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ter's clay-and that though Christ died to save | crowded in silence, as beneath the shadow of sinners, sinners who believe in Him, and therefore shall not perish, may yet lose hold of the belief when their understandings are darkened by the shadow of death, and, like Peter losing faith and sinking in the sea, feel themselves descending into some fearful void, and cease here to be, ere they find voice to call on the name of the Lord-"Help, or I perish!"

a thunder-cloud, to see some one single human being die-or swaying and swinging back wards and forwards, and to and fro, to hail a victorious armament returning from the war of Liberty, with him who hath "taken the start of this majestic world" conspicuous from afar in front, encircled with music, and with the standard of his unconquered country afloat above his head. Thus, and by many thousand other potent influences for ever at work, and from which the human heart can never make its safe escape-let it flee to the uttermost parts of the earth, to the loneliest of the multitude of the isles of the sea-are men, who vainly dream that they are Atheists, forced to feel God. Nor happens this but rarely-nor are such "angel-visits few and far between." As the most cruel have often, very often, thoughts tender as dew, so have the most dark often, very often, thoughts bright as day. The sun's golden finger writes the name of God on the clouds, rising or setting, and the Atheist, falsely so called, starts in wonder and in delight, which his soul, because it is immortal, cannot resist, to behold that Bible suddenly opened before his eyes on the sky. Or some old, decrepit, grayhaired crone, holds out her shrivelled hand, with dim eyes patiently fixed on his, silently asking charity-silently, but in the holy name of God; and the Atheist, taken unawares, at the very core of his heart bids "God bless her," as he relieves her uncomplaining miseries.

What may be the nature of the thoughts and feelings of an Atheist, either when in great joy or great sorrow, full of life and the spirit of life, or in mortal malady and environed with the toils of death, it passes the power of our imagination even dimly to conceive; nor are we convinced that there ever was an utter Atheist. The thought of a God will enter in, barred though the doors be, both of the understanding and the heart, and all the windows supposed to be blocked up against the light. The soul, blind and deaf as it may often be, cannot always resist the intimations all life long, day and night, forced upon it from the outer world; its very necessities, nobler far than those of the body, even when most degraded, importunate when denied their manna, are to it oftentimes a silent or a loud revelation. Then, not to feel and think as other beings do with "discourse of reason," is most hard and difficult indeed, even for a short time, and on occasions of very inferior moment. Being men, we are carried away, willing or unwilling, and often unconsciously, by the great common instinct; we keep sailing with the tide of humanity, whether in flow or ebb- If then Atheists do exist, and if their deathfierce as demons and the sons of perdition, if beds may be described for the awful or melanthat be the temper of the congregating hour-choly instruction of their fellow-men, let them mild and meek as Pity, or the new-born babe, be such Atheists as those whom, let us not when the afflatus of some divine sympathyhesitate to say it, we may blamelessly love has breathed through the multitude, nor one creature escaped its influence, like a springday that steals through a murmuring forest, till not a single tree, even in the darkest nook, is without some touch of the season's sunshine. Think, then, of one who would fain be an Atheist, conversing with the "sound, healthy children of the God of heaven!" To this reason, which is his solitary pride, arguments might in vain be addressed, for he exults in being "an Intellectual All in All," and is a bold-browed sophist to daunt even the eyes of Truth-eyes which can indeed "outstare the-visible now in the tears that fall, audible now eagle" when their ken is directed to heaven, in the sighs that breathe for his sake-in the but which are turned away in aversion from still small voice. That Being forgets not those the human countenance that would dare to by whom he has been forgotten; least of all, deny God. Appeal not to the intellect of such the poor "Fool who has said in his heart there a man, but to his heart; and let not even that is no God," and who knows at last that a God appeal be conveyed in any fixed form of words there is, not always in terror and trembling, -but let it be an appeal of the smiles and tears but as often perhaps in the assurance of forof affectionate and loving lips and eyes-of giveness, which undeserved by the best of the common joys and common griefs, whose con- good, may not be withheld even from the worst tagion is often felt, beyond prevention or cure, of the bad, if the thought of a God and a Sa where two or three are gathered together-viour pass but for a moment through the darkamong families thinly sprinkled over the wil-ness of the departing spirit-like a dove shootderness, where, on God's own day, they repairing swiftly, with its fair plumage, through the to God's own house, a lowly building on the deep but calm darkness that follows the subbrae, which the Creator of suns and systems sided storm. despiseth not, nor yet the beatings of the few contrite hearts therein assembled to worship him in the cathedral's "long-drawn aisles and fretted vaults"-in mighty multitudes all

