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east wind, only to let them fall in flesh about the camp of men; He has not heaped the rocks of the mountain only for the quarry, nor clothed the grass of the field only for the oven.-M. P.

MAN'S BUSINESS IN LIFE.

or intent of it; and as these emotions are in no way resultant from, nor obtainable by, any operation of the intellect; it is evident that the sensation of beauty is not sensual on the one hand, nor is it intellectual on the other, but is dependent on a pure, right, and open state of the heart, both for its truth and for its intensity,

Men's proper business in this world falls insomuch that even the right after-action of the mainly into three divisions:

First, to know themselves, and the existing state of the things they have to do with.

Secondly, to be happy in themselves, and in the existing state of things.

Thirdly, to mend themselves, and the existing state of things, as far as either are marred and mendable.

These, I say, are the three plain divisions of proper human business on this earth. For these three, the following are usually substituted and adopted by human creatures:

intellect upon facts of beauty so apprehended, is dependent on the acuteness of the heart-feeling about them. And thus the apostolic words come true, in this minor respect as in all others, that men are alienated from the life of God through the ignorance that is in them, having the understanding darkened because of the hardness of their hearts, and so, being past feeling, give themselves up to lasciviousness. For we do indeed see constantly that men having naturally acute perceptions of the beautiful, yet not re ceiving it with a pure heart, nor into their hearts

First, to be totally ignorant of themselves, at all, never comprehend it, nor receive good and the existing state of things.

from it, but make it a mere minister to their

Secondly, to be miserable in themselves, and desires, and accompaniment and seasoning of in the existing state of things.

Thirdly, to let themselves, and the existing state of things, alone (at least, in the way of correction).

The dispositions which induce us to manage, thus wisely, the affairs of this life seem to be: First, a fear of disagreeable facts, and conscious shrinking from clearness of light, which keep us from examining ourselves, and increase gradually into a species of instinctive terror at all truth, and love of glosses, veils, and decorative lies of every sort.

lower sensual pleasures, until all their emotions take the same earthly stamp, and the sense of beauty sinks into the servant of lust.

Nor is what the world commonly understands by the cultivation of taste, anything more or better than this; at least in times of corrupt and over-pampered civilisation, when men build palaces and plant groves and gather luxuries, that they and their devices may hang in the corners of the world like fine-spun cobwebs, with greedy, puffed-up, spider-like lusts in the middle. And this, which in Christian times is the abuse and corruption of the sense of beauty, was in that pagan life of which St Paul speaks, little less than the essence of it, and the best they had. I do not know that of the expres sions of affection towards external nature to be found among heathen writers, there are any of Her beneficence they which the leading thought leans not towards the sensual parts of her.

Secondly, a general readiness to take delight in anything past, future, far off, or somewhere else, rather than in things now, near, and here; leading us gradually to place our pleasure principally in the exercise of the imagination, and to build all our satisfaction on things as they are not. Which power being one not accorded to the lower animals, and having indeed, when disciplined, a very noble use, we pride ourselves upon it, whether disciplined or not, and passing our lives complacently, in substantial discontent, and visionary satisfaction.-M. P.

The sought, and her power they shunned; her teachthrough both they understood never. pleasant influences of soft winds, and ringing streamlets, and shady coverts, of the violet couch and plane-tree shade, they received, perhaps, in a more noble way than we; but they

IDEAS OF BEAUTY DEPEND ON PURITY found not anything, except fear, upon the bare

OF MIND.

mountain, or in the ghostly glen. The Hybla heather they loved more for its sweet hives than its purple hues. But the Christian Theoria seeks not, though it accepts and touches with its own

It is necessary to the existence of an idea of beauty, that the sensual pleasure which may be its basis should be accompanied first with joy, then with love of the object, then with the per-purity, what the Epicurean sought; but finds ception of kindness in a superior intelligence, finally, with thankfulness and veneration towards that intelligence itself; and as no idea can be at all considered as in any way an idea of beauty, antil it be made up of these emotions, any more than we can be said to have an idea of a letter of which we perceive the perfume and the fair writing, without understanding the contents of it,

its food and the objects of its love everywhere, in what is harsh and fearful as well as in what is kind: nay, even in all that seems coarse and commonplace, seizing that which is good; and sometimes delighting more at finding its table spread in strange places, and in the presence of its enemies, and its honey coming out of the rock, than if all were harmonised into a less

wondrous pleasure; hating only what is selfsighted and insolent of men's work, despising all that is not of God, unless reminding it of God, yet able to find evidence of Him still where all seems forgetful of Him, and to turn that into a witness of His working which was meant to obscure it; and so with clear and unoffended sight beholding Him for ever, according to the written promise, "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."-M. P.

