it honor enough! Ah, if we would but pledge ourselves to truth as heartily as we do to a real or imaginary mistress, and think life too short only because it abridged our time of service, what a new world we should have! Most men pay their vows to her in youth, and go up into the bustle of life, with her kiss warm upon their lips, and her blessing lying upon their hearts like dew; but the world has lips less chary, and cheaper benedictions, and if the broken trothplight with their humble village-mistress comes over them sometimes with a pang, she knows how to blandish away remorse, and persuades them, ere old age, that their young enthusiasm was a folly and an indiscretion.

JOHN.

The pillow of their death-bed, however, hears the name of the old love again, and is made the confidant of some bitter tears to her memory. But you have given me your daisy snipped short off by the head, as a child does.

PHILIP.

"Never man loved more hotly in his life,
And, when the evening cometh, I run blithe,
As soon as e'er the sun begins to west,
To see this flower, how it will go to rest,
For fear of night, darkness so hateth she;
Her cheer is in the brightness utterly
Of the glad sun, for there she will unclose.
Ah, that I have not English rhyme or prose
Enough to give this flower its praise aright!

My busy spirit, that still thirsts anew

To see this flower so young and fresh of hue,
Constrained me with such a great desire,
That in my heart I yet can feel its fire,
And made me rise before the peep of day,
It being now the morning first of May,
With glad devotion and heart full of dread,
To see the resurrection from the dead
Of this same flower, when it should unclose
Against the sun that rose as red as the rose
Which in the breast was of the beast that day
He led Agenor's daughter fair away;
And down upon my knees I set me right,
To greet this flower fresh as best I might,
Kneeling alway till it unclosed was

Among the tender, sweet, and new-sprung grass,

That was with blossoms sweet embroidered all,

In which methought that I might, day by day,
Dwell all throughout the jolly month of May,
Withouten sleep, withouten meat or drink :
Adown full softly I began to sink,

And, leaning on my elbow and my side,
Through the whole day I shaped me to abide,
For nothing else, and I shall tell no lie,
But on the daisy for to feed mine eye,
That has good reason why men call it may
The daisy, otherwise the eye of day,
The empress and the flower of flowers all:

I pray to God that fair may it befall,

And all that love the flowers for her sake!

JOHN.

Happy flower, to have received the homage of Chaucer and Wordsworth! Happier, to have

been ever the playmate and favorite of childhood! There is a true flavor of piety in the whole of the passage you have read, for he that loves the creature has made ready a shrine for the Creator in his heart. The leaf of a tree has a more moving exhortation to the love of God written upon it, than a leaf of Taylor or Barrow.

PHILIP.

Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or the ear. There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or other. The Puritans forgot this, and thrust beauty out of the meeting-house and slammed the door in her face. I love such sensuality as that which Chaucer shows in his love of nature. Surely, God did not give us these fine senses as so many posterns to the heart for the Devil to enter at. I believe that he has endowed us with no faculty but for his own glory. If the Devil has got false keys to them, we must first have given him a model of the wards to make a mould by. The senses can do nothing unless the soul be an accomplice, and, in whatever the soul does, the body will have a voice. In all ages, it has been deemed a Christian virtue to persecute the body. Yet persecution is a sower of dragon's teeth, from which spring armed men to do battle against her. We have driven the world and the flesh, against their wills, into a league with the Devil. If we provided ourselves with half as many ar

guments for loving God as we have against forgetting him, we should be both wiser and better. To be a sensualist in a certain kind and to a certain degree is the mark of a pure and youthful nature. To be able to keep a just balance between sense and spirit, and to have the soul welcome frankly all the delicious impulses which flow to it from without, is a good and holy thing. But it must welcome them as the endearments of a wife, not of a harlot. A Dryad and a Satyr may drink out of the same spring. A poet must be as sensitive as the yielding air, and as pure. To a soul which is truly king of itself, and not a prisoner in its desolate palace, the senses are but keepers of its treasury, and all beautiful things pay their tribute through these, and not to them. If they are allowed to squander the treasure upon their own lusts, the subjects turn niggard and withhold the supplies.

JOHN.

All things that make us happy incline us also to be grateful, and I would rather enlarge than lessen the number of these. Morose and callous recluses have persuaded men that religion is a prude, and have forced her to lengthen her face, and contract her brows to suit the character. They have laid out a gloomy turnpike to heaven, upon which they and their heirs and assigns are privileged to levy tolls, and have set up guide-boards to make us believe that all other roads lead in quite an opposite

I would stamp

direction. The pleasanter they are, the more dangerous. For my part, I am satisfied that I am upon the right path so long as I can see anything to make me happier, anything to make me love man, and therefore God, the more. God's name, and not Satan's, upon every innocent pleasure, upon every legitimate gratification of sense, and God would be the better served for it. In what has Satan deserved so well of us, that we should set aside such first-fruits for him? Christianity differs not more widely from Plato than from the Puritans.

PHILIP.

The church needs reforming now as much as in Luther's time, and sells her indulgences as readily. There are altars to which the slaveholder is admitted, while the Unitarian would be put forth as unclean. If it be God's altar, both have a right there, the sinner most of all, - but let him not go unrebuked. We hire our religion by the quarter, and if it tells any disagreeable truths, we dismiss it, for we did not pay it for such service as this. Christ scourged the sellers of doves out of the temple; we invite the sellers of men and women in. We have few such preachers now as Nathan was. They preach against sin in the abstract, shooting their arrows into the woundless air. Let sin wrap itself in superfine broadcloth, and put its name on charitable subscription-papers, and it is safe. We bandy compliments with it, instead of