that can be sent to the press. Canst thou draw out of a little girl's mind, with hook or pen, the grief that is there because of her doll all broken and spoiled? The small leviathan of pain must swim there alone, unseen, in his native sea. Thou canst not draw out with a line. Sorrow is very deep. It does not rise to the levels of writing tablets. No one knows his own distress but himself, and the searching, all-knowing Spirit. Can mother, or motherly aunt, apprehend and dispatch, in the mail-bag, her little man's satisfaction at putting on his first manly suit, — with a pocket in it? Many a joy flies high upward towards its Source, and is too buoyant to come down and inscribe itself. The risen consciousness, risen from beneath the incubus of heedlessness and sin; time not used, and the great gift thrown away; then the bud and growth of a tender repentance, and the turning back to one's self and to the God of the penitent, these will not embark on printer's ink, and there ride before our eyes.

The heart is greater than books, and they cannot measure it. The heart is older than books, and they cannot go back and record its everlasting beginning, - cannot tell what it is, delineate its daily pulse of joy and sorrow. Books cannot paint the immortal hopes of the heart lighted up, and shone upon from the future and from heaven. The heart is not one earthen vessel and the book another, and the things of the Spirit poured from one into the other, as oil and wine are poured. The heart that is John's is of most respectable and heavenly lineage, and out of the life of God it comes to sojourn in these parts. By other methods, then, than the untutored rustic's mark or cross it signifies the bond between itself and Mary. Her love is taught after the same high system, and is above engrossing itself in a billet. Each is glad in the possession of the other. Each knows the other's gladness by his own, - by her own. Neither poet nor angel can write it. The feelings, social and religious, so nobly born can never find full expression in this lower language of The participating instincts of man and man must associate, must seek the real forms as they came from on

ours.

high. Men sit down by each other, and through the willing gates of mutual being pass to and fro.

"Thy actions to thy words accord, thy words

To thy large heart give utterance due, thy heart
Contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape."

The post-office serves me but poorly. I must have my prerogatives, heed the heavenly call, and away to my friend, or my friend must stop folding notes and away to me. Many a European for years reads of noble and excellent men living on these shores. It is not enough. It is not enough. Their faint images in books and letters he throws down. He will come and see the original life of original souls in America. The same necessity draws from here to the lands of our fathers. Existence, which the invention of Cadmus knows not of, is thick within all borders and in every habited spot. Knowledge, friendship, love, live only in apartments not made with hands. Wouldst thou know the Psalms? Having read, leave the Psalms and retire within the chamber no carpentry formed. Sitting there, the grace of the spirit will show them to the sitter.

The aspirations ascend far up, and the feathered quill cannot fly so high and write them. The longings have no biographers to tell how uneasy they go up and down the earth, and range within the bars of time and sense. It is not to be written how unsatisfied the best appetites feed from off common tables. The noble ambitions, at times, lie still and think and muse, - brood over this big, round earth, as over an egg, waiting for something to break shell, and appear worthy of human desires and capacities. Sometimes losing the grandeur of heaven-born mein, they sink down with folded wing, as if the universe were hollow, all vacuity but man's great hunger. Deep soundings below the plane of literature do the meditations make, dredging in the sea of being and destiny. They do this by the fireside, on the sunny bank, in the still shade of the summer grove, where the brook runs dreamily along, when the ear hears the waters of the ocean, and the eye sees the wide, billowy

field, or when the feet stand upon the mountain. At such times and places the heaven-plumed aspirations often get free from burdens, and rise easily to truth,-high up, on steady wing, soar in the realms of faith. When the mind is. thus clear, it mirrors, as no sacred lore can, the clear heavens, — the warm sun and the bright stars of the over-arching skies. Then a man's joys do not stick in his throat; he does not see a lion in the way; he does not say the harness is lacking, and the forces cannot be be led out and put in gear, his sorrows do not run down a steep place with him into the sea, or take him into the wilderness.