with a troubled affection; for our Faith may not have preserved us from sins from which they are free-and we may give even to many of the qualities of their most imperfect and unhappy characters almost the name of virtues. No curses on their death-beds will they be heard to utter. No black scowlings-no horrid gnashing of teeth-no hideous shriekings will there appal the loving ones who watch and weep by the side of him who is dying disconsolate. He will hope, and he will fear, now that there is a God indeed everywhere present

So, too, with respect to Deists. Of unbe. lievers in Christianity there are many kinds-. the reckless, the ignorant, the callous, the con firmed, the melancholy, the doubting, the de

spairing the good. At their death-beds, too, | down or straw-stretched, already a skeleton,

may the Christian poet, in imagination, take his stand-and there may he even hear

"The still sad music of humanity,

Not harsh nor grating, but of amplest power
To soften and subdue!"

Oftener all the sounds and sights there will be full of most rueful anguish; and that anguish will groan in the poet's lays when his human heart, relieved from its load of painful sympathies, shall long afterwards be inspired with the pity of poetry, and sing in elegies, sublime in their pathos, the sore sufferings and the dim distress that clouded and tore the dying spirit, longing, but all unable-profound though its longings be-as life's daylight is about to close upon that awful gloaming, and the night of death to descend in oblivion-to believe in the Redeemer.

Why then turn but to such death-bed, if indeed religion, and not superstition, described that scene-as that of Voltaire? Or even

Rousseau, whose dying eyes sought, in the last passion, the sight of the green earth, and the blue skies, and the sun shining so brightly, when all within the brain of his worshipper was fast growing dimmer and more dim-when all the unsatisfied spirit, that scarcely hoped a future life, knew not how it could ever take farewell of the present with tenderness enough, and enough of yearning and craving after its disappearing beauty, and when as if the whole earth were at that moment beloved even as his small peculiar birthplace—

"Et dulces moriens reminiscitur Argos."

and gnashing-may it be in senselessness, for otherwise what pangs are these!-gnashing his teeth, within lips once so eloquent, now white with foam and slaver; and the whole mouth, of yore so musical, grinning ghastly, like the fleshless face of fear-painted death! Is that Voltaire? He who, with wit, thought to shear the Son of God of all his beams-with wit, to loosen the dreadful fastenings of the Cross?with wit, to scoff at Him who hung thereon, while the blood and water came from the wound in his blessed side?-with wit to drive away those Shadows of Angels, that were said to have rolled off the stone from the mouth of the sepulchre of the resurrection ?—with wit, to deride the ineffable glory of transfigured Godhead on the Mount, and the sweet and solemn semblance of the Man Jesus in the garden?with wit, to darken all the decrees of Provi dence?—and with wit,

"To shut the gates of Mercy on mankind?"

Nor yet will the Christian poet long dwell in his religious strains, though awhile he may linger there," and from his eyelids wipe the tears that sacred pity hath engendered," beside the dying couch of Jean Jaques Rousseau-a couch of turf beneath trees-for he was ever a lover of Nature, though he loved all things living or dead as madmen love. His soul, while most spiritual, was sensual still, and with tendrils of flesh and blood embracedeven as it did embrace the balm-breathing form of voluptuous woman-the very phantoms of his most etherealized imagination. Vice stained all his virtues-as roses are seen, in some certain soils, and beneath some certain skies, always to be blighted, and their fairest petals to bear on them something like blots of blood. Over the surface of the mirror of his mind, which reflected so much of the imagery of man and nature, there was still, here and there, on the centre or round the edges, rust-spots, that gave back no image, and marred the propor tions of the beauty and the grandeur that yet shone over the rest of the circle set in the rich carved gold. His disturbed, and distracted, and defeated friendships, that all vanished in insane suspicions, and seemed to leave his soul as well satisfied in its fierce or gloomy void, as when it was filled with airy and glittering vi sions, are all gone for ever now. Those many thoughts and feelings-so melancholy, yet still fair, and lovely, and beautiful-which, like bright birds encaged, with ruffled and drooping wings, once so apt to soar, and their music mute, that used to make the wide woods to ring, were confined within the wires of his jealous heart-have now all flown away, and are at rest! Who sits beside the wild and wondrous genius, whose ravings entranced the world! who wipes the death-sweat from that capacious forehead, once filled with such a multitude of disordered but aspiring fancies? Who, that his beloved air of heaven may kiss and cool it for the last time, lays open the covering that hides the marble sallowness of Rousseau's sin-and-sorrow-haunted breast? One of Nature's least gifted children-to whose eyes nor There he is-it matters not now whether on earth nor heaven ever beamed with beaut

