The fountain from which such a man daily drinks, sparkles with the elements of all that is grateful and refreshing.
The purest patriotism, the sweetest charities of domestic life, the most expansive and wise benevolence, all spring up in the heart together, the consentaneous and harmonious fruits of the love and fear of God. It was in the same school that Wilberforce learned to love the slave—Howard to love the prisoner—Wirt to love his country—and all to love the world. They feared and obeyed God—and all noble and generous emotions grow spontaneously in the soil of the heart thus prepared and enriched.
Nor is the effort less marked or less salutary upon the mind. Its thoughts are loftier, and its purposes deeper and more steadfast, for being conversant with the great subject of divine obligation. No man can think much of the Deity, and realize strongly His constant presence and inspection, without an elevation of views, and a growing consciousness of that mental power, for the right use of which he is accountable to Him who bestowed it. We were not made to inhabit a godless world, and we cannot make it so, in speculation and in practice, without a deterioration analogous to the dwarfish tendency of emigration to a region colder than our native clime. "God is a sun," to the mental as well as to the moral powers; and in the frozen zone of practical atheism, both degenerate and die. The noble motto, "Bene orasse est bene studisse," applies with hardly less force to secular, than to sacred studies.
With what energy must it arm the soul of the patriot statesman struggling against wrong counsels, and discredited dangers, to know that the God of truth and of right, sees and approves his course! With what new power does his mind grasp a difficult and embarrassed subject, when he feels that the Former of that mind, now demands from him an exertion of its highest powers! What exciting power, to call forth the most thrilling eloquence, can be found in the crowded senate-chamber, compared with the consciousness that for every word he must give account to Him, whose applause, if he fulfils his high behest, will surpass in value the shouts of an enraptured universe besides!
A NEW-ENGLAND WINTER-SCENE.
EXTRACT FROM A LETTER TO A FRIEND IN ONE OF THE WEST INDIA ISLANDS.
By William Cutter.
I have sometimes almost envied you the perpetual summer you enjoy. You have none of the bleak, dark wastes of Winter around you, and have never to look, with aching heart, upon all fair, bright, beautiful things, withering before your eyes, in the severe frown of frosty Autumn. It is always green, and fresh, and fragrant, in your Islands of eternal June. Your gardens are always gardens, gay and redolent with sweet blossoms, and rich with ripe fruits, mingling like youth and manhood vying with each other, "from laughing morning up to sober prime," pursuing, without blight or dimness, the same gay round—blooming and ripening—ripening and blooming, but never falling, through all generations. Through all seasons, you have only to reach forth your hands, and there are bright bouquets, and mellow, delicious fruits, ready to fill them. Your trees have always a shade to spread over you; and they cast off their gorgeous blossoms, and their luxuriant load, as if they were conscious of immortal youth and energy—as if they knew they should never fade, become fruitless, or die. There is no frail, bending, withering age, in any thing of nature you look upon—no blasting of the unripened bud by untimely frosts—no falling prematurely of all that is beautiful and rare, to remind you daily that time is on his flight, and that you will not always be young. I wonder you do not think yourselves immortal in those everlasting gardens! Oh! that perpetual youth and maturity of every thing lovely!—how I have sometimes envied you the possession!