the lake under moonlight soothes the soul into sweetest repose. In the terror of the mighty evolutions of nature, man is also prepared for ruin. His genius bounds at the approach of the whirlwind; it rushes with the swiftness of its fury, and tracks it through its rustling path to the boundaries of the heavens. It is transcendent amid the horrours of the tempest, and, as the lightning breaks from the thunder cloud, it leaps with sublimity, and moves on its blazing line into the profundity of darkness.

Man thus appears to hold an intimate connexion, and grand alliance with nature. But the enjoyment of this blessing seems negative by habitual experience, though the consciousness of it is necessarily deduced from the supremacy of his power, and the sublimity of his position over all surrounding existence. Still, however, must he remain contented with the certainty of its possession, though it be in some measure unaccountable to himself. He must learn to satisfy his mind with the resemblances of facts, on subjects too subtle for their operation, and he must not sicken at the disappointment of defining, what is infinite. The brightness of beauty should enlighten the mistiness of its existence, and that sublimity which is not instantaneous and universal, may be produced by elevation of thought and combination of mag nitudes. His mind may, for a moment, stand and gaze on the very borders of its own perfection; but before it can even catch a glimpse of what rolls beyond, it perceives light and vision blended, and lost in the deep void of boundless

space.

There is, moreover, the sweetest union of the pleasures of sense

and intellect in the delight of nature. Through this bright me dium the vision of fancy has an infinite series of delightful views, sometimes breaking into the bright opening of rapture, and sometimes lengthening and expanding into the luxuriant extent of enjoyment. Every pleasurable impulse of sense urges incipient action into the execution of delight; and every great passion riots in indulgence, more rapturous by progression, and more vacant by excess; not forbidden by reason, nor tainted by disgust. He, who thus gives himself up to nature, is in the brightness and purity of his existence. His mind philosophizes with itself in the loneliness of meditation, and his passions receive ordinance from the solemn convention of philosophy and religion.

Human nature, thus ennobled with powers so sublime, and softened with sensibilities so delicate, each qualified with capacities of enjoyment, extensive as the subjects are exhaustless, must indeed be inveterate against its own happiness by renouncing the experience of it. We too niggardly encroach on the rights of intellect in the vain enterprize of meliorating that, which is already essentially below the standard of human dignity. Few are even aware of the freedom and range of nature, for half mankind come into the world with manacles and fetters. With the smile of slaves, they are pleased and exult with the freedom of breath, and the liberty of life. They sicken and rot within the impalement of a city, without once brightening their eye with a gleam of pure light, or refreshing their lungs with the balmy inhalations of pure expanse. There is a feebleness about them, which is not

the relaxation of strength, and a languor, which is not the repose of enjoyment. At death their eye At death their eye shuts blankly on the walls of their prison, while the vision of him, who has communed with nature, slowly fades with the melancholy dimness of things, and vanishes with their departure.

How truly inglorious is existence, thus drawn out by the continual motives of business, and fretted away by the vain anxieties of city life. How vacant the mind, without the intelligence of nature, and how spiritless the brain, without the thrills of her emotions. He, who is thus kennelled in the city, prefers the bustle of noisy nothingness to the soothing serenity of country life; an atmosphere darkened with the dust of drudgery and labour to the blue expanse, over the fresh landscape; the jargon of brokers, and the brawlings and heavings of "fat and greasy citizens" to the sound of the spring bird at evening, or the broken song of the peasant on his doorstone. To all the exquisite niceties and delicacies of cultured product, even his senses are blunt. He had rather sit, of a dog-day, with four and twenty trenchermen, "big and burly," at the head of a table, whose loaded extent presents the perspective of a market place, than to retire to the cool cell in the grove, to regale himself amid the freshness of fruit, and the raciness of vegetables.

On the contrary, how pleasantly and how naturally flows the life of him, who breathes it in the cool shades of silent retirement, his soul expanding with the pure sen-, timents, which rural imagery inspires; who loves to stretch himself, at noon day, in the deep shade of the mountain brow, and follow the huge shadow of the

dark cloud, as it sails over the plain, deepening the luxuriance of the vallies, and reflecting bright and glaring light on the edges of cliffs and precipices; or in the stillness of a summer's evening, aside the old oak that sighs in the night breeze, to catch the bright forms of departed friends in the white clouds, which wave over the

moon.

