"Naming the malady

Which, heaven-inflicted, stings my tortured soul
To frenzy."

Many passages might be selected from this pamphlet which would charm the reader by the suggestiveness of the thought and the rare felicity of the expression. One or two examples must suffice.

"In politics, as in other parts of our knowledge, science is the daughter of experience, and the child of her old age;' though when her tongue is untied, and her infant limbs are strung, the clear-sighted nurseling guides the steps of the blind mother that bore her." p. 27.

"If I abandon these speculations, it will be to explore some other path of perfectibility. Perhaps without success. Such, often, is this our human condition, even in the pursuits of virtue! We devote ourselves, and Providence rejects the sacrifice.

"Yet I discern that its magnificent plans of mercy to our race are unfolding; and though it seems, for their accomplishment, to prefer confounding the malice of the wicked, rather than favoring the efforts of the good,-by whatever means, they are accomplishing. 'Therein I rejoice, yea, and will rejoice.' Yes! the iron temper of the fates is softening, and a better age revolving on mankind! Those who will not run before it, must follow after it, or be crushed beneath its wheels." p. 56.

The great work which he had undertaken with such wealth of learning, with such acuteness and grasp of thought, and with so much power of illustration and expression, was the ever engrossing and at last unfinished labor of his life. His attempt was so bold, his ideal so lofty, and his critical sensibility so far beyond his own most admirable faculty of execution, that old age, and at last death, overtook him in his voluntary exile, before he could realize the gorgeous dream with which "the enthusiasm of the imagination" had inspired his youth. In the zeal of his one pursuit, he withdrew himself more and more from society, especially from the society of Americans. at Paris, and became more and more sensitively shy of intercourse with strangers. As the friends whom he had left at home departed, one by one, from among the living, his epistolary intercourse with the survivors became more irregular. While he never lost his affection for his native country, nor relinquished his purpose of returning, he was still detained by the stronger purpose of first finishing his great work. The

slight eccentricities of his youth, such as often accompany an exquisite sensibility, seem to have grown upon him as he grew old in his strange mode of life. With a competent income and with a disposition the very opposite of parsimony, he lived in close seclusion, rigidly limiting his personal expenses, and sometimes permitting large balances to remain uncalled for in the hands of his banker. Now and then some privileged person from America, with a special claim on him, either on the score of early acquaintance and old friendship, or on the score of some family connection, was permitted to find him out and to draw him from his seclusion, and such opportunities of conversation with him were never afterwards forgotten. One who had enjoyed the privilege, says, "I shall never forget his earnest, profound conversation, his childlike, amiable manners, his benevolent smile, his large and glowing heart. He was a man of no ordinary stamp; the world little knew him. He had sounded the depths of all moral, social, and metaphysical science, and he exemplified in these latter days of self-seeking the devotion and self-sacrifice of an ancient philosopher, with a better motive, being always actuated by the purest and highest aims. Though he published nothing [on these topics] I knew what he was capable of doing and confidently believed he would leave an impress on the world and make an epoch in moral and philosophical history."

On the 15th of March, 1859, the United States Consul at Paris was informed that an American gentleman had died, the night before, at one of the villages in the neighborhood of that metropolis. Repairing to the place, he found the villagers all mourning the loss of a friend whose beneficence to the poor among them, and whose sympathy with the afflicted, had taught them to regard him not merely with grateful affection, but with something of the reverence due to a superior being. Among those simple villagers, the deceased had long resided for several months in each year; and a few days before, hoping that a change of air would relieve him from what he thought a temporary illness, he had left his town lodging for his retreat in the country. They knew him only by his Christian name, "Monsieur Auguste." A letter in his pocket,

from a sister, was inscribed with his full name, Augustus L. Hillhouse, and gave the clue to his city residence and to his connections with his native country. His grave was made in the village where he died; and the whole population there followed his hearse with unaffected lamentations.