SECRET OF TRUE HAPPINESS.

exists, it acts for good on the character to which it belongs, though, as it may often belong to characters weak in other respects, it may carelessly be mistaken for a source of evil in them.

And having arrived at this conclusion by a review of facts, which I hope it will be admitted, whether accurate or not, has at least been candid, these further considerations may confirm our belief in its truth. Observe: the whole force of education, until very lately, has been directed in every possible way to the destruction of the love of nature. The only knowledge which has been considered essential among us is that of words, and, next after it, of the abstract sciences; while every liking shown by children for simple natural history has been either violently checked (if it took an inconvenient form for the housemaids), or else scrupulously limited to hours of play; so that it has really been impossible for any child earnestly to study the works of God but against its conscience; and the love of nature has become inherently the characteristic of truants and idlers. While also the art of drawing, which is of more real importance to the human race than that of writing (because people can hardly draw anything without being of some use both to themselves and others, and can hardly write anything without wasting their own time and that of others)—this art of drawing, I say, which on plain and stern system should be taught to every child, just as writing is, has been so neglected and abused that there is not one man in a thousand, even of its professed teachers, who knows its first principles; and thus it needs much ill-fortune or obstinacy

Gradually, thinking on from point to point, we shall come to perceive that all true happiness and nobleness are near us and yet neglected by us; and that till we have learned how to be happy and noble we have not much to tell, even to Red Indians. The delights of horse-racing and hunting, of assemblies in the night instead of the day, of costly and wearisome music, of costly and burdensome dress, of chagrined contention | for place or power, or wealth, or the eyes of the multitude; and all the endless occupation without purpose, and idleness without rest, of our vulgar world, are not, it seems to me, enjoy ments we need be ambitious to communicate. And all real and wholesome enjoyments possible to man have been just as possible to him, since first he was made of the earth, as they are now; and they are possible to him chiefly in peace. To watch the corn grow and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to praythese are the things that make men happy; they have always had the power of doing these; they much neglect on the part of his teachers, or never will have power to do more. The world's rebellion on his own, before a boy can get leave prosperity or adversity depends upon our know- to use his eyes or his fingers, so that those who ing and teaching these few things; but upon can use them are for the most part neglected or iron, or glass, or electricity, or steam, in no wise. rebellious lads-runaways and bad scholarsAnd I am Utopian and enthusiastic enough to passionate, erratic, self-willed, and restive against believe that the time will come when the world all forms of education; while your well-behaved will discover this. It has now made its experi- and amiable scholars are disciplined into blindments in every possible direction but the rightness and palsy of half their faculties. Wherein one, and it seems that it must, at last, try the there is at once a notable ground for what differright one in a mathematical necessity.-M. P. ence we have observed between the lovers of nature and its despisers; between the somewhat immoral and unrespectable watchfulness of the one and the moral and respectable blindness of the other.

LOVE OF NATURE.

Though the absence of the love of nature is not an assured condemnation, its presence is an invariable sign of goodness of heart and justness of moral perception, though by no means of moral practice; that in proportion to the degree in which it is felt will probably be the degree in which all nobleness and beauty of character will also be felt; that when it is originally absent from any mind, that mind is in many other respects hard, worldly, and degraded; that where, having been originally present, it is repressed by art or education, that repression appears to have been detrimental to the person suffering it; and that wherever the feeling

One more argument remains, and that, I believe, an unanswerable one. As, by the accident of education, the love of nature has been among us associated with wilfulness, so, by the accident of time, it has been associated with faithlessness. I traced above the peculiar mode in which this faithlessness was indicated, but I never intended to imply, therefore, that it was an invariable concomitant of the love. Because it happens that, by various concurrent operations of evil, we have been led, according to those words of the Greek poet already quoted, to "dethrone the gods and crown the whirlwind," it is no

