PROBATION.

"Small is it that thou canst trample the earth with its injuries under thy feet, as old Greek Zeno trained thee; thou canst love the earth while it injures thee, and even because it injures thee; for this a greater than Zeno was needed, and he, too, was sent. Knowst thou that Worship of Sorrow?' The temple thereof, opened some eighteen centuries ago, now lies in ruins, overgrown with jungle, the habitation of doleful creatures. Nevertheless, venture forward; in a low crypt, arched out of falling fragments, thou findest the altar still there, and its sacred lamp perennially burning."-Sartor Resartus.

'I will tell you, scholar, I have heard a grave divine say that God has two dwellings; one in heaven, and the other in a meek and thankful heart."-IZAAK WALTON,

AMONG the strongest of the fresh feelings excited by foreign travel—those fresh feelings which are an actual re-enforcement of life-is that of welcome surprise at the sympathy the traveller is able to yield, as well as privileged to receive. We are all apt to lose faith in the general resemblance between human beings when we have remained too long amid one set of circumstances; all of us nearly as weakly as the schoolgirl who thinks that the girl of another school cannot comprehend her feelings; or the statesman who is surprised that the lower classes appear sometimes to understand their own interests; or the moralist who starts back from the antique page where he meets the reflection of his own convictions; or the clergyman who has one kind of truth for his study and another for his pulpit. Intellectual sympathy comes to the traveller in a distant land like a benignant rebuke of his narrowness; and when he meets with moral beauty which is a realization of his deep and secret dreams, he finds how true it is that there is no nationality in the moral creation, and that, wherever grass grows and the sun shines, truth springs up out of the earth and righteousness looks down from heaven. Those who bring home a deep, grateful, influential conviction of this have become possessed of the best results of travel; those who are not more assured than before of the essential sympathy of every human being they meet, will be little the worse for staying at home all the rest of their lives. I was

delighted with an observation of a Boston merchant who had made several voyages to China. He dropped a remark by his own fireside on the narrowness which causes us to conclude, avowedly or silently, that, however well men may use the light they have, they must be very pitiable, very far behind us, unless they have our philosophy, our Christianity, our ways of knowing the God who is the Father of us all, and the Nature which is the home of us all. He said that his thoughts often wandered back with vivid pleasure to the long conversations he had enjoyed with some of his Chinese friends on the deepest themes of philosophy and the highest truths of religion, when he found them familiar with the convictions, the emotions, the hopes which, in religious New-England, are supposed to be derivable only from the Christianity of this region. His observation gave me intense pleasure at the time I heard it; and now, though I have no such outlandish friends as the Chinese appear to a narrow imagination, I can tell him, from a distance of three thousand miles, that his animating experience is shared by other minds.

The most extensive agreement that I have ever known to exist between three minds is between two friends of mine in America and myself, Dr. F. being German, Mrs. F. American, and I English, by birth, education, and (at least in one of the three) prejudice. Before any of the three met, all had become as fixed as they were ever likely to be in habits of thought and feeling; and yet our differences were so slight, our agreements so extensive, that our intercourse was like a perpetual recognition rather than a gradual revelation. Perhaps a lively imagination may conceive something of the charm of imparting to one another glimpses of our early life. While our years were passing amid scenes and occupations as unlike as possible, our minds were converging through foreign regions of circumstance to a common centre of conviction. We have sat mutually listening for hours, day after day, week after week, to his account of early years spent in the range of a royal forester's domain, and of the political struggles of later years; to her history of a youthful life nourished by all kinds of American influences; and to mine, as unlike both theirs as each was to the other.

The same sort of experience is yielded by every chapter of human history which comes under the mind's eye in a

foreign country. The indolence of the speculatist, however, generally prevents his making this use of any but the most extraordinary and eventful sections of this interminable history. Such contemplations rouse sympathy, extinguish nationality, and enlarge the spirit to admit new kindred by an irresistible assurance of the rightfulness of all claims of brotherhood. Every lovetale has this effect, for true love is the same all over the wide earth. Most tales of wo have the same influence, for the deepest woes spring from causes universally prevalent. But, above all, spectacles of moral beauty work miracles of reconciliation between foreign minds. The heart warms to every act of generosity, and the spirit sends out a fervent greeting to every true expression of magnanimity, whether it be meek intrepidity in doing or unconscious bravery in suffering.

