skimble-scamble, and anon slowly and more regularly, as in a minuet; and as they came nearer the ground, they were caught up by the current, and borne in a horizontal line, like long, quickspun, silver threads, afar over the white fields. There was but little snow in the shed, although entirely open on the south side; the storm seeming to devote itself to building up a drift in front.. This drift had now reached a height of seven or eight feet. It sloped up like the roof of a pyramid, and on the top was an appendage like a horn, or a plume, or a marble jet d'eau, or a frozen flame of fire; and the elements in all their violence, the eddies that veered about the corner of the house, the occasional side-blasts, still dallied, and stopped to mould it and finish it; and it became thinner, and more tapering, and spiral; each singular flake adjusting itself to the very tip, with instinctive nicety; till at last it broke off by its own weight; then a new one went on to be formed. Under this drift lay the wood Margaret was after, and she hesitated to demolish the pretty structure. The cistern was overrun with ice; the water fell from the spout in an ice tube, the half-barrel was rimmed about with a broad round moulding of ice, and where the water flowed off, it had formed a wavy cascade of ice, and under the cold snows the clear cold water could he heard babbling and singing as if it no whit cared for winter. Her great summer gobbling turkey attempted to mount the edge of the cistern to drink, but the wind blew, his feet slipped, and back he fell. She took a dish and watered her poultry. From the corner of the house the snow fretted and spirted, in a continuous stream of spray. While she looked at this, she saw a flock of snow-birds borne on by the winds, endeavouring to tack their course, and run in under the shelter of the house, but the remorseless elements drifted them on, and they were apparently dashed against the woods beyond. One of the birds was seen to drop, and Margaret darted out, waded through the snow, caught the luckless or lucky wanderer, and amid the butting winds, sharp snow-rack, and smothering sheets of spray, carried it into the house. In her Book of Birds, she found it was a snow-bunting, that it was hatched in a nest of reindeer's hair near the North Pole, that it had sported among eternal solitudes of rocks and ice, and come thousands of miles. It was purely white, while others of the species receive some darker shades. She put it in the cage with Robin, who welcomed the travelled stranger with due respect.". pp. 162, 163. -- If the impressions of the readers of this book are like ours, they have thought the author superior to his work, which, though it abounds in proofs of talent, has many things that to some must impair, to others utterly destroy, its attraction. If he is one of those who feel no respect for prevailing sentiments in matters of taste, he may persist in his own way, which, as it is now, will not lead him to a throne in men's minds and hearts. But if he will pay deference to established modes of communication, which, though they might be improved, are, at present, the only channels through which extensive influence can be exerted, he may gain for himself a brilliant reputation, and, what is more to his purpose, he may be a powerful and successful instrument for bringing about those reforms which he evidently has at heart, and which will be triumphantly accomplished in happier days than ours. ART. VI.—1. Biographical, Literary, and Philosophical Essays, contributed to the Eclectic Review. By JOHN FOSTER, Author of Essays on Decision of Character, Popular Ignorance, and Christian Morals. New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1844. 12mo. pp. 419. 2. Miscellaneous Essays on Christian Morals, Experimental and Practical. Originally delivered as Lectures in the Broadmead Chapel, Bristol, England. By JOHN FOSTER. New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1844. 12mo. pp. 252. Ar the latest glimpse that we can get of the distinguished author whose name has drawn our attention to the above-mentioned publications, we find him an infirm, retired octogenarian, long, gaunt, and ghastly, careless and slovenly in dress, with a countenance deeply furrowed by a life of intense thought, and indicating great mental vigor and rigid inflexibility of character. He was revered and cherished as the last of a constellation of luminaries, that had for half a century or more shed lustre on the previously obscure and overshadowed denomination of Particular or Calvinistic Baptists. He, too, has now gone to his rest; and, as his finished life and testimony pass to be matters of record and history, we avail ourselves of the opportunity to present such imperfect sketches of his person and character as we can obtain, and to de scribe that compact and strongly marked individuality which has so stamped itself upon his works, as to give us, in the least of them, a perfect daguerrotype of the man. John Foster was, we believe, born in Bristol, was educated at the Baptist Academy there, and spent most of his days in that city or its vicinity. He entered in early life upon the clerical profession, but was never a popular, or, to a promiscuous audience, even an endurable preacher. He was two or three times settled, either over very small societies, or over congregations that dwindled rapidly under his ministrations. His failure as a public teacher was to be ascribed, in part, to the uncompromising rigidity of his character, which forbade his becoming "all things to all men," even in that apostolic and Christian sense in which these much abused words were first used, and in part to great personal awkwardness, and to feeble and unadorned elocution; though, as a speaker, he is said, by his skilful and graphic emphasis, to have exercised the power, denied to his vivâ voce readers, of rendering his own cumbrous and clumsy sentences intelligible to a patient hearer. He was fond of the company of intellectual men, and conversed with animation and interest on high