SIGHTS of woe, scenes of anguish, sounds of horror and despair, that sometimes come under the personal inspection and hearing of individuals, ought not to pass untold for the benefit of others. Such a sad experience was afforded one night to the writer of this paper, some time after he had bidden adieu, and, as he supposed, forever, to the Balize Pilot.* It is detailed here in its simplicity, stripped of all exaggeration, with the hope that it may give birth, in other minds, to thoughts, feelings, and practical resolutions similar to those which it originated in my own.

For nearly two hours of the dreary night I was a pained and agitated listener to the piteous cries, groans, and shrieks for mercy, and entreaties for pardon, of a wretched fellow-mortal, in all the untold horrors of delirium tremens, or the drunkard's madness from drinking, mania a potu. Any description, however vivid, that should not embody, so that they might strike on the troubled ear again, the impassioned, heart-thrilling tones, and make to stand out before the mind's eye, with all the distinctness of affecting truth, that dreadful image of the upturned, glaring eye, the tortured visage, the clenched and smiting hands of the agonized sufferer, would utterly fail to convey an adequate idea of the heart-rending scene, and could by no means produce in another's mind an impression like that which its awful contemplation was calculated to fix indelibly upon my

own.

It may not, however, be useless to attempt a portrayal of the scene, and to repeat some of the agony-fraught expressions and articulate cries of the excited, terrified sinner, trembling and convulsed at the near prospect of being ushered into eternity, with all his sins upon his head, unprepared to meet God. He lay upon his back, with fiexd, uplifted eyes, hideous face, on which sat fear and dread despair, and hands raised in the atti

* See May No. pp. 25 and 26.

R. H. DANA.

tude of earnest prayer, frequently clenched and smiting violently together; and he cried incessantly to God to save him from hell, with all the dreadful energy of one that seemed to see hell opening before him, busy devils and torturing fiends all in view, and himself swift going into their hands.

His piteous cries I can imagine to be still ringing in my ears-"O Lord God-O Jesus, Jesus -Come, great King-Almighty God, forgive! Is there no mercy?-Shall I go to hell?-0, must I go to-night? O, I was warned, I was warned!-I thought of it, I thought of it !-O, Mediator, Jesus, Jesus!--O, I can't give up!-Don't let me go!O, let me see thy love!-O, cast me not away!--O, forgive, forgive!"-together with others that I could not wholly distinguish, as from the pit of despair.

He cried thus for a long time till exhausted, then stayed, and then resumed again, with awful intensity of supplication,-" O, that blessed place! -Save me, save me!-O, where's thy power?say, come, come-0 Holy Ghost, I have abused thee!-Lord, have mercy, O have mercy!"

Sometimes he would seem to labor under such a sense of guilt in the sight of a holy God, as utterly to despair of mercy, and then he would cry out many times in such indescribable, unaffected tones of desolate hopelessness as I never heard before, and hope never to again, "O, dear, dear! -Gone, gone--Lost, lost!" And then he would break forth in most earnest, soul-moving entreaty -"Almighty God, forgive-O forgive me through his name!-0, don't give me up!-Let not my soul be lost!-O, I beseech thee, forgive!"

Sometimes his imagination, stimulated by convictions of sin and conscious desert of punishment, would seem to behold the minister of vengeance coming to take him to hell; and he would shriek with agony, “O, death, I feel thy stingO, don't let me go-O, see him coming, comingSave me, save me from his arms-0, save me, wretched sinner!"

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At times his prayer to God seemed to be, if I could construe right the motions of his troubled mind, to inflict upon him the utmost weight of suffering now, but only to save him from a dreadful hell. 66 'Come," exclaimed he many times, over and over again, "come as hard as you can-I have deserved it all-But save, O save me from hell!" Then, as though he thought in this way to prevail with God, "Thou wast so kind to me, thou wast so kind to me--O, praised be thy name -I will praise thy name-O, forgive, I beseech thee, forgive me, Lord God!"