Many such a heartwarming must the stranger experience in America, where the diversities of society are as great as over the European Continent, and where all virtues can find the right soil to thrive in. If there are in some regions broader exhibitions of vice-of licentiousness and violence —than can be seen where slavery is not, in other regions or amid different circumstances there are brighter revelations of virtue than are often seen out of a primitive state of society. One of these, one of many, may, I think, be spoken of without risk of hurting any feelings or betraying any confidence, though I must refrain from throwing such light and beauty over the story as the letters of the parties would afford. I was never so tempted to impart a correspondence; and it is not conceivable that any harm could arise from it beyond the mischief of violating the sacredness of private correspondence; but this is not to be thought of.

At Cincinnati I became acquainted with the Rev. E. P., whom I found to be beloved, fervently but rationally, by his flock, some of whom think him not a whit inferior, as a preacher, to Dr. Channing. He was from New-England; and, till he spoke, he might have been taken for one of the old Puritans risen from an early grave to walk the earth for a while. He was tall, gaunt, and severe-looking, with rather long black hair and very large black eyes. When he spoke all the severity vanished; his countenance and voice expressed gentleness, and his quiet fun showed that the inward man was no Puritan. His conversation was peculiar. His voice was somewhat hollow, and not quite manageable, and

he was wont to express himself with schoolboy abruptness and awkwardness of phrase, letting drop gems of truth and flowers of beauty without being in the least aware of the inequality of his conversation, or, perhaps, that he was conversing at all. Occasionally, when he had lighted on a subject on which he had bestowed much thought, all this inequality vanished, and his eloquence was of a very high order. He was a man who fixed the attention at once, and could not, after a single interview, be ever forgotten. The first time I saw him he told me that his wife and he had hoped to have made their house my home in Cincinnati, but that she and the child had been obliged to set out on their summer visit to her parents in New-England before my arrival. Whenever he spoke of his home it was in a tone of the most perfect cheerfulness; so that I should not have imagined that any anxieties harboured there but for the fervent though calm manner in which he observed in conversation one day, that outward evils are evils only as far as we think them so; and that our thinking them so may be wonderfully moderated by a full conviction of this. This was said in a tone which convinced me that it was not a fragment of preaching, but of meditation. I found that he had been about two years married to a pretty, lively, accomplished girl from New-England. Some of his friends were rather surprised at the match, for she had appeared hitherto only as a sprightly belle, amiable, but a little frivolous. It was not, however, that he was only proud of her beauty and accomplishments, or transiently in love; for his young wife had soon occasion to reveal a strength of mind only inferior to his own. Her sight began to fail; it failed more and more rapidly, till, after the birth of her child, she was obliged to surrender to others all the nicer cares of maternal management. Her accomplishments became suddenly useless. Her favourite drawing was first given up; then her needle was laid aside; then she could neither write nor read, nor bear a strong light. In her state of enforced idleness (the greatest trial of all to the spirits), her cheerfulness never failed. Her step was as light, her voice as gay as ever. She said it was because her husband was as happy as ever. He aided her in every conceivable way, by doing all that was possible of what she was prevented from doing, and by upholding her conviction that the mind is its own place;

and he thus proved that he did not desire for her or for himself indolent submission, but cheerful acquiescence.

As summer came on, the child sickened in teething, and was sent with its mother to New-England, in order to escape the greatest heats. They had set out, under good guardianship, the week before I arrived at Cincinnati. Mr. P. could not leave his church for many weeks, but was to follow in August, so as to be in time to deliver a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Massachusetts, in Harvard commencement week, I fancied that I saw him meditating this poem more than once during our drives through the splendid scenery round Cincinnati. I was uneasy about his health, and expressed some apprehensions to one of his friends, who, however, made light of what I said. I thought that, made for strength as he looked, he had little of it. He seemed incessantly struggling against exhaustion, and I was confident that he often joined in conversation with his eyes alone, because he was unequal to the exertion of talking. I was quite sure of all this, and wondered how others could help seeing it too, on the day of the procession of the freeschools of Cincinnati, when he was appointed to address the children. His evident effort in the pulpit and exhaustion afterward made me fear that there were more trials in store for his young wife. During their separation she could neither write to him nor read his letters.

When, towards the end of August, I arrived at Cambridge for commencement, one of my first inquiries was for the P.s. He had joined his wife, his poem was ready, and they were in cheerful spirits, though both her sight and the child's health were rather worse than better. I did not see them among the assemblage on the great commencement day. On the morrow, when the Phi Beta Kappa Society had marched in to music, and the oration had been delivered, and we all looked eagerly for Mr. P. and his poem, a young clergyman appeared, with a roll of MS. in his hand, and with a faltering voice, and a countenance of repressed grief, told us that Mr. P. had been seized with a sudden and severe illness, and had requested from him, as an office of friendship, that he would read the poem which its author was prevented from delivering. The tidings ran in a mournful whisper through the assemblage that Mr. P. had broken a bloodvessel.