The thoughts are swift, and they outrun the winged words. The affections are too strong, the emotions too deep, for the most life-like page. Was the breath of God ever put in manuscript? be that breath in the baby with his dawning intelligence, and the opening of the divine and the human in him; be that breath of the Almighty pent up in the eager boy, letting out its eagerness upon books and bird's nest, or in man, testing its forces through the flesh, with human will and responsibility, upon work and play, money and conduct; or be that breath of the great Spirit in the soul, breathing back to the Most High in worship, in devotion, in love and good works. There is many a good man and scholar who cannot, in prose or verse or song, tell how happy have been some passages in his life, — cannot utter what liking he has for his friends, cannot express what enjoyment and newness of vision some books have given him. The types are not founded for printing, the ingredients of air not mixed for communicating, from the organs of speech, the revelation of beauty and the zest of the spirit some of us received, in the season of impressive youth, all alert and new, from the first reading of Virgil beneath an apple-tree, with a canopy of blossoms overhead, and sun and birds and bees all around. Printing House Square need not, in advance, advertise, "First Impressions Made on a Young Mind by the 'Arabian Nights." For the copy will never be carried up by the boy to the compositors. The author will never get on paper the imprint given to his boyish imagination by the mystic

grandeur of that book, by its wonderful fabrications and enchanting scenes.

Poor would be the book that is published if it did not impart something to this fluid nature of man that cannot be published. That is, the good book is an earthen vessel, in which to gather up some drops from the ocean of infinite wisdom and being, and from it pour into our little cup. Or, in other words, the pen is a wand, in skillful hands, to conjure up to the heart and fancy what the pen itself cannot depict. In a sense, what is in a book the reader puts into it. The page is a dead level, the heart and the imagination are the magician to raise from below the surface all surpassing forms.

It is a great thing to live. Since man cannot be traced in lettered lines, the stage has been built to enact him, pictures are painted to exhibit him, statues shaped to embody him. I have seen a reed stand in the waters of a dark and sedgy stream, palpitating and quivering with the ceaseless current. So we all, rooted to the ground, do sway to and fro with inexpressible desires, and with the Infinite entering this finite. Words are dumb to express what a world of soul was in Shakespeare, what a builder, building the temple of civilization, is the Bible. Not to be delineated is the gladness with which right minds are glad that enemies, Mrs. P. on one side of the broad aisle of the church and Mrs. Q. on the other, a northern nation in Europe and a southern, are getting friendly, and beginning to mellow and mingle, glad the war is over and slavery gone and unity forming, that the seasons know their courses, and that light is on all shores from Other Shores. When by emotions of great gratitude, praise, wonder, worship, sublimity, the soul, as on a wave, is borne above these flats, when, by the raptures of music, one is caught heavenward, at such times language is inar'ticulate, and can only give forth something like squeak and gibber, as once did the "sheeted dead" "in the Roman streets."

As there is an aroma, a perfume, a sweetness, which flowers and fruits and spicery cannot hold and be the meas

ure of, so the things of heart and mind and character cannot be inclosed in what is said or sung or written. The whole East Indiaman, above decks and below, the whole storied warehouse, is fragrant with the small parcels of fragrant products. The loveliness of the landscape, the freshness of foliage, the bleating of domestic herds, the beauteousness of murmuring rills and pebbly brooks, the majestic flow of the mighty river, the awe of the lofty mountain, all these speak for themselves. How, then, can syllables put forth all there is in love and friendship, and leave nothing for the kindly act to do, the gentle expression and the beaming eye? Lore and learning, in all the books of all times, are great; but greater is that which stands behind universal literature. Some improvement, before unheard of, must be made in the printing press before it can make one's prayers for him. Often, in his most aspiring mood, he cannot make them himself in that which drops from the tongue. The simplest language is too material. Silently the heart yearns towards the heavenly, and the Spirit maketh intercession with longings that cannot be uttered. The prayer-book, so serviceable, used aright, in the congregation and at the breakfast-table, is only a vehicle to carry the heart and the affections to God, -- from the hands of a good workman, a better framing of words than most could order for the occasion. The prayer itself is of the soul, and of the great helping Presence.

The eloquence of heart and mind, eye and lips, hearer and reporter, have no method yet invented for packing and preserving. Good teaching is where the teacher gives out more the spirit than the sound of the tongue. Communings are real and with the real. The interposed book or bible, psalm or sermon, they pierce through and through, running direct to their object, like rays of sun boring through films of fog. It hath been often seen how men of Godly cast, affecting the things of olden time, put behind them land and water and domestic convenience that they may stand by the remains of hoary age, so instinct with the riddle of humanity and with thoughts of the divine. Not unobserved are the loves of lovers, with whom, when it goes heavenliest with them, the