-him into the extreme measures of an ultra fluence, and consequently but imperfect suc- partizan, He adheres steadily to his own cess in most of his undertakings. The truth opinions, but does not obtrude them when they is, I apprehend, that he has some prominent are uncalled for by the occasion. defect in his character, which prevents him from having what would otherwise be, his proportional influence in society.

The glory of a good man is the testimony of a good conscience: have that and thou The most important point is to acquire self-wilt have inward peace in the midst of many command, if we ever expect to have any permanent influence over others. We must not lose our balance, whenever we meet with Men often go from love to ambition, but selany trifling unpleasant circumstance. We "dom return from ambition to love.

troubles.