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past life. They would form a curious panorama, and might serve to teach that in no circumstances, however apparently desperate, should men lose hope. Never forget that it is not necessary, in order to overcome gigantic difficulties, that one's strength should be gigantic. Persevering exertion is much more than strength. We owe to shovels and wheelbarrows, and human muscles of the average size and vigour, the great railway which connects the capitals of the two kingdoms. And the difficulties which encompass the young man of humble circumstances and imperfect education, must be regarded as coming under the same category as difficulties of the purely physical kind. Interrupted or insulated efforts, however vigorous, will be found to be but of little avail. It is to the element of continuity that you must trust. There is a world of sense in Sir Walter Scott's favourite proverb, Time and I, gentlemen, against any two.' But though it be unnecessary, in order to secure success, that one's efforts in the contest with gigantic difficulties should be themselves gigantic, it is essentially necessary that they should employ one's whole strength. Half efforts never accomplish anything. 'No man ever did anything well,' says Johnson, 'to which he did not apply the whole bent of his mind.' And unless a man keep his head cool, and his faculties undissipated, he need not expect that his efforts can ever be other than half efforts, or other than of a desultory, fitful, non-productive kind. We do not stand here in the character of a modern Rechabite. But this we must say: Let no young man ever beguile himself with the hope that he is to make a figure in society, or rise in the world, unless, as the apostle expresses it, he be 'temperate in all things.' Scotland has produced not a few distinguished men who were unfortunately not temperate; but it is well known that of one of the greatest of them all-perhaps one of the most vigorous-minded men our country ever produced the intemperate habits were not formed early. Robert Burns, up till his twentysixth year, when he had mastered all his powers, and produced some of his finest poems, was an eminently sober man. Climbing requires not only a steady foot, but a strong head; and we question whether any one ever climbed the perilous steep, where, according to Beattie, 'Fame's proud temple shines afar,' who did not keep his head cool during the process. So far as our own experience goes, we can truly state, that though we have known not a few working men, possessed some of them of strong intellects, and some of them of fine taste, and even of genius, not one have we ever known who rose either to eminence or a competency under early formed habits of intemperance. These indeed are the difficulties that cannot be surmounted, and the only ones. Rather more than thirty years ago, the drinking usages of the country

were more numerous than they are now. In the mechanical profession in which we laboured they were many: when a foundation was laid, the workmen were treated to drink; they were treated to drink when the walls were levelled; they were treated to drink when the building was finished; they were treated to drink when an apprentice joined the squad; treated to drink when his apron was washed; treated to drink when his 'time was out;' and occasionally they learned to treat one another to drink. At the first house upon which we were engaged as a slim apprentice boy, the workmen had a royal founding-pint, and two whole glasses of whisky came to our share. A full-grown man might not deem a gill of usquebaugh an overdose, but it was too much for a boy unaccustomed to strong drink; and when the party broke up, and we got home to our few books-few, but good, and which we had learned at even an earlier period to pore over with delight-we found as we opened the page of a favourite author, the letters dancing before our eyes, and that we could no longer master his sense. The state was perhaps a not very favourable one for forming a resolution in, but we believe the effort served to sober us. We determined in that hour that never more would we sacrifice our capacity of intellectual enjoyment to a drinking usage; and during the fifteen years which we spent as an operative mason, we held, through God's help, by the determination. We are not sure whether, save for that determination, we would had had the honour of a place on this platform to-night. But there are other kinds of intoxication than that which it is the nature of strong drink or of drugs to produce. Bacon speaks of a 'natural drunkenness.' And the hallucinations of this natural drunkenness must be avoided if you would prosper. Let us specify one of these. Never let yourselves be beguiled by the idea that fate has misplaced you in life, and that were you in some other sphere you would rise. It is true that some men are greatly misplaced; but to brood over the idea is not the best way of getting the neces sary exchange effected. It is not the way at all. Often the best policy in the case is just to forget the misplacement. We remember once deeming ourselves misplaced, when, in a season of bad health and consequent despondency, we had to work among labourers in a quarry. But the feeling soon passed, and we set ourselves carefully to examine the quarry. Cowper describes a prisoner of the Bastile beguiling his weary hours by counting the nailstuds on the door of his cell, upwards, downwards, and across,

'Wearing out time in numbering to and fro,
The studs that thick emboss his iron door;
Then downward and then upwards, then aslant
And then alternate; with a sickly hope
By dint of change to give his tasteless task

Some relish; till, the sum exactly found
In all directions, he begins again.'