The Christian poet, in his humane wisdom, will, for instruction's sake of his fellow-men, and for the discovery and the revealment of ever-sacred truth, keep aloof from such deathbeds as these, or take his awful stand beside them to drop the perplexed and pensive tear. For we know not what it is that we either hear or see; and holy Conscience, hearing through a confused sound, and seeing through an obscure light, fears to condemn, when perhaps she ought only to pity-to judge another, when perhaps it is her duty but to use that inward eye for her own delinquencies. He, then, who designs to benefit his kind by strains of high instruction, will turn from the death-bed of the famous Wit, whose brilliant fancy hath waxed dim as that of the clown-whose malignant heart is quaking beneath the Power it had so long derided, with terrors over which his hated Christian triumphs-and whose intellect, once so perspicacious that it could see but too well the motes that are in the sun, the specks and stains that are on the flowing robe of nature herself-prone, in miserable contradiction to its better being, to turn them as proofs against the power and goodness of the Holy One who inhabiteth eternity-is now palsy-stricken as that of an idiot, and knows not even the sound of the name of its once vain and proud possessor-when crowded theatres had risen up with one rustle to honour, and thea, with deafening acclamations,

"Raised a mortal to the skies!"

to whose heart were known but the meanest No great moral or religious lesson can well charities of nature; yet mean as they were, be drawn, or say rather so well, from such how much better in such an hour, than all his anomalous death-beds, as from those of com imaginings most magnificent! For had he not mon unbelievers. To show, in all its divine suffered his own offspring to pass away from power, the blessedness of the Christian's faith, his eyes, even like the wood-shadows, only less it must be compared, rather than contrasted, beloved and less regretted? And in the very with the faith of the best and wisest of Deists. midst of the prodigality of love and passion, The ascendency of the heavenly over the which he had poured outover the creations of his earthly will then be apparent as apparent as ever-distempered fancy, let his living children, the superior lustre of a star to that of a lighthis own flesh and blood, disappear as paupers ed-up window in the night. For above all in a chance-governed world?-A world in other things in which the Christian is hapier which neither parental nor filial love were than the Deist-with the latter, the life beyon more than the names of nonentities-Father, the grave is but a dark hope-to the former, Son, Daughter, Child, but empty syllables," immortality has been brought to light by the which philosophy heeded not-or rather loved Gospel." That difference embraces the whole them in their emptiness, but despised, hated, spirit. It may be less felt-less seen when or feared them, when for a moment they life is quick and strong: for this earth alone seemed pregnant with a meaning from heaven, has much and many things to embrace and and each in its holy utterance signifying enchain our being-but in death the difference God! is as between night and day.

CHRISTOPHER IN HIS AVIARY.