Thus he continued, almost without cessation, for two or three hours, till nature was spent in agony of spirit that may bear a faint resemblance to the woes of the second death. As I listened to his cries, it was awful to think what must be the inward present suffering that produced them, and what will be the desolating woe of every impenitent condemned soul in hell, forever. Who can estimate the mercy of being delivered in hope, from such unutterable misery, by the precious blood and unbought love of Jesus Christ? Never did that mercy appear so rich and precious; and never did the ingratitude and guilt seem greater, of being stupid and insensible, and of do ing nothing for men's salvation, while our belief is that undying spirits, with these vast capacities for happiness or woe, are swinging loose every moment from their moorings in this world of hope, and putting out into the GREAT DEEP OF ETERNITY, there to be torn and tossed forever on the billows of wretchedness, the despairing, inconceivable wretchedness of "the lost!" Of what infinite consequence that every owner of immortal capacities like the soul's, should first have a personal insurance effected for eternity in the BANK OF SALVATION, by the initiative of true faith in Jesus Christ! and that he be laboring, with all the might of a ransomed heir of glory, to save others also! Would that every man who had ministered to the unhappy subject of this narrative the maddening drink-would that every distiller who manufactures the baleful poison - every merchant that exchanges and makes merchandise of the burning liquor-every bar-keeper, and vender, and grocer, that deals out to the thoughtless and wretched applicants this "distilled damnation"--would that they all could have stood around the berth-side of that miserable man, whom THEY helped to make so! Would that they could all have seen, as I did, the manifold agonies of that deathless soul, and have listened to those loud cries of horror breaking in upon the silence of midnight, and rending the pitying hearts of those who could afford him no drop of relief! Could they go away from such a spectacle and resume

again their dreadful trade?-O, no! no. Methinks they would return to their distilleries, and cellars, and storehouses, and let forth upon the absorbing earth those pernicious sluices of desolation and death;-no more to pour over society their worse than lava-streams, and to blight the prospects, and scorch and wither up the joys, yea, the very moral being of countless human hearts! How, then, knowing, as they do, the multiplied modes of misery which THEY are causing; seeing before them the reeling, haggard, trembling, bloated witnesses to the blasting effects of strong drink; knowing the pauperism, vice and crime, of which their trade is the one prolific source; beholding the athletic, manly forms it is breaking down and laying in infamous drunkards' graves; the unconsoled mothers, widows, and orphans it is making the human hearts it is rending with disappointment and anguish—the intellects it is wasting the lives it is consuming—the precious souls it is ruining forever,-O, how can they, how dare they, why will THEY continue their accursed trade?

In reflecting now upon this remarkable case and that of the Pilot at the Balize, who can help exclaiming, how wonderful and mysterious is that mighty agent, the conscience, whose residence is the human soul, that kindled the fires and raised the storms which raged and beat so vehemently over the desolate spirits of these unhappy men! Here were two persons that had passed among their fellows, during the day, for aught that could be seen, as tranquil and untroubled as any. But when night comes, a life-endangering accident in the one case, and the oppression of the habitual use of strong drink upon the overheated brain, in both, agitates those immortal spirits to their profoundest depths; reveals their secret recesses, known before only to God and their own consciousness; makes the characters faintly traced on memory's tablet years long gone, to stand out before the mind in distinct burning reality; it gives to that faculty an unwonted recollective power; endues with a tormenting deadly sting the sense of guilt; imparts an almost miraculous freedom and vividness to the imagination; opens up the spiritual vision of the conscious soul, and makes it look in, amazed, upon eternity, and view its solemn scenes, its changeless destinies, its awful retributions, and hear the ceaseless wail, and feel the burning of the quenchless fire, and the gnawing of the undying worm of hell.

Such an agent of power doth every human spirit bear, involved within itself, which it can no more separate itself from, or permanently stupefy, or counteract its power, than it can make itself cease to be.

Then, dread this very power; for, works it wrong,
It gives to all without a power as strong
As is its own-a power it can't recall :
Such as thy strength, e'en so will be thy thrall.
Then, when thy spirit's from the body freed,

Then shalt thou know, see, feel, what's life indeed!
Bursting to life, thy dominant desire

Shall upward flame, like a fierce forest fire:

The indomitable will shall know no sway :-
God calls-man, hear Him; quit that fearful way!

How important, dear reader, whosoever thou art that perusest this page, how important to quit at once the fearful way of sin! For if such be the wonderful power of conscience, as sometimes developed in this life, when all the soul's energies are under restraint and shackled by the body, how fearful must it then be, when, leaving its shell of clay to moulder in the grave, the SOUL shall be ushered into eternity, with the moral character formed here, disenthralled from its gross material fetters, and with a spirit's intuition shall PERCEIVE a sin-hating, holy God, and shall feel the searching eye of Omniscience pervading it through and through!