themes; but in ordinary social and domestic intercourse was, in early and middle life, austere and stern, commanding more reverence than love. His own household are said to have regarded him with a distant veneration amounting almost to awe; and a domestic picture given of him by a visiter some twenty years ago reminded us of our own Jonathan Edwards, who dined in state from silver, while his household cowered around his table over pewter. But later informants, who have seen him in his bereaved and diminished family, represent him as not insensible to the amenities, or unobservant of the courtesies, that make home graceful and happy. Thus the hard, crabbed fruit, which the summer sun cannot ripen, grows mellow as the oblique rays of autumn reach it through thinned and withered foliage. Possessed of a moderate competence, sufficient for his frugal tastes and habits, he lived for many of his last years in retirement, from which he emerged only when solicited for special services, occasionally preaching ad interim in a vacant church, and now and then delivering courses of lectures to an evening audience composed of the cultivated and spiritual from the various denominations in Bristol. He had, it is said, of late, even used his pen with growing reluctance, and this, not from indolence or inactivity, but because he had identified himself with the notions and sentiments of a vanished generation, had been a laudator temporis acti se puero, and had grudgingly bestowed his services, as a censor and castigator, on those novelties in literature, philosophy, and theology for which he deemed silent" preterition" the most worthy treatment. He continued, however, to contribute not infrequently to the Eclectic Review till near the close of 1839, having been intimately associated with the founders of that journal, and sympathizing strongly with the theological views which have uniformly characterized it. Foster was a Calvinist of the old school as to his theological opinions; and his opinions were all theological. He took cognizance, indeed, of a wide diversity of subjects, but viewed them only in their religious aspects and relations. His general knowledge was great, and his learning accurate and profound; but every thing, ancient and modern, sacred and profane, was tried by the unelastic standard of his own creed. His literary criticisms often remind us of the trite, yet undoubtedly fabulous, anecdote of the Caliph Omar's decision of the fate of the Alexandrian Library, "What accords with the Koran is superfluous, what differs from it harmful." He is much more shocked by the false doctrine, than edified by the poetical genius, of Homer and Virgil, and evidently ascribes to their great works a stronger hold upon opinion and sentiment in modern times, than they could have had even in the classic ages. He cannot tolerate so much as a metaphor drawn from mythology or fable, and manifests the same horror at the cursory introduction of the name of a heathen deity by way of ornament to a Christian poem, which he might have been expected to show, had the Broadmead Chapel been converted into a Pantheon, and the statue of Jupiter Tonans erected in his own frequent place in its pulpit. Of course, the moral tone of all his writings is pure and lofty. His ethics are eminently Christian as to their positive side; but they lack the breadth and catholicity of the Christian standard. They omit all the æsthetic aspects of virtue. They give but narrow scope and reluctant tolerance to those innocent amenities of domestic and social life, of literature and art, which grow in the most luxuriant beauty under true Christian culture. His morality would be repre sented by a rigid code, formed of precise precepts, stated and defined with logical accuracy, and bristling all over with stern penalties, rather than by a pervading, plastic spirit of devotion and humanity, multiform in its manifestations, and blending with all that is graceful and beautiful in nature and in life. While all his works are characteristic of the author, the Essay on Decision of Character, which has had, we believe, wider circulation than any of his writings, bears preeminently the shape and pressure of his mind and heart. It is a condensed and generalized autobiography. In every form and hue, he is the man he paints, inflexible to evil, firmly just, rigidly true, but cold and statue-like, deeming every sweet voice a Siren's song, every pleasant form an incarnation of the great adversary, all tempting fruit apples of Sodom. He shows a strait and narrow path, which manifestly leads to heaven; but nowhere on the road has he planted "instead of the thorn the fir-tree, and instead of the brier the myrtle." He treats with little respect the gentler elements of character, and deems their absence hardly a defect. Severe resolve, tenacious purpose, intense, yet quiet energy, under the control of a conscience incorruptible and unslumbering, these with him make up the perfect character; and it matters little, if, in developing the hardier sinews of the moral man, the lines of beauty be all marred, and the cords of finer feeling broken or unstrung. The same exclusive spirit runs through the powerfully written Essay on the Aversion of Men of Taste to Evangelical Religion. The author here represents all ancient and modern literature as arrayed in an almost unbroken phalanx against religious faith and reverence, so that one can become conversant with the intellectual achievements of his race only at the risk of indifference or unbelief as to the most momentous of all truths. The ancient poets are condemned and their influence deprecated, because they had not anticipated the disclosures of the New Testament; while most modern works of taste and fancy are represented as hostile to religion, solely because they are not distinctively religious. Even Addison and Johnson, clear and emphatic as were their recognitions of the divinity and authority of the Christian revelation, are harshly censured for what they left unwritten. Our author, however, strangely enough, pronoun |