The constant action of thought in retirement, adds another charm to it. The mind here is not left merely to its own operation, reason. ing on subjects of its own suggestion, without the standard of perceptible truth for the conclusion of such abstractions. But it has the constant presentation of the sublime experiment of universal cause and effect, free from the anxieties of chance, and unincumbered with the ponderous mass of human follies, prejudices, and absurdities. Its acquisition is the wisdom of nature, and its truth is that certainty of conclusion, which is deduced from determinate causes, invariably efficient of consequential effects.

There is yet another charm in this retreat from the town, and the throng, which is beyond even the fascination of poetry. We here feel, that, description is only imitative of nature, and we turn from the transcription, however charming and exact, to the raptures of the original. We are no longer content with the ideal sympathy of visionary existence, but we extend all the pleasures of fiction into the emotions of sensible truth. In the presence of nature, even the minuteness and exactitude of Cowper is indiscriminate and unsatisfactory; the mellow, luxuriance of Thomson barren and wasteful. In the bright expanse, which surrounds her, even

the sublime and transcendent genius of Milton flutters with dark and heavy wings, near the earth, but faintly tinged with the celestial light, and rests on objects blasted or deformed. Let him then,

whose soul is pure and holy with the love of nature, take his posi tion in the midst of creation, and commence the mighty work of the eternal perfection of thought.

IT is the fortune of some opinions, as well as of some individual characters, to have been, during a long succession of ages, subjects of continual controversy among mankind. In forming an estimate of the moral or intellectual merits of many a person, whose name is recorded in the volumes of history, their virtues and vices are so nearly balanced, that their station in the ranks of fame has never been precisely assigned, and their reputation,even after death, vibrates upon the hinges of events, with which they have little or no perceptible connexion. Such too has been the destiny of the arts and sciences in general, and of the art of rhetorick in particular. Their advancement and decline have been alternate in the annals of the world. At one period they have been cherished, admired, and cultivated; at another neglected, despised, and oppressed. Like the favourites of princes, they have had their turns of unbounded influence and of excessive degradation. Now the enthusiasm of their votaries has raised them to the pinnacle of greatness; now a turn of the wheel

Once

has hurled them prostrate in the dust. Nor have these great and sudden revolutions always resulted from causes seemingly capable of producing such effects. At one period, the barbarian conqueror destroys, at another he adopts, the arts of the vanquished people. The Grecian Muses were led captive and in chains to Rome. there, they not only burst asunder their own fetters, but soon mounting the triumphal car, rode with supreme ascendancy over their victors. More than once have the Tartars, after carrying conquest and desolation over the empire of China, been subdued in turn by the arts of the nation, they had enslaved; as if by a wise and equitable retribution of nature the authors of violence were doomed to be overpowered by their own prosperity, and to find in every victory the seeds of defeat.

On the other hand, the arts and sciences, at the hour of their highest exaltation, have been often reproacked and insulted by those, on whom they had bestowed their choicest favours, and most cruelly

assaulted by the weapons, which themselves had conferred. At the zenith of modern civilization, the palm of unanswered eloquence was awarded to the writer, who maintained, that the sciences had always promoted rather the misery, than the happiness of mankind; and in the age and nation, which heard the voice of Demosthenes, Socrates has been represented as triumphantly demonstrating, that rhetorick cannot be dignified with the name of an art; that it is but a pernicious practice...the mere counterfeit of justice. This opinion has had its followers from the days of Socrates to our own, and it still remains an inquiry among men, as in the age of Plato and in that of Cicero, whether eloquence is an art, worthy of the cultivation of a wise and virtuous man. To assist us in bringing the mind to a satisfactory result of this inquiry, it is proper to consider the art, as well in its nature, as in its effects; to derive our inferences, not merely from the uses, which have been made of it, but from the purposes, to which it ought to be applied, and the end, which it is destined to answer.