When, in the dread presence of Jehovah, eternal realities shall blaze in upon it with more than noon-day brightness,-then, if unshielded, unrenewed, unwashed in the blood of atonement, O, what a stinging, withering sense of guilt, and of loss, eternal, irremediable loss, must weigh down that undying spirit, and plunge it in hopeless despair! To see others entering in through the pearly gates, and walking the golden streets of the celestial city; eating of the tree of Paradise, drinking of the river of life; exulting in the praises of God and the Lamb, communing with Christ and all the redeemed; and yet to be ourself forever separated, like a convict, from the

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happy company, a great multitude which no man can number,-ah, who can conceive the bitterness of the loss, the cutting keenness of that pang! Who in the flesh can tell the anguish that will rend the quickened souls of the finally impenitent, as that dreadful sentence is issued-"Depart, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels!" And they go to their prison-houses, to feel forever the blighting curse of the Almighty's indignation against unrepented sin, and to have verified in themselves that solemn passage of Proverbs, to which the melancholy cases here truly narrated afford so striking a commentary-Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof; I also will laugh at your calamity, I will mock when your fear cometh. When your fear cometh as desolation, and your destruction as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you; then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me; for that they hated knowledge, and did not choose the fear of the Lord; they would none of my counsel; they despised all my reproof; therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices.

Through God's great mercy in Jesus Christ, may none that read this ever experience these bitter pangs. But, by present repentance and faith in the Crucified, may their hearts be sprinkled from an evil conscience, and an inheritance among the sanctified be their everlasting portion.

With them numbered let me be,
Here and through eternity!

We may dwell with regret upon time thrown away, When youth and its follies are o'er ; We may waken to memory many a day Which, alas! can be ours no more: And we frequently think could we live o'er again The years we have heedlessly lost, 'Twere easy to shun the remorse and the pain Which reflection is certain to cost.

Tho' futile and vain are the tears and regret
Which we waste in lament for the past-
E'er the sun of existence forever be set,
And death claims his victim at last-
Let us learn from the sorrow that shadows the soul,
As we sigh o'er the time that has flown,
To enforce a far wiser and better control

O'er the days we may yet call our own.

we now term the infancy of literature, Solomon said, "Of making many books there is no end." But of the books which he found extant, there probably remain in being only the Pentateuch, the Book of Job, and a few of the poems of his own royal father. What a vast freight of promised immortality have these three thousand years carried away as a dream! Of the lost books, which Solomon may have read, the Pentateuch preserves the name of one, with a short extract. It is the "Book of the wars of Jehovah," that is, of great, famous wars,-a poetical work, probably the Iliad of its day, commemorative of heroic darings and achievements, the bard's tribute to men of might and renown, whose world-honored names, he trusted, would bear his own down to the end of time. Why has his book perished? Why is his name, why are the names of his heroes dropped from the memory of man? Probably because the book was a mere war-poem,-an eulogy of deeds that had made men wretched,—of deeds, the praise of which was cherished among the posterity of their heroes, or until the tribe which had achieved them was disbanded, but which had no hold upon the general heart, nothing to call forth the sympathy, or to enlist the affections. Why have the writings of Moses and of David, why has the Book of Job survived, and gone forth into all lands, and been translated into every tongue?! Because there was that in them which appealed | to the universal heart, and which found an answering chord in every breast. They addressed man as man, and in tones of love and sympathy. They revealed the common parentage, both earthly and heavenly, of all men. They breathed compassion for the poor, kindness for the exile and the stranger. They opened the bosom of eternal love for the repose of the weary, for the refuge of the oppressed. They spake of the unslumbering Shepherd. They drew around the tried and stricken children of earth the mantle of a watchful Providence. They encompassed men's dwellings and daily walks with the hosts of God and the sympathy of heaven. Therefore

was it, that long before literature was wont to pass from nation to nation, and from tongue to tongue, these books were translated and circulated among nations whose theology differed the most widely from that of the Jews. The philanthropic aim and tendency of these writings preserved and diffused them.

In the present article, we ask the attention of our readers to the philanthropic element, considered as the life-giving and life-preserving principle of literature; as that without which taste, genius, and eloquence can leave no extensive or enduring impress. By the philanthropic element we mean sympathy with man as man, -a spirit which surmounts natural barriers, which forgets factitious differences, which regards our common nature as essentially sacred and venerable, and which utters itself with tenderness and love,-in fine, a spirit which brings the reader, whoever he may be, into face to face communion with the author, and which makes the process of perusal a blending of heart with heart. The motto of the writer who would give his book free course and length of days, must be, Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.