It was idle work; for to reckon up the doorstuds never so often was not the way of opening up the door. But in carefully examining and recording for our own use the appearances of the stony bars of our prison, we were greatly more profitably employed. Nay, we had stumbled on one of the best possible modes of escaping from our prison. We were in reality getting hold of its bolts and its stancheons, and converting them into tools in the work of breaking out. We remember once passing a whole season in one of the dreariest districts of the north-western Highlands,- -a district included in that unhappy tract of country, doomed, we fear, to poverty and suffering, which we find marked in the rain-map of Europe with a double shade of blackness. We had hard work, and often soaking rain, during the day; and at night our damp fuel filled the turf hut in which we sheltered with suffocating smoke, and afforded no light by which to read. Nor-even ere the year got into its wane, and when in the long evenings we had light-had we any books to read by it, or a single literary or scientific friend with whom to exchange an idea. We remember at another time living in an agricultural district in the low country, in a hovel that was open along the ridge of the roof from gable to gable, so that as we lay a-bed we could tell the hours of the night by the stars that were passing overhead across the chasm. There were about half-a-dozen farm-servants, victims to the bothie system, that ate and slept in the same place; and often, long after midnight, a disreputable poacher used to come stealthily in, and fling himself on a lair of straw that he had prepared for himself in a corner. Now, both the Highland hut and the Lowland hovel, with their accompaniments of protracted and uncongenial labour, might be regarded as dreary prisons; and yet we found them to be in reality useful schools, very necessary to our education. And now, when we hear about the state of the Highlands, and the character of our poor Highlanders, and of the influence of the bothie system and of the game-laws, we feel that we know considerably more about such matters than if our experience had been of a more limited or more pleasant kind. There are few such prisons in which a young man of energy and a brave heart can be placed, in which he will not gain more by taking kindly to his work, and looking well about him, than by wasting himself in convulsive endeavours to escape. If he but learn to think of his prison as a school, there is good hope of his ultimately getting out of it. Were a butcher's boy to ask us-you will not deem the illustration too low, for you will remember that Henry Kirke White was once a butcher's boy-were he to ask us how we thought he could best escape from his miserable employment, we would at once say, You have rare

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opportunities of observation; you may be a butcher's boy in body, but in mind you may become an adept in one of the profoundest of the sciences, that of comparative anatomy;-think of yourself as not in a prison, but in a school, and there is no fear but you will rise. There is another delusion of that natural drunkenness' referred to, against which you must also be warned. Never sacrifice your independence to a phantom. We have seen young men utterly ruin themselves through the vain belief that they were too good for their work. They were mostly lads of a literary turn, who had got a knack of versifying, and who, in the fond belief that they were poets and men of genius, and that poets and men of genius should be above the soil and drudgery of mechanical labour, gave up the profession by which they had lived, poorly mayhap, but independently, and got none other to set in its place. A mistake of this character is always a fatal one; and we trust all of you will ever remember, that though a man may think himself above his work, no man is, or no man ought to think himself, above the high dignity of being independent. In truth, he is but a sorry, weak fellow who measures himself by the conventional status of the labour by which he lives. Our great poet formed a correcter estimate:

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodden grey, and a' that?
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine,
A man's a man for a' that.'

There is another advice which we would fain give you, though it may be regarded as of a somewhat equivocal kind: Rely upon yourselves. The man who sets his hopes upon patronage, or the exertions of others in his behalf, is never so respectable a man, and, save in very occasional instances, rarely so lucky a man, as he who bends his exertions to compel fortune in his behalf, by making himself worthy of her favours. Some of the greatest wrecks we have seen in life have been those of waiters on patronage; and the greatest discontents which we have seen in corporations, churches, and states, have arisen from the exercise of patronage. Shakespeare tells us, in his exquisite vein, of a virtue that is twice blessed-blessed in those who give, and blessed in those who receive. Patronage is twice cursed-cursed in the incompetency which it places where merit ought to be, and in the incompetency which it creates among the class who make it their trust. But the curse which you have mainly to avoid is that which so often falls on those who waste their time and suffer their energies to evaporate in weakly and obsequiously waiting upon it. We therefore say, Rely upon yourselves. But there is One other on whom you must rely; and implicit reliance on Him, instead of inducing weakness, infinitely increases strength. Bacon has

