level of American character. This upper class are often too refined to attend to their political duty. They are too much immersed in letters and pleasure too sublimated, to descend to the vulgar arena of elections. They may talk of public affairs, erect monuments to distinguished men, give of their abundance to all the showy, magnificent operations of the day, and yet do this with an exclusive spirit, and with a haughty patronage, that robs the thing of all republican odor.

It is vastly pleasant to live thus, we acknowledge; it is agreeable to meet none but well dressed, genteel people; and it may be flattering to one's self-love to be acknowledged to be above the mass -to belong to the elite; but this is ruinous to the self-respect of those less fortunate than ourselves in education, wealth, and opportunities. The political badinage about 'ruffled shirt gentry' is by no means unfounded as to fact; only that as many of the said luxurious gentlemen probably belong to one political party as to the other. That there will be an aristocracy in every government, as long as all men are not upon a level in moral and intellectual acquirements, is true; a set of agiotol -the best of men, and the more the better: but that people should set themselves up as grandees, look down upon the working classes, instruct their children, by example and precept, to give themselves airs, and make them believe they are of a higher race than the rest of their countrymen, is shocking and disgusting, in a country where merit is acknowledged to be the only path to respectability, and where poverty is felt to be no disgrace.

If in certain towns in the state of New-York this doctrine prevails, it is not general. New-York has no aristocracy, no hereditary grandeur to maintain. There are those who would like such a state of things, undoubtedly, but an overwhelming majority is arrayed against them. Her great population is the growth of a few years. The inhabitants of her thriving villages have grown up together, from small beginnings; some to wealth, some to reputation, and nearly all to ease and comfort. They have had no bad examples before their eyes to nullify the precepts of the declaration of equality. They have been united in poverty and labor; they are united in prosperity and happiness. In no section of our country is there so little parade of family. If wealth gives a man power, he exercises it to advance his pecuniary interests, not to separate himself from his former acquaintances. Some of her leading men are mechanics. They retain their occupation and their sign, though placed far beyond the necessity of manual labor, as if proud to be found in the paths of honest industry. What an incentive to the young mechanic is here! - and we see its effects. NewYork is emphatically the government of the people. New-England is emphatically the government of the few.

While the religious worship of New-England partakes of the drowsy nature of her politics wishing no change remaining satisfied with old notions, to escape the trouble of forming new ones the same life and energy which pervades the political character of New-York shows itself in her sacred observances. Here has risen up the doctrine of re

*Politicians, so called, in New-England, are neither of the highest nor lowest class, but a kind of medium. Legal and political ambition are rarely united there. When we say that New-England is the government of the few, we mean that political influence is so little cared for, that almost any one may obtain it.

vivals, four days' meetings, extemporaneous oratory, engrafting upon a church remarkable for its quiet dignity of manner and fixedness of opinion, something of the rant of Methodism and disorder of campmeetings. A people rife with life and ardor could not enjoy the plain, unvarnished truth, written out and delivered in periods never so smooth. They must have the thunders and lightnings that roared and blazed upon the top of Sinai pictured to them-vivid representations of happiness and misery-something striking, decided, and overpowering. And this, by the way, is the reason of the popularity of the Methodist worship in our western states. It has the stamp of originality, the independence of times and places, the disregard of human art and splendor, in keeping with the unwrought solemnity of the majestic woods, and the ceaseless music of the mighty waters.

Unitarianism obtains among many of the intellectual and refined in New-England, but it wants the life, eloquence — the elocution—to recommend it to people who see God, rather in the manifestations of his power, than in the evidences of his love. There is not enough of party zeal about it, to furnish points upon which to hang and wrangle about. It is, perhaps, necessarily sectarian, but it is sectarianism deprived of its gross misrepresentation, its heart-burnings and rank bitterness. It is rather the cause of religion, than of any system of theology, as furnishing the touch-stone of virtue. It is the cause of true liberality; not, as some suppose, of that liberality which would prostrate the temples of God, and tear out from the heart the idea of human responsibility; but that liberality which opens the soul to the mild and purifying influences of charity and love toward our fellow-men; makes human life a voyage of the affections; soothes down the asperities of our nature, and fills the mind with aspirations after something higher and better than merely temporal prosperity, while it encourages enlightened views of the nature and capabilities of man.

When our country shall have passed through the fiery youth of her existence, become satiated with excitements, have grown thoughtful with age, wise by experience when society shall have become settledwe may hope, not for the establishment of Unitarian sentiments, particularly, nor of any other specific doctrines, but for a system of truth so plain and obvious as to be beyond the ground of cavil and dispute, which shall not fluctuate with men, or accommodate itself to the passing tempests of popular feeling.

We have said New-England exerts a valuable influence in our country and she does. It is the land of steady habits, of a truth. The hardness and unproductiveness of the soil forces men to labor for subsistence; and when they labor they cannot play. The habits of industry they form there, they carry with them to the fertile west, and in a few years they are placed beyond want, and possess the means to give for the public good. Unless we are much mistaken, the unexampled progress of our western country is owing, in no small degree, to the directness and plain common sense of New-Englanders, applied to its great resources. Theorists and wild speculators can project large plans, and indulge in plausible designs, but one matter-of-fact man is worth them all, in a new country.

