seems mere waiting: it was not that we were born for. Any other could do it as well, or better. So little skill enters into these works, so little do they mix with the divine life, that it really signifies little what we do, whether we turn a grindstone, or ride, or run, or make fortunes, or govern the state. The worst feature of this double consciousness is, that the two lives, of the understanding and of the soul, which we lead, really show very little relation to each other, never meet and measure each other: one prevails now, all buzz and din; and the other prevails then, all infinitude and paradise; and, with the progress of life, the two discover no greater disposition to reconcile themselves. Yet, what is my faith? What am I? What but a thought of serenity and independence, an abode in the deep blue sky? Presently the clouds shut down again; yet we retain the belief that this petty web we weave will at last be overshot and reticulated with veins of the blue, and that the moments will characterize the days. Patience, then, is for us, is it not? Patience, and still patience. When we pass, as presently we shall, into some new infinitude, out of this Iceland of negations, it will please us to reflect that, though we had few virtues or consolations, we bore with our indigence, nor once strove to repair it with hypocrisy or false heat of any kind.

But this class are not sufficiently characterized, if we omit to add that they are lovers and worshippers of Beauty. In the eternal trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, each in its perfection including the three, they prefer to make Beauty the sign and head. Something of the same taste is observable in all the moral movements of the time, in the religious and benevolent enterprises. They have a liberal, even an æsthetic spirit. A reference to Beauty in action sounds, to be sure, a little hollow and ridiculous in the ears of the old church. In politics, it has often sufficed, when they treated of justice, if they kept the bounds of selfish calculation. If they granted restitution, it was prudence which granted it. But the justice which is now claimed for the black, and the pauper, and the drunkard, is for Beauty-is for a necessity to the soul of the agent, not of the beneficiary. I say this is the tendency, not yet the realization. Our virtue totters and trips, does not yet walk firmly. Its representatives are

austere; htey preach and denounce; their rectitude is not yet a grace. They are still liable to that slight taint of burlesque which, in our strange world, attaches to the zealot. A saint should be as dear as the apple of the eye. Yet we are tempted to smile, and we flee from the working to the speculative reformer, to escape that same slight ridicule. Alas for these days of derision and criticism! We call the Beautiful the highest, because it appears to us the golden mean, escaping the dowdiness of the good, and the heartlessness of the true. They are lovers of nature also, and find an indemnity in the inviolable order of the world for the violated order and grace of man.

There is, no doubt, a great deal of well-founded objection to be spoken or felt against the sayings and doings of this class, some of whose traits we have selected; no doubt, they will lay themselves open to criticism and to lampoons, and as ridiculous stories will be to be told of them as of any. There will be cant and pretension; there will be subtilty and moonshine. These persons are of unequal strength, and do not all prosper. They complain that everything around them must be denied; and if feeble, it takes all their strength to deny, before they can begin to lead their own life. Grave seniors insist on their respect to this institution, and that usage; to an obsolete history; to some vocation, or college, or etiquette, or beneficiary, or charity, or morning or evening call, which they resist, as what does not concern them. But it costs such sleepless nights, and alienations and misgivings, - they have so many moods. about it; these old guardians never change their minds; they have but one mood on the subject, namely, that Antony is very perverse, that it is quite as much as Antony can do, to assert his rights, abstain from what he thinks foolish, and keep his temper. He cannot help the reaction of this injustice in his own mind. He is braced-up and stilted; all freedom and flowing genius, all sallies of wit and frolic nature are quite out of the question; it is well if he can keep from lying, injustice, and suicide. This is no time for gayety and grace. His strength and spirits are wasted in rejection. But the strong spirits overpower those around them without effort. Their thought and emotion comes in like a flood, quite withdraws them from all notice of these carping critics; they surrender

themselves with glad heart to the heavenly guide, and only by implication reject the clamorous nonsense of the hour. Grave seniors talk to the deaf, - church and old book mumble and virtualize to an unheeding, preoccupied and advancing mind, and thus they by happiness of greater momentum lose no time, but take the right road at first.

But all these of whom I speak are not proficients, they are novices; they only show the road in which man should travel, when the soul has greater health and prowess. Yet let them feel the dignity of their charge, and deserve a larger power. Their heart is the ark in which the fire is concealed, which shall burn in a broader and universal flame. Let them obey the Genius then most when his impulse is wildest; then most when he seems to lead to uninhabitable desarts of thought and life; for the path which the hero travels alone is the highway of health and benefit to mankind. What is the privilege and nobility of our nature, but its persistency, through its power to attach itself to what is permanent?