But our theory encounters at the outset a formidable objection in the ancient classics taken collectively. They have little or none of this philanthropic element. They recognize not the intrinsic dignity and worth of the human soul. They are contracted and exclusive in their sympathies. Hatred, contempt, or revenge often gives them their key-note. Even Socrates (in Plato's Dialogues) speaks scornfully of those who, in humble life, practice the quiet virtues that adorn their station, denies that they can partake or approach the divine nature, and promises them no more worthy fate after death, than transmigration into the bodies of ants, wasps, and bees. Yet those old Greek and Roman writers have survived the nations and languages of their birth,-they enter into all liberal culture, they nournish youth, they are the delight of age, and the wreath of their renown is as fresh and green as when it was first woven. How is it that they

still live, if philanthropy is the breath of life to literature?

We reply, that the history of the classics is not even an exception to the principle which we have laid down; but, on the other hand, strikingly illustrates and confirms it. For, in the first place, how exceedingly small a proportion (probably much less than a thousandth part) of ancient classical literature has come down to us! What a multitude of philosophers and of poets, renowned in their day, have transmitted only as much knowledge of themselves, as may be compressed within five lines of a classical dictionary! The Alexandrian Library contained seven hundred thousand volumes, most of them, undoubtedly, single copies of works, which had ceased to be read or known, which, even if works of genius, never had any permanent hold upon the interest or sympathy of mankind, and to which, already dead, the fanatical Christians who burned the library only added the honors of a funeral pile; for even before the art of printing, the conflagration of a single library, or of a score of libraries, could not have destroyed a living litera

ture.

The strongest proof that classical literature had no intrinsic vitality, may be drawn from the history of the civilized world in the interval be. tween the dismemberment of the Roman Empire and the revival of letters. For the citizens of the empire transmitted to their rude conquerors from the North, not the literature which was indigenous among themselves, but a provincial literature, full of foreign idioms, which they had borrowed from despised Judæa. This was not because the conquered people were religious devotees. Primitive piety then burned low in the church, and the senseless glitter of mere form had hidden the power of godliness. The Scriptures were but partially diffused, imperfectly understood, and superficially obeyed. Their direct influence upon individual character was hardly perceptible. But yet, by their catholic, humane, philanthropic spirit, they had so inwrought themselves into the body politic, and so leavened the whole mass of society, as to sustain the fiercest shock of revolution, nay, the entire disintegration of the social system, and to mingle anew with its chaotic elements, as they were fused into other forms, and a life more hardy, though less refined. Now, as it was barely the social and intellectual influence of the Scriptures which thus survived the rush of desolating hordes, and subdued the conquerors, had classical literature taken any strong hold upon the general mind and heart, there is no conceivable reason why that also should not have penetrated the new organization

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of the social elements, and impressed its trace deep and clear upon the history and monuments of the dark ages. But we discern no such traces. The age immediately preceding that of the barbarian inroads had lost all purity of taste and beauty of literary execution,-the time-hallowed imagery of the classics had become time-worn and obsolete, the forms of the Augustan age had been racked and warped, its idioms diluted, its graphic terseness of diction beaten out into a verbose and lumbering dialect, an attenuated, enervated Latin, which Cicero would hardly have recognized as his native tongue. Classical literature had lost its power over those of its own household; and, when aliens overran its home, liberty of concealment, undisturbed oblivion was the highest boon which it could obtain, and that only for a few of its master-spirits. There was no transfusion of its harmonious breathings into a new literature, or into the life-blood of the na tions that entered upon its heritage. No strains from Mantua or Tibur were taught to blend with the hoarse war-cry of Goth and Hun. No Athenian or Roman culture moulded the manners or formed the minds of the invaders. But the writings of the Galilean fishermen worked their way with inconceivable rapidity into the hearts and habits of those fierce idolaters, quenching the fires of their often bloody superstitions, infusing a spirit of humanity, cherishing pacific counsels and arts, and mingling even with the savage code of war principles of honor and forbearance. To be sure, the sacred writings themselves were soon hidden from the people, nay, from the very priests, hidden in cloister libraries, and in a tongue which was fast growing obsolete. Yet they inspired and pervaded what little of literature, what little of eloquence there was.

But the revival of letters (so called) was an isolated phenomenon, fraught with no far-reaching results, exerting no extensive sway over the destiny of the race. For classical learning in its revival took its first start, and reached its highest point, in its own soil of Italy; yet there the intellectual impulse was of narrower extent and shorter duration than elsewhere, and was closely followed by an age of literary imbecility and plagiarism, and of political and religious proffigacy, which gave place only to the death-shadows of universal ignorance and degradation. The reason of this was, that the Italian mind, when roused from its long lethargy, found in the department to which it applied itself nothing to expand and elevate its highest powers, nothing adapted to awaken heart-interest and heart-sympathy, nothing diffusive in its nature, and fitted to become the basis of general culture and prog