FIRST CANTICLE.

in the most perfect harmony and order. Neophytes now range for themselves, according to THE present Age, which, after all, is a very their capacities and opportunities, the fields, pretty and pleasant one, is feelingly alive and woods, rivers, lakes, and seas; and proficients, widely awake to the manifold delights and ad- no longer confining themselves to mere vantages with which the study of Natural nomenclature, enrich their works with anecHistory swarms, and especially that branch of dotes and traits of character, which, without it which unfolds the character and habits, phy- departure from truth, have imbued bird-biosical, moral, and intellectual, of those most in-graphy with the double charm of reality and teresting and admirable creatures-Birds. It romance. is familiar not only with the shape and colour of beak, bill, claw, talon, and plume, but with the purposes for which they are designed, and with the instincts which guide their use in the beautiful economy of all-gracious Nature. We remember the time when the very word Ornithology would have required interpretation in mixed company; when a naturalist was looked on as a sort of out-of-the-way but amiable monster. Now, one seldom meets with man, woman, or child, who does not know a hawk from a handsaw, or even, to adopt the more learned reading, from a heron-shew; a black swan is no longer erroneously considered a rara avis any more than a black sheep; while the Glasgow Gander himself, no longer apocryphal, has taken his place in the national creed, belief in his existence being merely blended with wonder at his magnitude, and some surprise perhaps among the scientific, that he should be as yet the sole specimen of that enormous Anser.

The chief cause of this advancement of knowledge in one of its most delightful departments, has been the gradual extension of its study from stale books written by men, to that book ever fresh from the hand of God. And the second-another yet the same-has been the gradual change wrought by a philosophical spirit in the observation, delineation, and arrangement of the facts and laws with which the science is conversant, and which it exhibits

Compare the intensity and truth of any natural knowledge insensibly acquired by observation in very early youth, with that corresponding to it picked up in later life from books! In fact, the habit of distinguishing between things as different, or of similar forms, colours, and characters, formed in infancy, and childhood, and boyhood, in a free intercourse and communion with Nature, while we are merely seeking and finding the divine joy of novelty and beauty, perpetually occurring be fore our eyes in all her haunts, may be made the foundation of an accuracy of judgment of inappreciable value as an intellectual er dow ment. So entirely is this true, that we know many observant persons, that is, observant in all things intimately related with their own pursuits, and with the experience of their own early education, who, with all the pains they could take in after-life, have never been able to distinguish by name, when they saw them, above half-a-dozen, if so many, of our British singing-birds; while as to knowing them by their song, that is wholly beyond the reach of their uninstructed ear, and a shilfa chants to them like a yellow yoldrin. On seeing a small bird peeping out of a hole in the eaves, and especially on hearing him chatter, they shrewdly suspect him to be a sparrow, though it does not by any means follow that their suspicions are always verified; and though, when sitting with her white breast so lovely out of the

"auld clay bigging" in the window-corner, he | silk, and the captive remains for ever happy cannot mistake Mistress Swallow, yet when in its bright prison-house. On this principle, flitting in fly-search over the stream, and ever it is indeed surprising at how early an age and anon dipping her wing-tips in the lucid coolness, 'tis an equal chance that he misnames her Miss Marten.

children can be instructed in the most interest. ing parts of natural history-ay, even a babe in arms. Remember Coleridge's beautiful lines to the Nightingale :

"That strain again!

Full fain it would delay me! My dear babe,
Who, capable of no articulate sound,
Mars all things with his imitative lisp,
How he would place his hand beside his ear,
His little hand, the small forefinger up,
And bid us listen! and I deem it wise
To make him Nature's child.”