well said, that a dog is brave and generous when he believes himself backed by his master, but timid and crouching, especially in a strange place, when he is alone and his master away. And a human master, says the philosopher, is as a god to the dog. It certainly does inspire a man with strength to believe that his great Master is behind him, invigorating him in his struggles, and protecting him against every danger. We knew in early life a few smart infidels-smart but shallow; but not one of them ever found their way into notice; and though we have not yet lived out our half century, they have in that space all disappeared. There are various causes which conspire to write it down as fate, that the humble infidel should be unsuccessful in life. In the first place, infidelity is not a mark of good sense, but very much the reverse. We have been much struck by a passage which occurs in the autobiography of a great general of the early part of the last century. In relating the disasters and defeats experienced in a certain campaign by two subordinate general officers, chiefly through misconduct, and a lack of the necessary shrewdness, he adds, "I ever suspected the judgment of these men since I found that they professed themselves infidels.' The sagacious general had inferred that their profession of infidelity augured a lack of sense; and that, when they got into command, the same lack of sense which led them to glory in their shame would be productive, as its necessary results, of misfortune and disaster. There is a shrewd lesson here to the class who doubt and cavil simply to show their parts. In the second place, infidelity, on the principle of Bacon, is a weak, tottering thing, unbuttressed by that support which gives to poor human nature half its strength and all its dignity. But, above all, in the third and last place, the humble infidel, unballasted by right principle, sets out on the perilous voyage of life without chart or compass, and, drifting from off the safe course, gets among rocks and breakers, and there perishes. But we must not trespass on your time. With regard to the conduct of your studies, we simply say, Strive to be catholic in your tastes. Some of you will have a leaning to science; some to literature. To the one class we would say, Your literature will be all the more solid if you can get a vein of true science to run through it; and to the other, Your science will be all the more fascinating if you temper and garnish it with literature. In truth, almost all the greater subjects of man's contemplation belong to both fields. Of subjects such as astronomy and geology, for instance, the poetry is as sublime as the science is profound. As a pretty general rule, you will perhaps find literature most engaging in youth, and science as you grow in years. But faculties for both have been given you by the great Taskmaster, and it is your bounden duty that these be exercised aright.

And so let us urge you, in conclusion, in the words of Coleridge:

'Therefore to go and join head, heart, and hand, Active and firm to fight the bloodless fight Of science, freedom, and the truth in Christ.'"

THE MOSAIC VISION OF CREATION.*

Such a description of the creative vision of Moses as the one given by Milton of that vision of the future which he represents as conjured up before Adam by the archangel would be a task rather for the scientific poet than for the mere practical geologist or sober theologian. Let us suppose that it took place far from man, in an untrodden recess of the Midian desert, ere yet the vision of the burning bush had been vouch. safed; and that, as in the vision of St John in Patmos, voices were mingled with scenes, and the ear as certainly addressed as the eye. A "great darkness" first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the "horror;" and, as the Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildlytroubled waters, as a visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is orally enunciated, that "in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision into a few brief moments, pass away; the creative voice is again heard, "Let there be light," and straightway a grey diffused light springs up in the east, and, casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the west. One heavy, sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint light waxes fainter-it sinks beneath the dim undefined horizon; the first scene of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits awhile on his hill-top in darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless night.

The light again brightens-it is day; and over an expanse of ocean without visible bound, the horizon has become wider and sharper of outline than before. There is life in that great seainvertebrate, mayhap also ichthyic life; but, from the comparative distance of the point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves can be decerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a gentle gale; and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. That lower stratum of the heavens occupied in the previous vision by scething steam, or grey, smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region, where the previously invisible vapour of the tepid sea has thickened in the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the atmosphere, they lie, thick and manifold-an upper sea of great waves, separated from those beneath by

* "Testimony of the Rocks."

the transparent firmament, and, like them too, impoiled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty advance has taken place in creation; but its most conspicuous optical sign is the existence of a transparent atmosphere of a firmament stretched out over the earth, that separates the waters above from the waters below. But darkness descends for the third time upon the seer, for the evening and the morning have completed the second day.

