THERE came to the knowledge of the writer a striking verification of this great truth, when he was anchored in a merchant-ship on the bar at the Southwest Pass of the mighty Mississippi. As illustrative of the power of conscience, and shedding a warning light upon the character and history and mental exercises of a bad man, it is well worthy of record.

We were seventy days from Marseilles, with a cargo of claret wine for New Orleans, and had taken a Balize pilot in one of those dense fogs that hang over the Gulf of Mexico, at the mouth of the great father of waters, in the months of March and April. When the tow-boat Hudson fastened alongside of us for the purpose of lightening our ship by a transfer of cargo, in order to draw us over the bar, this pilot obtained access to the whiskey-barrel, which, we are sorry to say, is open for the unrestrained use of the hands, on many of the boats of our western waters. Having been some days in our ship without his customary draughts of the maddening fire-water, he drank, it is likely, more deep than he was wont to do; and while trying that same evening to walk down a ladder laid obliquely from the hurricane-deck of the steamboat, he lost his balance and fell heavily against the capstan and down to the engine-deck, cutting the back of his head, and badly bruising his side, unobserved by the men, who were all busy on the cargo. With difficulty and groaning he made his way back into the ship and down into the cabin, where was the writer and a beloved brother-now in glory.

After assistance given him in bathing his wounds, and helping him into his berth, he began freely to unbosom, without questioning, his ago

nized soul. The imminent danger which he had run of being killed or drowned, had greatly alarmed him; and when we pressed him to the consideration of what would have been his condition, had he been thus unexpectedly summoned into eternity, and whether he was prepared to meet God, conscience began to unrake its buried fires, and blow them into flame, as it plied him with the harrowing recollection of his past offenses. And there he rolled and writhed upon his bed, under the double agony of remorse and bodily pain, an object pitiable and sad indeed.

He thought to give himself some relief by telling us, in the way of soliloquy with himself, some of his past crimes-by which, it appeared, that at the early age of seventeen he was stained with the blood of murder. He had gained the affections of a young girl of sixteen, who was loved by another young man of his companions, and had seduced her. His rival challenged him; they met alone with pistols, a duel was fought, and the former was shot through the body a little below the heart. He ran to his antagonist as he fell; received, he said, his forgiveness, and was told with his dying breath immediately to make his escape from Virginia. He did so and became a sailor, afterwards a privateersman in the wars of the States of South America, in which capacity he committed many acts of wickedness and robbery, that seemed to come up before his mind with great vividness and horror. He was taken in an engagement, along with others, imprisoned, and condemned to be hung, but succeeded, with his companions, in breaking out, killing five or six of the guards, and making his escape. Since then he had led, for a while, a

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roving, lawless life, until he had finally settled down as a pilot at the Balize, with a band of half-reclaimed freebooters like himself, among whom he had seen a murder perpetrated with a carving-knife at the dinner-table, in a fit of inflamed passion.

When we urged upon him the necessity of repentance and faith in Christ, for the forgiveness of his great sins, he would endeavor with himself to excuse and palliate his guilt, talk of the infinite mercy of God, and ask if it were possible that all those who had died not Christians, in battle and by accident, would be forever lost. When assured, on the undeniable word of God, that as a man was in heart when he died, so would he be through eternity, and that if he did not love God here, neither would he in the next world, then he would attempt to soothe himself by the consideration of the multitudes that were like him. But all could not suffice to relieve the gnawings of the undying worm at his heart, or to quench the quenchless fire of his re

morse.

When excusing himself for the duel, saying that he was challenged and did not want to fight, and that he expostulated with his rival in vain, but had to fight, we suggested that he ought to have fled away, or suffered anything rather than stand up to be shot at or shoot another.