Society also has its duties in reference to this class, and must behold them with what charity it can. Possibly some, benefit may yet accrue from them to the state. In our Mechanics' Fair, there must be not only bridges, ploughs, carpenters' planes, and baking troughs, but also some few finer instruments, rainguages, thermometers, and telescopes; and in society, besides farmers, sailors, and weavers, there must be a few persons of purer fire kept specially as guages and meters of character; persons of a fine, detecting instinct, who betray the smallest accumulations of wit and feeling in the bystander. Perhaps too there might be room for the exciters and monitors; collectors of the heavenly spark with power to convey the electricity to others. Or, as the storm-tossed vessel at sea speaks the frigate or line-packet' to learn its longitude, so it may not be without its advantage that we should now and then encounter rare and gifted men, to compare the points of our spiritual compass, and verify our bearings from superior chronometers.

Amidst the downward tendency and proneness of things, when every voice is raised for a new road or another statute, or a subscription of stock, for an improvement in dress, or in dentistry, for a new house or a larger business, for a po

- will you not

litical party, or the division of an estate, tolerate one or two solitary voices in the land, speaking for thoughts and principles not marketable or perishable ? Soon these improvements and mechanical inventions will be superseded; these modes of living lost out of memory; these cities rotted, ruined by war, by new inventions, by new seats of trade, or the geologic changes: - all gone, like the shells which sprinkle the seabeach with a white colony to-day, forever renewed to be forever destroyed. But the thoughts which these few hermits strove to proclaim by silence, as well as by speech, not only by what they did, but by what they forbore to do, shall abide in beauty and strength, to reorganize themselves in nature, to invest themselves anew in other, perhaps higher endowed and happier mixed clay than ours, in fuller union with the surrounding system.

A SONG OF SPRING.

LEAVES On the trees,

And buds in the breeze,

And tall grass waving on the meadow side,
And the showerlet sweet,

While the soft clouds meet

Again in their golden robes, when day has died.

The scholar his pen

Hath mended again,

For the new life runs in his wearied veins;
While the wild child flies

Mid the flowers' fresh dyes,

And the happy bird gushes with sudden strains.

DISCOVERIES IN THE NUBIAN PYRAMIDS.

[Translated from the (Vienna) Jahrbücher der Literatur.]

DR. C. G. CARUS, on the discovery of valuable golden ornaments in a Nubian pyramid, by Dr. Ferlini, of Bologna.

On the 22d of April, 1841, on my return from Florence, I passed a day in Bologna, where the rich collections of Professor Alessandrini, in Comparative Anatomy, might well offer me sufficient objects of consideration. At noon, after I had attended a sitting of the Academy of Sciences, and had particularly enjoyed an interesting discourse of Professor Calori, I visited some collections of art, and among others it was proposed to me to see a collection of antiquities, which a Bolognese physician had brought with him from Egypt about four years before. My interest was increased by the fact, that it was a physician who had collected these treasures, and I delayed not to enter. Dr. Ferlini himself was not at home; a young black (whom he had also brought home with him) opened the door to me, and I found first, a small number of stuffed Egyptian animals of little variety; also, oriental weapons and utensils; but in addition, a very remarkable collection of rich golden ornaments, with the model of the Pyramid, in which this so valuable treasure was found. The sister of Dr. Ferlini, a friendly, well-bred lady, appeared, and explained very pleasantly the different pieces of the collection; and also at parting gave me an opportunity to buy a little quarto volume, in which her brother has himself given a report of his researches and this important discovery, with a catalogue, and drawings of the most remarkable pieces. The volume is entitled Relation historique des fouilles opérés dans la Nubie, par le docteur Joseph Ferlini, de Bologne. Rome, 1838.

The treasure found, and here collected, has not failed to attract the attention of antiquarians; and the more, because many other travellers, who have made researches, furnished with ample means, and commissioned by governments, (as for instance the learned Rosellini,) have not succeeded in discovering anything of consequence wrought in gold. The king of Bavaria has indeed already, at considerable cost, procured a small part of Ferlini's treasure for the gallery at Munich. Yet it was not all this, which particularly interested me in this discovery. The interest, with which it inspired me, came especially from the psychological side.

I did not fail to make myself thoroughly acquainted with the