Yet again the light rises under a canopy of cloud; but the scene has changed, and there is no longer an unbroken expanse of sea. The white surf breaks, at the distant horizon, on an insulated reef, formed mayhap by the Siluriar or Old Red coral zoophytes ages before, during the bygone yesterday; and beats in long lines of foam, nearer at hand, against a low, winding shore, the seaward barrier of a widely-spread country. For at the Divine command the land has risen from the deep,-not inconspicuously and in scattered islets, as at an earlier time, but in extensive though flat and marshy continents, little raised over the sea-level; and a yet further flat has covered them with the great Carboniferous flora. The scene is one of mighty forests of cone-bearing trees,-of palms, and tree-ferns, and gigantic club-mosses, on the opener slopes, and of great reeds clustering by the sides of quiet lakes and dark rolling rivers. There is deep gloom in the recesses of the thicker woods, and low thick mists creep along the dank marsh cr sluggish stream. But there is a general light▾ening of the sky overhead: as the day declines, a redder flush than had hitherto lighted up the prospect falls athwart fern-covered bank and long withdrawing glade. And while the fourth evening has fallen on the prophet, he becomes sensible, as it wears on and the fourth dawn approaches, that yet another change has taken place. The Creator has spoken, and the stars look out from openings of deep unclouded blue; and as day rises, and the planet of morning pales in the east, the broken cloudlets are transmuted from bronze into gold, and anon the gold becomes fire, and at length the glorious sun arises out of the sea, and enters on his course rejoicing. It is a brilliant day; the waves, of a deeper and softer blue than before, dance and sparkle in the light; the earth, with little else to attract the gaze, has assumed a garb of brighter green; and as the sun declines amid even richer glories than those which had encircled his rising, the moon appears full-orbed in the east,-to the human eye the second great luminary of the heavens, and climbs slowly to the zenith as night advances, shedding its mild radiance on land and sea,

Again the day breaks; the prospect consists, as before, of land and ocean. There are great pine woods, reed-covered swamps, wide plains, winding rivers, and broad lakes; and a bright sun shines over all. But the landscape derives

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its interest and novelty from a feature unmark. ed before. Gigantic birds stalk along the sands, or wade far into the water in quest of their ichthyic food; while birds of lesser size float upon the lakes, or scream discordant in hovering flocks, thick as insects in the calm of a summer evening, over the narrower seas, or brighten with the sunlit gleam of their wings the thick woods. And ocean has its monsters: great "tanninim" tempest the deep, as they heave their huge bulk over the surface, to inhale the life-sustaining air; and out of their nostrils goeth smoke, as out of a "seething pot or caldron." Monstrous creatures, armed in massive scales, haunt the rivers, or scour the flat rank meadows; earth, air, and water are charged with animal life; and the sun sets on a busy scene, in which unerring instinct pursues unremittingly its few simple ends-the support and preservation of the individual, the propagation of the species, and the protection and maintenance of the young.

Again the night descends, for the fifth day has closed; and morning breaks on the sixth and last day of creation. Cattle and beasts of the field graze on the plains; the thick-skinned rhinoceros wallows in the marshes; the squat hippopotamus rustles among the reeds, or plunges sullenly into the river; great herds of elephants seek their food amid the young herbage of the woods; while animals of fiercer nature-the lion, the leopard, and the bear-harbour in deep caves till the evening, or lie in wait for their prey amid tangled thickets, or beneath some broken bank. At length, as the day wanes and the shadows lengthen, man, the responsible lord of creation, formed in God's own image, is introduced upon the scene, and the work of creation ceases for ever upon the earth. The night falls once more upon the prospect, and there dawns yet another morrowthe morrow of God's rest-that Divine Sabbath in which there is no more creative labour, and which, "blessed and sanctified" beyond all the days that had gone before, has as its special object the moral elevation and final redemption of man. And over it no evening is represented in the record as falling, for its special work is not yet complete. Such seems to have been the sublime panorama of creation exhibited in vision of old to

"The shepherd who first taught the chosen seed, In the beginning how the heavens and earth Rose out of chaos;"

and rightly understood, I know not a single scientific truth that militates against even the minutest or least prominent of its details.