"Ah, yes!" said he, with a self-condemning tone and emphasis I shall never forget, Young man, you are right-you are right!" The workings of the soul we saw under sin, and we thought this might be a faint image of the power of conscience and the anguish of the finally impenitent in hell. When he closed his eyes in slumber, he said the image of his murdered companion stood before his mind, and he could see his pallid cheek and languishing eye, and hear his expiring words. And again his words were that he saw the countenance of his friend, with its sad, dying look, as clearly when he closed his eyes as he could with them open. It haunted him always; a fact fearfully corroborative of the remark of Dr. Macnish in "The Philosophy of Sleep," who says: "When any crime has been committed by one, the wide storehouse of retributive vengeance is opened up in sleep, and its appalling horrors poured upon him. In vain does he endeavor to expel the dreadful remembrance of his deeds, and bury them in forgetfulness; from the abyss of slumber they start forth as the vampyres start from their sepulchres, and hover around him like avenging furies, while the voice of conscience stuns his ears with murmurs of judgment and eternity, like an echo from the tomb. Then a crowd of doleful remembrances

rush into the mind, no longer to be debarred from visiting the depths of his spirit."

From the first of this pilot's coming on board, we thought he had the restless air and manner and suspicious ways of a man whose conscience was accusing him of crime. Now in his agitated mood he thought aloud, and sometimes a couplet of a hymn or a scrap of Scripture which he had committed in childhood, but had not thought of before, perhaps, for the space of thirty years, would come back to his mind, reappearing from the depths of the past and rising to the surface, as do the timbers, sometimes, of long-foundered ships. In this way he repeated parts of those hymns, "The Dying Christian," "Before Jehovah's Awful Throne," " In robes of Judgment, lo, He comes," and several others, proving forcibly the importance of causing children to learn early, by heart, and infix upon the memory, hymns and verses of the Bible.

If such, we thought, be the power of an awakened conscience in this life, burdened with crime and writhing with a sense of guilt, how terrible will remorse be in eternity, when its fires shall be kindled by keen perceptions of truth and obligation, and by a quickened recollective memory, from whose unfading tablets no sin shall be erased; no lost opportunity of repentance and submission to Christ obliterated; no entreaty of friends or warnings of ministers, or striving of the Spirit effaced; but there they shall burn on forever in characters of fire, consuming the imperishable spirit with anguish unutterable. There will be no need that there should be written on paper those significant words once indited by a dying man, "remorse, remorse, remorse," but it will be engraved as with the point of a diamond and a pen of steel on the pages of conscience, in characters that must be perused forever by all the finally impenitent.

Who that has ever thus seen, in this life, a guilty man writhing under the tortures of remorse, has not thought of the undying worm and the quenchless fire of hell? What material image can be adduced, that conveys such a vivid idea of torment and despair, as the bare thought that the sufferer in the world of woe must be always saying to himself, "I am the author of my own punishment-I am self-ruined. With suicidal hand I have slain myself." Thy ways and thy doings have procured these things unto thee; this thy wickedness is bitter. Your iniquities have turned away those things, and your sins have withholden good things from thee.

Then shall the soul around it call
Impressions that it gathered here;
And pictured on the eternal wall
THE PAST SHALL REAPPEAR.

DIFFICULTIES have a very bad name in the world. Nobody likes them. Every one wishes to have his own path cleared of them. If there are any whom we love better than ourselves-not an impossible case, even in this selfish world-though content to struggle with those which fall to our own inevitable lot, we long to know whether in any way the loved ones can become exempt from them. We would be willing to take something additional to our own burden of difficulty, if we could make that addition a certain insurance price against their liability.

Thus a mother's heart-fountain of purest and most self-denying human love-anxiously forecasts the future pathway through this rugged life of her sleeping babe. She is forgetful of all she has endured in giving it birth and nurture; she is regardless of her present daily toil and nightly watching, but she is tremblingly alive to the certainties of its future difficulties and the possibilities of its future hardships and sufferings; and how gladly would she augment her own labors, if thereby she could provide that its every resting place in the pilgrimage before it, should be soft as the cradle in which she has rocked it to slumber, and its every scene of activity as free

from danger as that in which its first steps are taken under her own guiding hand.

Whoever will undertake to show the way of obtaining the advantages of life without encountering its difficulties, will be sure to find abundance of willing auditors predisposed to become infected with the feverish illusions by which their own brain has been heated and disordered, or it may be to be duped by the craft which for some selfish purpose they have learned to practise.

Royal roads to knowledge and eminence without number have from time to time been opened to view, but then they have been sketched upon the clouds, not carefully surveyed and measured out upon the solid earth. Fancy's wing could soar and speed along them with unobstructed and majestic sweep; but human progress is destined to be of another kind, step after step, on patient, plodding feet. Genius has sometimes lent its power to light them up with rainbow hues, and show their seeming point of contact with the earth; but the simple ones who have started to reach that point, apparently so near at hand, have strangely found that it receded as they advanced, and then its brightness has soon vanished and left them bewildered and lost.