But in New-England was made the earliest attempt to establish an institution of learning. Harvard College has nurtured many pure

scholars, who have kept clear the fountain heads of literature, and exerted their unobtrusive influence from one extremity of our country to the other. Around the hallowed precincts of Yale, and Hanover, and Harvard places having a relative antiquity in the literary history of our country-still lingers the book-worm, the recluse, the martyr to letters men untrained to the graces of the world without, but trained within to a grace and dignity and elevation of mind, rarely appreciated, because rarely understood; but for every drop of blood dried up in their veins, a pure gem is added to the treasures of the soul. No other part of our country can produce such men, because no where else are the old walls of colleges, and walks trodden by successive generations of scholars, and shades rendered sacred by hours of silent meditation; where the air is redolent of poetic thought, and where inanimate nature herself seems to partake of the intellectual life around her.

But do we estimate the influence of New-England so highly, with all her faults? Her faults are hereditary: she hardly knows them herself, and it is only when away from her beautiful valleys and peaceful villages, that we feel that the real genius of liberty and equality, and republican principles, finds a truer sympathy in the lands which her own hands have helped to adorn, than in herself.

While we may improve ourselves in pointing out the characteristics of the different sections of our country, we neither express nor feel surprise at our dissimilarity. We believe - and we say it rather in a spirit of thankfulness than of boasting — that we are the best specimen of human government upon the earth-strong in our very difference. We are good hints to each other. Each has its own sphere of influence. We can never believe that governments are not as much under the guidance of Heaven as the physical world. Creation is progressive. Human affairs must progress, upon the whole, from the very laws of mind. We cannot, as a world, retrograde. Particular states may rise and fall, but there is a symmetry in things worked out by mighty hands. We believe ourselves the favored child of Heaven created as an example to the world. There is an organization of feeling and action, apparently discordant, adapted to the growth of the whole. Here are the gardens of mind, there the physical force to be directed; here are the fields that produce our sustenance, there the deserts that make us prize them; here are the waves lashed into fury, there the oil that flows over and calms them; here is the wild luxuriance, the rank growth of too rich a soil, there the restraining hand to crop it. On this hand is too much liberty, on that too much law. As a whole, we are a fine compound, and if we were asked which part of our country we most admired, our answer would be like the child's, who, being teased to tell which one of all his family he loved the best answered, I love you all best.'

Cortlandville, (N. Y.,) August, 1836.

ae

J. N. B.

* THE above ode was composed by SILVIO PELLICO while he was confined, in chains and darkness, within the damp walls of an Austrian dungeon, in Sclavonia. It has not heretofore been published nor translated. Every thing that comes from Pellico has an interest independent of any particular merit or importance in itself.

'And can forget men's names with a great grace.'—BEN. Jonson.

FROM what circumstance Screamy Point derives its name, I shall not undertake to decide. Some learned antiquarians assert that it was thus called, because its early settlers, being attacked one dark night by Indians, screamed so loudly in their panic, that they were heard at another jutting head-land nearly three miles distant, and drove away the savages, who mistook this formidable outcry for a tremendous yell of ambushed braves. Others, with perhaps a greater probability of truth, allege that it was originally designated Creamy Point, and that the foaming aspect of the breakers which dash against it, suggested the appellation. For myself, I incline to the conjecture that the true and veritable name of this celebrated watering place is Screamy Point, and that it was so christened by the matter-of-fact Yankees in the neighborhood, because the sea-gulls and fish-hawks made it resound with their dissonant cries, long before it had ever been dreamed of by ruralizing cits, as a place for summer recreation. Be this as it may, the cognomen is singularly appropriate. The aerial aborigines have been driven from their desolate haunt; but the pianos and babies, which have displaced them, loudly assert its claims to its original nomenclature.

But a few years since, and a solitary farm-house, with its unseemly appurtenances of barn-yard and pig-pen, was the sole tenement upon this rocky promontory. Suddenly its destinies were changed. There was a hammering and an hurrahing for a few weeks upon the lonely beach, and videlicit, a splendid edifice. Far out at sea is that stately pile discernible, with its long ranges of Corinthian pillars, and the national flag floating from its dome. When less favored spots are burning with unmitigated heat, cool breezes play through its halls and corridors, and the rustling of their fairy pinions, together with the monotonous roll of the untiring surf, might, were it not for human accompaniments, lull the dreamy and imaginative into an elysium of indolent bliss.

Screamy Point is now the focus of fashion, the very pivot of the beau monde. Crowds congregate there from all the cities in the union, and the aspiring rustics of the vicinity, eager to mingle with these brilliant strangers, flock thither in countless numbers Let none who are ambitious of moving in the first circles,' neglect a yearly visit to this noted place, though their stay be ever so fugitive. Through the livelong winter which succeeds, it will be to them an epoch- a glorious Hegira! When an occurrence is referred to by their associates, they may perhaps be able to exclaim, with a proud consciousness of exalted worth, It happened while I was at Screamy Point!' At all events, they can date and ante-date from that memorable era.

It was the close of a hot August day, and the shadows of evening had begun to shut in around the spot we have been describing. The white sails in the offing were fast fading into dim obscurity, and a blue haze rested upon the inland hills, blending their summits with the clouds. It was nearly time for the tea-bell to ring, and groups of gentlemen were assembled on the piazza of the mansion house. Some in a linen