She was plucked up out of a mystery, and had its roots still clinging to her. . . . Yet it was to little purpose that she approached the edge of the voiceless gulf between herself and them. Standing on the utmost verge of that dark chasm, she might stretch out her hand, and never clasp a hand of theirs; she might strive to call out, "Help, friends! help!" but, as with dreamers when they shout, her voice would perish inaudibly in the remoteness that seemed such a little way. This perception of an infinite shivering solitude, amid which we cannot come close enough to human beings to be warmed by them, and where they turn to cold, chilly shapes of mist, is one of the most forlorn results of any accident, misfortune, crime, or peculiarity of character that puts an individual ajar with the world. . . . As these busts in the block of marble, thought Miriam, so does our individual fate exist in the limestone of time. We fancy that we carve it out; but its ultimate shape is prior to all our action. The sculptor is a magician who turns feverish men into cool, quiet marble. What a blessed change for them! . . . Ink, moreover, is apt to have a corrosive quality, and might chance to raise a blister, instead of any mere agreeable titillation, on skins so sensitive as those of artists. . All over the surface of what was once Rome, it seems to be the effort of time to bury up the ancient city, as if it were a corpse and he the sexton; so that in eighteen centuries, the soil over its grave has grown very deep, by the slow scattering of dust and the accumulation of more modern decay upon olden ruin. . . . In Italy, religion jostles along side by side with business and sport, after a fashion of its own, and people are accustomed to kneel down and pray, or see others praying, between two fits of merriment or between two sins.

Here is a spectral picture of the Coliseum:

Fancy a mighty assemblage of eighty thousand melancholy and remorseless ghosts looking down from those tiers of broken arches striving to repent of the savage pleasures which they once enjoyed, but still longing to enjoy them over again. . . . My heart consented to what you did. We two slew yonder wretch. The deed knits us together for time and eternity like the coil of a serpent. ... It is a terrible thought, that an individual wrong-doing melts into the great mass of human crime, and makes us-who dreamed only of our own little separate sin-makes us guilty of the whole.

Of Hilda, the most beautiful character in the story, it is said,

A torpor, heretofore unknown to her vivacious though quiet temperament, had possessed itself of the poor girl, like a half-dead serpent knotting its cold, inextricable wreath about her limbs. . . . She had trodden lightly over the crumble of old crimes; she had

taken her way amid the grime and corruption which Paganism had left there, and a perverted Christianity had made more noisome; walking saint-like through it all, with white, innocent feet, until, in some dark pitfall that lay right across her path, she had vanished out of sight. . . . This capability of transfiguration, which we often see wrought by inward delight on persons far less capable of it than Hilda, suggests how angels come by their beauty. It grows out of their happiness, and lasts forever, only because that is immortal.

The close of Hawthorne's life was somewhat tragical, resembling scenes which he has effectively introduced into his romances. A few weeks before his death, his state of health seeming to require the relaxation of travel, he started on a short excursion, accompanied by his friend, William D. Ticknor. They had gone no further than Philadelphia, when Ticknor suddenly died. The invalid must take charge of the remains of the strong man who had lately stood as his support. This sudden and terrible event produced a serious shock on the nervous system of the valetudinarian. He returned to Boston, and paid the last offices to his friend, and soon set out on another journey accompanied by Franklin Pierce. It was now his time to fall, and he died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, on the 19th of May, 1864, so suddenly and quietly that no one knew the moment or even the hour of his departure. He was buried at Concord, Massachusetts, on a pleasant hill-side "in a patch of sunlight, flecked by the shade of tall murmuring pines."

Upon Hawthorne as a writer the world has passed its judgment of approval. Slowly but surely he won his way to distinction and enduring fame. His productions were written to please rather than to instruct mankind. It has been a subject of discussion whether literature should be ranked among useful or ornamental arts. Were all authors of the type of Hawthorne, the question would be forever settled that literature is an ornamental art, designed simply to please. He was an artist of high order, and labored to construct his works with such perfection that they would meet the approval of the most scrupulous taste. Sometimes his words seem "gems that flame with many-colored light upon the page, and throw thence a tremulous glimmer into the reader's eyes."

It is much to be regretted that he did not sometimes em

ploy his pen upon the topics which enlist the minds of the great thinkers of the world. He did not consider it his mission to battle any of the great evils which afflict mankind, or to espouse the cause of the lofty virtues which adorn and dignify human nature. He had a great horror of hobbies, and no patience with philanthropy adopted as a profession; he was consequently too careful to avoid the advocacy of reforms.

He loved his country; he was thoroughly American, and did much to make American literature respectable before the world; and yet succeeding ages will be left to wonder, as they search his writings, why he left not a word behind him to aid his country in ridding herself of the most gigantic of all the evils which threatened her destruction.