ONE of the absurdest, yet perhaps one of the most common objections urged to the thorough education of females is, that such a process removes woman from her true sphere. The objector should first define what woman's sphere is, or rather what it ought to be. That her present sphere is, in all things, her proper sphere, will surely not be contended. It is not unnatural that at every period of the world's history, the existing should be deemed the right and the eternal; but yet changes steal in, and the thing that is, is not what was, or what yet shall be. On such a subject it becomes no one to dogmatize; but thus much may be safely said, that never will it

be known what woman's sphere is, till the powers with which she has been gifted by our common Creator shall have been unfolded to the utmost, and till she shall have been qualified, too, fo r the situation which she may be destined to fill. Ut may be that in every succeeding phase of our social condition, woman's sphere is proportioned to woman' smerit. Let us increase the merit of woman then, and trouble not ourselves about her sphere; it may be safely left to provide for itself. It is a problem-like most of our social problems-to be wrought out, not talked out, written out, or thought out. As it has been well said, it is one thing to enlarge a sphere of action,

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and another thing to change the sphere. It is the former, not the latter, that it is desirable to do. With richer culture, a deeper consciousness of duty, outward acts visibly the same, are, in spirit, widely different. It is the lofty spirit that will best

"On itself the lowliest duties lay."

Work of all kinds will be better done when its real significance is understood and felt, and the agent loses the oppressive sense of isolation and inutility, and feels himself, however humbly, a fellow-worker with the best and greatest. Too much should not be conceded to habit, in our notions of woman's fitting sphere.

It cannot be with any justice said, that the highest education of woman necessarily removes her from her domestic duties. It rather capacitates her to discharge them in a higher spirit, because with a deeper and truer knowledge of their value. There is a fallacy in this reasoning which needs to be pointed out. We commonly hear contrasted man's literary pursuits on the one hand, and woman's domestic duties on the other; and we are gravely told that the latter disqualify

woman for the former. But the true contrast is between man's business occupations, and woman's domestic duties; to both literary pursuits are a neutral and an equal ground. If the one disqualify woman, the other must not less disqualify man; and in truth, in the great mass of cases women have greatly more spare time for mental culture than men have. This fact renders their neglect of such studies the more to be deplored.

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The senseless ridicule which deters so many women from following the dictates of their better nature is unworthy of their notice. The name ‘blue-stocking" is losing its power. If for a lady to be learned is wrong, because it is unusual, reverse the rule, let it be usual, and it will be right. It is beginning to be more and more felt that improvement, man's as well as woman's, is deeply concerned in the question of female education. They cannot be wholly left apart: they act and re act together. As through Eden the fallen pair wandered hand in hand, so hand in hand through the world they still must go. What degrades or elevates either, infallibly degrades or elevates the other.

Or all the simple beauties with which the writings of Washington Irving are rich, one touching episode in his "Sketch Book," on the solemn subject of the grave, we are inclined to think among the finest. To weep in sacred sorrow over the ashes of "the high hearts and brave" that are gathered beneath the dull turf, to the breast of our parent earth, is one of the most merciful prerogatives assigned to humanity by a most merciful Providence. The burstings of the bereaved heart, perhaps thrilling with their echoes the breathless hour of midnight, of all things touch most nearly the tender sympathies.

A parent, mourning the loss of a beloved child, we must conceive as in the absolute depths of desolate sorrow. Rachel, weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, might engage the fervent pencil of a Raphael. The King of Israel, too-he who, through rugged vicissitudes and constant battling with his fellows, retained the affections of his heart gentle and pure as the spirit of that system his illustrious descendant

was destined to consummate-even he brooded over his son's untimely death with a grief whose graphic description is instinct with deep power. "Smiles form the channel of a future tear!" The beaming expression of brotherly or sisterly affection is suddenly frozen into furrows, where flow the tears of the tender fountain, so rudely shattered by a death-stroke. What more bitter than the tear on the pale orphan's cheek? What unmans more than the ruins of a friendship despoiled and severed, or the prostration of the time-honored head of a benefactor?