What constant caution is necessary during the naturalist's perusal even of the very best books! From the very best we can only obtain knowledge at second-hand, and this, like a story circulated among village gossips, is more apt to gain in falsehood than in truth, as it passes from one to another; but in field study we go at once to the fountain-head, and obtain our facts pure and unalloyed by the How we come to k re the Birds of Bewick, theories and opinions of previous observers. and White, and the two Wilsons, and Montagu, Hence it is that the utility of books becomes and Mudie, and Knapp, and Selby, and Swain. obvious. You witness with your own eyes son, and Audubon, and many others familiar some puzzling, perplexing, strange, and un- with their haunts and habits, their affections accountable-fact; twenty different statements and their passions, till we feel that they are of it have been given by twenty different orni- indeed our fellow-creatures, and part of one thologists; you consult them all, and getting a wise and wonderful system! If there be ser hint from one, and a hint from another, here a mons in stones, what think ye of the hymns glimmer of light to be followed, and there a and psalms, matin and vesper, of the lark, who gloom of darkness to be avoided-why, who at heaven's gate sings-of the wren, who pipes knows but that in the end you do yourself her thanksgivings as the slant sunbeam shoots solve the mystery, and absolutely become not athwart the mossy portal of cave, in whose only happy but illustrious? People sitting in fretted roof she builds her nest above the watertheir own parlour with their feet on the fender, fall! In cave-roof? Yea-we have seen it so er in the sanctum of some museum, staring at -just beneath the cornice. But most frequentstuffed specimens, imagine themselves natural- ly we have detected her procreant cradle on ists; and in their presumptuous and insolent old mossy stump, mouldering walls or living ignorance, which is often total, scorn the wis-rock-sometimes in cleft of yew-tree or hawdom of the wanderers of the woods, who have for many studious and solitary years been making themselves familiar with all the beautiful mysteries of instinctive life. Take two boys, and set them respectively to pursue the two plans of study. How puzzled and per-pearls. plexed will be the one who pores over the "interminable terms" of a system in books, having meanwhile no access to, or communion with nature! The poor wretch is to be pitied -nor is he any thing else than a slave. But the young naturalist who takes his first lessons in the fields, observing the unrivalled scene | which creation everywhere displays, is perpetually studying in the power of delight and wonder, and laying up knowledge which can be derived from no other source. The rich boy is to be envied, nor is he any thing else than a king. The one sits bewildered among words, the other walks enlightened among things; the one has not even the shadow, the other more than the substance the very essence and life of knowledge; and at twelve years old he may be a better naturalist than ever the mere bookworm will be, were he to outlive old Tommy Balmer.

In education-late or early-for heaven's sake led us never separate things and words! They are married in nature; and what God hath put together let no man put asunder-'tis a fatal divorce. Without things, words accumulated by misery in the memory, had far better die than drag out an useless existence in the dark; without words, their stay and support, things unaccountably disappear out of the storehouse, and may be for ever lost. But bind a thing with a word, a strange link, stronger than any steel, and softer than any

thorn-for hang the globe with its imperceptible orifice in the sunshine or the storm, and St. Catharine sits within heedless of the outer world, counting her beads with her sensitive breast that broods in bliss over the priceless

Ay, the men we have named, and many other blameless idolaters of Nature, have worshipped her in a truly religious spirit, and have taught us their religion. All our great poets have loved the Minnesingers of the woodsThomson, and Cowper, and Wordsworth, as dearly as Spenser, and Shakspeare, and Milton. From the inarticulate language of the groves, they have inhaled the enthusiasm that inspired some of the finest of their own immortal strains. "Lonely wanderer of Nature" must every poet be-and though often self-wrapt his wanderings through a spiritual world of his own, yet as some fair flower silently asks his eye to look on it, some glad bird his ear solicits with a song, how intense is then his percep tion-his emotion how profound-while his spirit is thus appealed to, through all its human sensibilities, by the beauty and the joy perpetual even in the most solitary places!

Our moral being owes deep obligation to all who assist us to study nature aright; for believe us, it is high and rare knowledge to know and to have the true and full use of our eyes. Millions go to the grave in old age without ever having learned it; they were just beginning, perhaps, to acquire it, when they sighed to think that "they who look out of the windows were darkened;" and that while they had been instructed how to look, sad shadows had fallen on the whole face of Nature, and that the time for those intuitions was gone for ever. But the

science of seeing has now found favour in our eyes; and blessings be with them who can discover, discern, and describe the least as the greatest of nature's works-who can see as distinctly the finger of God in the lustre of the humming-bird murmuring round a rose-bush, as in that of the star of Jove shining sole in heaven.

Take up now almost any book you may on any branch of Natural History, and instead of the endless, dry details of imaginary systems and classifications, in which the ludicrous littlenesses of man's vain ingenuity used to be set up as a sort of symbolical scheme of revelation of the sublime varieties of the inferioras we choose to call it-creation of God, you find high attempts in an humble spirit rather to illustrate tendencies and uses, and harmonies, and order, and design. With some glorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the day gone by showed us a science that was but a skeleton-little but dry bones; with some inglorious exceptions, indeed, the naturalists of the day that is now, have been desirous to show us a living, breathing, and moving body-to explain, as far as they might, its mechanism and its spirit. Ere another century elapse, how familiar may men be with all the families of the flowers of the field, and the birds of the air, with all the interdependencies of their characters and their kindreds, perhaps even with the mystery of that instinct which is now seen working wonders, not only beyond the power of reason to comprehend, but of imagination to conceive!