He had no taste for politics, and yet it was his fortune to be patronized by politicians whose capital in trade was jointstock with the slave oligarchy of the South. If he would maintain agreeable relations with them, the least he could do was to say no word which could be construed against "the sum of all villainies." So far as would be indicated by his words on this, or any other practical topic of the time, like a character in one of his own romances, "he might have lived a century ago, or a thousand years, or before the Christian epoch."

ART. V.-DIVINE PASSION.

THAT the Divine Being possesses an emotional nature, is generally admitted in the theological world; but the application and illustration of the doctrine has often been attended with much difficulty, if not with absolute confusion and contradiction of statement. We form our conceptions of infinite understanding from the finite understanding of the human mind, the former differing from the latter in being unlimited and free from error; but we are told the emotional nature of man is essentially different from that of the Deity, in that the latter is incapable both of grief and of variations in degrees of happiness. It is difficult to conceive how such a nature could have any

active relation to human conduct and character, since nothing that man can do or be can either enhance or detract from infinite and unvaried happiness. It may be doubted if the term emotion can properly be applied to a nature of that kind. The common sentiment of Christian believers may perhaps be expressed in these words, "God is so happy in himself that nothing which man can do can make him more happy." And yet it is generally acknowledged that in some inexplicable manner God is pleased with the virtues and displeased with the vices of his creatures. These two sentiments, apparently so contradictory, are alike adopted in unquestioning faith, and with strange unanimity. Neither proposition is ever a subject of much discussion in the pulpit, in the study, or in the Christian household. Both are received in silent assent, the one from Scripture and the instinctive teachings of the heart, the other from the dicta of metaphysics and the deductions of logic. If both sentiments cannot be true, which shall we adopt? "If God were capable of grief he would not be a perfect being." That is founded upon the assumption that nothing which is inconsistent with happiness can be an element of perfection. For, it may be argued, infinite happiness must be in itself desirable, and a being of infinite power can possess whatever is desirable, therefore he possesses infinite happiness. The same conclusion may be reached by the argument that nothing exists to limit the happiness of a self-existent, independent being. The logic is short, and to many, perfectly conclusive.

It seems remarkable, in opposition to all this, that the doctrine of the infinite happiness of God is nowhere asserted in the Bible. It is purely a deduction of metaphysical reasoning. The whole subject of divine infinity is somewhat indefinitely revealed. Distinct attributes are revealed as infinite. Absolute infinity is more inferred than revealed. Even infinity may have its qualifications. An infinity in one direction does not imply its existence in all other supposable directions; nor, according to mathematics, are all infinities absolutely equal. We consider it no detraction from Omnipotence to say, it cannot perform a contradiction, nor change an axiomatic truth. As Arminians we say it would be a contradiction for the Deity to bestow a necessitated holiness upon a free moral agent.

Some of the attributes of God are in their very nature limited. There can be no such thing as a holiness that is infinite in all directions, though there can be perfect holiness. There are boundaries to right. The decalogue is a series of limitations. Justice, for instance, is represented by the even balances. Here there can be no infinity. Temperance is restraint; meekness is calm endurance and freedom from passion. Even love is limited to the proper objects of love, for some things are to be hated and not loved; and, in regard to the proper objects, some are loved in a higher degree than others, both by God and man. If, then, divine holiness has its limitations, may not also divine happiness?

We may well pause before pronouncing positive judgments as to the ways and attributes of the Unsearchable. Even to celestial minds his nature must ever remain mysterious; how much more to the infirm capacities of earth? It is asserted that happiness and perfection are inseparable. May it not be possible that, in the divine mind, absolute and unvarying happiness may be associated with imperfection? The griefs of humanity have beneficent objects other than the disciplining of the sufferers; may not grief in the Deity have its great ends to reach in the beneficent system of the universe? Qualities undesirable to selfishness may be intimately associated with beneficence. The sorrows of Jesus of Nazareth, even if they be considered as belonging to his human nature alone, are an exhibition of how closely sorrow and virtue can be allied; and the effect produced upon all Christian generations by the exhibition of such sorrows, shows the beneficent mission of sorrow. The sorrows of the Redeemer seemed to flow spontaneously from his exalted, virtuous manhood, and therefore may not be supposed to have been borne for no other purpose than that of atonement. If then sorrow be not inconsistent with the highest style of humanity which was ever made manifest, can we positively assert that it is inconsistent with Divinity? We venture to take the ground that it is not.

When we speak of sorrow as associated with the Divine Mind, we do not mean that degree of it which implies the deprivation of happiness and the existence of positive misery in its place. That which mars the happiness of a sentient existence may be said to sadden and grieve, though it may