It was afterwards ascertained that he had expressed a desire to be buried among his kindred in that natal soil which he had never ceased to love. Accordingly, on the 16th of June, just three months after the first burial, his remains, having been disinterred and conveyed across the ocean, were brought to the resting place which he had desired for them. It was late in a long summer afternoon, when a few friends assembled in the cemetery to witness the re-interment. Strangely did the past and the present seem to mingle in that hour,—the thought of the New Haven from which Augustus L. Hillhouse went away for the circuit of European travel in 1816, setting itself in contrast with the thought of the New Haven to which, after so long a time, his remains had been at last brought home. How much of the world's history was included in the interval! How unlike the America, the Europe, and the world of 1816, to the America, the Europe, and the world of 1859! A few gray men were gathered around that open grave, whom the westering sun and the lengthening shadows might remind that with them also the day was far spent. They remembered that when he who was now gathered to his fathers went from his home in all the blossoming promise of his youth, they, too, were young; and at the thought of what he was when they saw him last, they could not but recall the venerable image of his father, and the names and forms of all who sat around his father's table, and amid whose love his childhood grew. Of that household circle, there stood beside his grave one sole survivor; the names of all the rest were already carved on monumental marbles, there in the family burial place. A few words of devotion, of remembrance, and of consolation, were spoken, and the remains were left to mingle with kindred dust.

The life of Augustus L. Hillhouse may seem not to have fulfilled its early promise. Yet he did not live in vain.

While he had not ceased to be a young man, he said, "I feel a real need of deserving the gratitude of my fellow men. I should esteem the labor of my life well employed if, according to the ancient superstition, I could prophesy at its close, and bequeath one useful truth as a legacy to mankind." Whether anything may hereafter be produced from the great mass of papers which he left like Sibylline leaves, is not known. But not to speak of his incidental connection with the evangelical renaissance at Geneva and among the French Protestants-the one hymn which he has given to the churches that worship in the English language, will be his imperishable memorial. Already that hymn is sung not only in the churches of New England, but in kindred churches wherever, westward, even to the "western hills of golden ore,” a Christian civilization has taught the wilderness to know the voice of Christian song-nay, wherever the sons of those churches are renewing the labor of the Apostles, whether in the remotest isles, or in the shadow of hoary Lebanon, or where the Tigris rushes in his rocky channel among the graves of ancient empires. And if the prophetic word which he so long was hoping to utter, and the "one useful truth" unknown before, which it was his life-long labor to bequeath to mankind, should never be found, those who knew him and loved him may remember that

"In a Roman mouth the graceful name Of poet and of prophet was the same."

ARTICLE II.-REFLEX BENEFITS OF THE CLERICAL OFFICEA LETTER FROM A COUNTRY CLERGYMAN TO HIS DESPONDING BRETHREN.

THE future historian of the literature pertaining to our profession, will doubtless characterize our age as the Shady Side epoch.

The various ills which (ministerial) flesh is heir to, have been exhibited in kaleidoscopic variety and profusion. Whatever may be thought of our claims to an Apostolical succession, our title to a Martyrological one seems clearly established. Should the old Jewish mode of estimating moral character according to the sufferings endured, again come into vogue, we shall probably be regarded as sinners above all contemporaneous Galileans, because we suffered such things.

But seriously, brethren, are we indeed of all men most miserable? Is there no sorrow like unto ours? Is there not danger to our happiness and usefulness, in looking too often at our trials, and too seldom upon our rewards, or in looking only at the former through a telescope, and the latter through the telescope inverted? The evils indeed of our profession are neither few nor small; but is it fair to be ever heaping them into the scale of despondency, while we neglect to place in the opposite scale those many hopes and blessings which lie so thickly strewn around? Is it not well for us sometimes to take off the somber-colored ministerial spectacles, (which we are possibly inclined to wear more than is best for us, and look out upon the sunlight that diversifies, if it does not completely flood our professional landscape? Let us then in this way take a hasty glance at our work in some of its temporal aspects,-pecuniary, social, and intellectual.

I. We begin with the lowest-that of which we are most disposed to complain, and of which we have too much reason perhaps to complain. After our long, toilsome, and expensive 38

VOL. XVIII.