THE WORKING MAN'S TRUE POLICY.* My advice to young working men desirous of bettering their circumstances, and adding to the

* "Old Red Sandstone."

amount of their enjoyment, is a very simple one. Do not seek happiness in what is misnamed pleasure; seek it rather in what is termed study. Keep your consciences clear, your curiosity fresh, and embrace every opportunity of cultivating your minds. You will gain nothing by attending Chartist meetings. The fellows who speak nonsense with fluency at these assemblies, and deem their nonsense eloquence, are totally unable to help either you or themselves; or, if | they do succeed in helping themselves, it will be all at your expense. Leave them to harangue unheeded, and set yourselves to occupy your leisure hours in making yourselves wiser men. Learn to make a right use of your eyes: the commonest things are worth looking at-even stones and weeds, and the most familiar animals. Read good books, not forgetting the best of all: there is more true philosophy in the Bible than in every work of every sceptic that ever wrote; and we would be all miserable creatures without it, and none more miserable than you. You are jealous of the upper classes; and perhaps it is too true that, with some good, you have received much evil at their hands. It must be confessed they have hitherto been doing comparatively little for you, and a great deal for themselves. But upper and lower classes there must be so long as the world lasts; and there is only one way in which your jealousy of them can be well directed: do not let them get ahead of you in intelligence. It would be alike unwise and unjust to attempt casting them down to your own level, and no class would suffer more in the attempt than yourselves; for you would only be clearing the way, at an immense expense of blood, and under a tremendous pressure of

misery, for another and perhaps worse aristocracy, with some second Cromwell or Napoleon at their head. Society, however, is in a state of continual flux: some in the upper classes are from time to time going down, and some of you from time to time mounting up to take their places-always the more steady and intelligent among you, remember; and if all your minds were cultivated, not merely intellectually, but morally also, you would find yourselves, as a body, in the possession of a power which every charter in the world could not confer upon you, and which all the tyranny or injustice of the world could not withstand.

I intended, however, to speak rather of the pleasure to be derived by even the humblest, in the pursuit of knowledge, than of the power with which knowledge in the masses is invariably accompanied. For it is surely of greater importance that men should receive accessions to their own happiness, than to the influence which they exert over other men. There is none of the intellectual, and none of the moral faculties, the exercise of which does not lead to enjoyment; nay it is chiefly in the active employment of these that all enjoyment consists; and hence it is that happiness bears so little reference to station. It is a truth which has been often told, but very little heeded or little calculated upon, that though one nobleman may be happier than another, and one labourer hap pier than another, yet it cannot be at all premised of their respective orders that the one is in any degree happier than the other. Simple as the fact may seem, if universally recognised it would save a great deal of useless discontent, and a great deal of envy.

LEIGH HUNT. BORN 1784: DIED 1859.
(From the Indicator.)

PLEASANT RECOLLECTIONS CONNECTED

WITH THE METROPOLIS.

insist upon pleasant materials to work on. Nor, indeed, does health. Health will give us a vague sense of delight, in the midst of objects that ONE of the best secrets of enjoyment is the art would teaze and oppress us during sickness. of cultivating pleasant associations. It is an But healthy association peoples this vague sense art that of necessity increases with the stock of with agreeable images. It will relieve us, even our knowledge; and though in acquiring our when a painful sympathy with the distresses of knowledge we must encounter disagreeable asso- others becomes a part of the very health of our ciations also, yet, if we secure a reasonable minds. For instance, we can never go through quantity of health by the way, these will be far St Giles's, but the sense of the extravagant inless in number than the agreeable ones: for, un- equalities in human condition presses more foreless the circumstances which gave rise to the ibly upon us; but some pleasant images are at associations press upon us, it is only from want hand even there to refresh it. They do not disof health that the power of throwing off these place the others, so as to injure the sense of burdensome images becomes suspended. public duty which they excite; they only serve And the beauty of this art is, that it does not to keep our spirits fresh for their task, and

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