The peculiar and highest charac teristick, which distinguishes man from the rest of the animal creation, is reason. It is by this attribute, that our species is constituted the great link between the physical and intellectual world. By our passions and appetites we are placed on a level with the herds of of the forest; by our reason we participate in the divine nature itself: formed of clay, and compounded of dust, we are, in the scale of creation, little higher than the clod of the valley; endowed with reason, we are little lower than the angels. It is by the gift of reason, that the human species enVol. III. No. 6. 2N

joys the exclusive and inestimable privilege of progressive improvement, and is enabled to avail itself of the advantages of individual discovery. As the necessary adjunct and vehicle of reason, the faculty of speech was also bestowed as an exclusive privilege upon man: not the mere utterance of articulate sounds; not the mere cries of passion, which he has in common with the lower orders of animated nature but as the conveyance of thought; as the means of rational intercourse with his fellow-creature, and of humble communion with his God. It is by the means of reason, clothed with speech, that the most precious blessings of social life are communicated from man to man, and that supplication, thanksgiving, and praise are addressed to the author of the uniHow justly then, with the great dramatick poet may we exclaim,

verse.

"Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,

Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and God-like reason To rust in us, unus'd.”

A faculty thus elevated, given us for so sublime a purpose, and destined to an end so excellent, was not intended by the supreme Creator to be buried in the grave of neglect. As the source of all human improvements it was itself susceptible of improvement by industry and application, by observation and experience. Hence, wherever man has been found in a social state, and wherever he has been sensible of his dependance upon a supreme disposer of events, the value and the power of publick speaking, if not universally acknowledged, has at least been universally felt.

For the truth of these remarks let me appeal to the testimony of history, sacred and profane. We shall find it equally clear and conclusive from the earliest of her records, which have escaped the ravages of time. When the people of God were groaning under the insupportable oppressions of Egyptian bondage, and the Lord of hosts condescended by miraculous interposition, to raise them up a deliverer, the want of eloquence was pleaded, by the chosen object of his ministry, as an argument of his incompetency for the high commission, with which he was to be charged. To supply this deficiency, which, even in the communication of more than human powers, Eternal Wisdom had not seen fit to remove, another favoured servant of the Most High was united in the exalted trust of deliverance, and specially appointed, for the purpose of declaring the divine will, to the oppressor and the oppressed to the monarch of Egypt and the children of Israel. "Is not Aaron the Levite thy brother? I know that he can speak well. And he shall be thy spokesman unto the people: and he shall be, even he shall be to thee instead of a mouth, and thou shalt be to him instead of God." was not sufficient for the beneficent purposes of divine Providence that the shepherd of his flock should be invested with the power of performing signs and wonders to authenticate his mission, and command obedience to his words.... The appropriate instrument to appal the heart of the tyrant upon his throne, and to control the wayward dispositions of the people, was an eloquent speaker; and the importance of the duty is apparent in the distinction, which separated it from all the other transcendent

It

gifts, with which the inspired leader was endowed, and committed it as a special charge to his associate. Nor will it escape your observation, that when the first great object of their joint mission was accomplished, and the sacred system of laws and polity for the emancipated nation was delivered by the voice of heaven from the holy mountain, the same eloquent speaker was separated from among the children of Israel, to minister in the priest's office; to bear the iniquity of their holy things; to offer up to God, their creator and. preserver, the publick tribute of their social adoration.

In the fables of Greece and Egypt the importance of eloquence is attested by the belief, that the art of publick speaking was of celestial origin, ascribed to the invention of a God, who, from the possession of this faculty, was supposed to be the messenger and interpreter of Olympus. It is at tested by the solicitude, with which the art was cultivated at a period of the remotest antiquity. With the first glimpse of historical truth, which bursts from the oriental regions of mythological romance, in that feeble and dubious twilight, which scarcely discerns the distinction between the fictions of pagan superstition and the narrative of real events, a school of rhetorick and oratory, established in the Peloponnesus, dawns upon our view. After the lapse of a thousand years from that time, Pausanias, a Grecian geographer and historian, explicit ly asserts, that he had read a treatise upon the art, composed by the founder of this school, a cotemporary and relative of Theseus in the age preceding that of the Trojan war. The poems of Homer abound with still more deci