But time has two characters; it is a healer and a destroyer. The gnawing of a ling such as grief, is not like the eternal voracity of the vulture which fed on the entrails of Prometheus. The load is gradually lifted; and, as the most brawling stream runs on the most shallow bed, the most violent sorrow is commonly the most readily exhausted. In some minds, indeed, the traces left by grief are surprisingly transient. Every active temperament, however it may feel

stricken when the blow falls, however it may resolve to nourish its grief as a sacred inmate of the bosom, from its very nature, rises elastic from the weight. Bitter days pass over, and these may be lengthened into weeks, and even months; but the voice will soon regain its full-throated ease, the face its unbidden smile, and the step its careless tread. This may be predicated of the majority of people. Those on whom sorrow sinks down with a leaden weight are the subjects of intense contemplative sentiment, disappointed hopes, or the flatterers of a morbid melancholy, which, the more causeless it is, is cherished the more, and appears to communicate sensations of singular satisfaction. The more pains that are taken to study the annals of psychology, the more certain will be the inference that, in the soundest minds, grief finds its most transitory home.

To an intellect firm in its judgment, with its active and moral atmosphere pure and vigorous, sorrow, in fact, however one may recoil from the proposition, must be regarded as unnecessary. To brood over earthly disappointments, leading to misfortune, is contrary to every principle of mental health. Extending this fact to the cases in which the world's esteem may causelessly or otherwise have been forfeited, useless ruminating becomes still more objectionable. Action should be the great principle of life, guided by a steady hope. When, farther, the green turf closes over the wreck of some dear connection, grief, though it may not be deprecated and stoically stifled, should be steadily subdued. Whatever tenderness it may bring on its drooping wings, as a guest it should be allowed to depart, instead of being coaxed to remain. If one would regard his lost relation or friend as "not lost, though gone before," and if that sunniness, which is the brightest phase of the human heart, would not be spotted with a sudden mildew-shade, grief, which becomes too often a degeneracy of moroseness and selfishness, would come and go with noiseless tread, but leave no corroding footmark behind.

We are no enemy to the usages of a becoming and natural sorrow. No one can respect, with more tender hand, the eternal shrine of Nature's affections; but, in the deliberate calmness of a rational spirit, and aided by the light of the very spirit of Christianity, it must appear obvious, and of no secondary importance, that a stable

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mind, firm in its faith and hopes alike, finds an earthly sorrow a fruitless tenant, and, some would even say, all but incompatible with its very character. To be salutary, grief must be neither violent nor long-continued; and, as a process of purifying, to a spirit already sound and stedfast, it is not necessary.

Nothing connected with time and earth can have a permanent existence. It is so with grief. No mind can always retain the impression of a sorrow which subdued even to prostration at its first blow. There may be deep resolutions to nurture, as a point of duty, the remembrance, solemn and affecting, of severed connections and ruined affections, to the exclusion of everything this world calls innocently gladsome or gay. In every interval of occupied hours, one may revert to his recent loss; he may revert with something like resignation, and think that the striking change has made him a better man, and weaned him from the frivolities of life; but still revert with a determined tenacity of his sorrow, which makes him seem strangely desirous of a condition of self-torture. He will open his casement on the quiet lawn, at midnight, where the moon "sweetly sleeps" upon the close-cropped bank, and where in giddy hours, whose like he will never see again, he sported with a rosy-cheeked brother or a blue-eyed sister, now sleeping in "the sleep that knows no waking" and here he may conjure up old echoes, or contrast the present with the past. He may piously plant flowers about the tombs of "the lost and lovely," and, if it be in some quiet hollow, he may weep as he hears the lonely wailing of the plover from the sedge. But all such grief will insensibly decline under the influence of time and external circumstances. Grief is like some bitter but soluble substance dropped in the whirling pool; the friction of the dancing waters wears it into dissolution, till even its grains are thoroughly melted in the general mass. That mass circles not the less pure or healthy. Even that most morbid kind of sorrow which, morosely plunging in religious speculation, verges on fanaticism, though the most tenacious, because most tickling to human weakness, is liable to the same decay. Joy is transient; grief is only a degree less so. But a sunbeam vanishes sooner than a shadow: the former is extinct in an instant; the latter glides slowly into imperceptibility.