builders, the first spring of their full-fledged lives; with no other tools but a bill, unless we count their claws, which however seem, and that only in some kinds, to be used but in carrying materials. With their breasts and whole bodies, indeed, most of them round off the soft insides of their procreant cradles, till they fit each brooding bunch of feathers to a hair's-breadth, as it sits close and low on eggs or eyeless young, a leetle higher raised up above their gaping babies, as they wax from downy infancy into plumier childhood, which they do how swiftly, and how soon have they flown! You look some sunny morning into the bush, and the abode in which they seemed so cozey the day before is utterly forsaken by the joyous ingrates-now feebly fluttering in the narrow grove, to them a wide world filled with delight and wonder-to be thought of never more. With all the various materials used by them in building their different domiciles, the Bishop is as familiar as with the sole material of his own wig-though, by the by, last time we had the pleasure of seeing and sitting by him, he wore his own hair-" but that not much;" for, like our own, his sconce was bald, and, like it, showed the organ of constructiveness as fully developed as Christopher or a Chaffinch. He is perfectly well acquainted, too, with all the diversities of their modes of building-their orders of architecture-and eke with all those of situation chosen by the kinds-whether seemingly simple, in cunning that deceives by a show of carelessness and heedlessness of notice, or with craft of concealment that baffles the most searching eyehanging their beloved secret in gloom not impervious to sun and air-or, trustful in man's love of his own home, affixing the nest beneath the eaves, or in the flowers of the lattice, kept shut for their sakes, or half-opened by fair hands of virgins whose eyes gladden with

mark the growing beauty of the brood, till they smile to see one almost as large as its parents sitting on the rim of the nest, when all at once it hops over, and, as it flutters away like a leaf, seems surprised that it can fly!

How deeply enshrouded are felt to be the mysteries of nature, when, thousands of years after Aristotle, we hear Audubon confess his utter ignorance of what migrations and nonmigrations mean—that 'tis hard to understand why such general laws as these should bethough their benign operation is beautifully seen in the happiness provided alike for all-heartborn brightness as each morning they whether they reside in their own comparatively small localities, nor ever wish to leave them or at stated seasons instinctively fly away over thousands of miles, to drop down and settle for a while on some spot adapted to their necessities, of which they had prescience afar off, though seemingly wafted thither like leaves upon the wind! Verily, as great a mystery is that Natural Religion by the theist studied in woods and on mountains and by sea-shores, as that Revelation which philosophers will not believe because they do not understand-" the blinded bigot's scorn" deriding man's highest and holiest happiness-Faith!

We must not now go a bird-nesting, but the first time we do we shall put Bishop Mant's "Months" in our pocket. The good Bishopwho must have been an indefatigable birdnester in his boyhood-though we answer for him that he never stole but one egg out of four, and left undisturbed the callow young-treats of those beauteous and wondrous structures in a style that might make Professor Rennie jealous, who has written like a Vitruvius on the architecture of birds. He expatiates with uncontrolled delight on the unwearied activity of the architects, who, without any apprenticeship to the trade, are journeymen, nay, master

Yet there are still a few wretched quacks among us whom we may some day perhaps drive down into the dirt. There are idiots who will not even suffer sheep, cows, horses, and dogs, to escape the disgusting perversions of their anile anecdotage-who, by all manner of drivelling lies, libel even the common domestic fowl, and impair the reputation of the bantam. Newspapers are sometimes so in fested by the trivial trash, that in the nostrils of a naturalist they smell on the breakfast table like rotten eggs; and there are absolutely volumes of the slaver bound in linen, and lettered with the names of the expectorators on the outside, resembling annuals-we almost fear with prints. In such hands, the ass loses his natural attributes, and takes the character of his owner; and as the anecdote-monger is seen astride on his cuddy, you wonder what may be the meaning of the apparition, for we defy you to distinguish the one donk from the other, the rider from the ridden, except by the more inexpressive countenance of the one, and

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