But the boat's bow is naïvely perfect; complete without an effort. The man who made it knew not that he was making anything beautiful as he bent its planks into those mysterious ever

the image of the sea-shell, the seal, as it were, of the flowing of the great tides and streams of ocean stamped on its delicate rounding. He leaves it when all is done, without a boast. It is simple work, but it will keep out water, and every plank, thenceforward, is a fate, and has men's lives wreathed in the knots of it, as the cloth yard shaft had their deaths in its plumes.

reason that we should forget there was once a time when "the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind." And if we now take final and full view of the matter, we shall find that the love of nature, wherever it has existed, has been a faith-changing curves. It grows under his hands into ful and sacred element of human feeling-that is to say, supposing all circumstances otherwise the same with respect to two individuals, the one who loves nature most will be always found to have more faith in God than the other. It is intensely difficult, owing to the confusing and counter influences which always mingle in the data of the problem, to make this abstraction fairly; but so far as we can do it, so far, I boldly assert, the result is constantly the same; the nature-worship will be found to bring with it such a sense of the presence and power of a Great Spirit as no mere reasoning can either induce or controvert.-M. P.

A SEA BOAT.

Then, also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the thing accomplished. No other work of human hands ever gained so much. Steam-engines and telegraphs, indeed, help us to fetch and carry, and talk; they lift weights for us, and bring messages with less trouble than would have been needed otherwise; this saving of trouble, however, does not constitute a new faculty, it only enhances the powers we already possess. But in that bow of the boat is the gift of another world. Without it, what prison wall would be so strong as that white and wailing fringe of sea? What maimed creatures, were we all chained to our rocks, Andromeda-like, or wandering by the endless shores, wasting our incommunicable strength, and pining in hopeless watch of unconquerable waves! The nails that fasten together the planks of the boat's bow are the rivets of the fellowship of the world. Their iron does more than draw lightning out of heaven, it leads love round the earth.

Then, also, it is wonderful on account of the greatness of the enemy that it does battle with. To lift dead weight, to overcome length of

Of all things, living or lifeless, upon this strange earth, there is but one which, having reached the mid-term of appointed human endurance on it, I still regard with unmitigated amazement. I know, indeed, that all around me is wonderful; but I cannot answer it with wonder: a dark veil with the foolish words, Nature of Things, upon it casts its deadening folds between me and their dazzling strangeness. Flowers open, and stars rise, and it seems to me they could have done no less. The mystery of distant mountain-blue only makes me reflect that the earth is of necessity mountainous; the sea wave breaks at my feet, and I do not see how it should have remained unbroken. But one object there is still, which I never pass with-languid space, to multiply or systematise a out the renewed wonder of childhood, and that is the bow of a boat. Not of a racing-wherry, or revenue cutter, or clipper-yacht, but the blunt head of a common bluff, undecked sea boat, lying aside in its furrow of beach sand. The sum of navigation is in that. You may magnify it or decorate it as you will; you do not add to the wonder of it. Lengthen it into hatchet-like edge of iron, strengthen it with complex tracery of ribs of oak, carve it and gild it till a column of light moves beneath it on the sea, you have made no more of it than it was at first. That rude simplicity of bent plank, that can breast its way through the death that is in the deep sea, has in it the soul of shipping. Beyond this, we may have more work, more men, more money; we cannot have more miracle.

For there is first an infinite strangeness in the perfection of the thing as work of human hands. I know nothing else that man does which is perfect, but that. All his other doings have some sign of weakness, affectation, or ignorance in them. They are over-finished, or under-finished; they do not quite answer their end, or they show a mean vanity in answering it too well.

given force; this we may see done by the bar, or beam, or wheel, without wonder. But to war with that living fury of waters, to bare its breast, moment after moment, against the unwearied enmity of ocean; the subtle, fitful, implacable smiting of the black waves, provoking each other on endlessly, all the infinite march of the Atlantic rolling on behind them to their help, and still to strike them back into a wreath of smoke and futile foam, and win its way against them, and keep its charge of life from them. Does any other soulless thing do as much as this?

I should not have talked of this feeling of mine about a boat if I had thought it was mine only; but I believe it to be common to all of us who are not seamen. With a seaman wonder changes into fellowship and close affection; but to all landsmen, from youth upwards, the boat remains a piece of enchantment, at least, unless we entangle our vanity in it, and refine it away into mere lath, giving up all its protective nobleness for pace. With those in whose eyes the perfection of a boat is swift fragility I have no sympathy. The glory of a boat is first, its