92 ON PARTING WITH A LATELY-ACQUIRED FRIEND. should be pioneers in every cause which tends to the amelioration of the condition of their fellow men. The powers of darkness are leagued against them. Whether the assault shall be made against our free institutions, or the holy religion which sustains them, its success is none the less to be dreaded. Let vice and infidelity revel unrestrained throughout our land, and the sun of our liberty will go down in endless night. Let the hand of Omnipotence, which has thus far guided our councils, be withdrawn, and our ruin will be inevitable. No nation can withstand, none endure the wrath of Omnipotence. Every Christian, therefore, who enjoys the elective franchise, is under the moral obligation to exercise it for the dissemination of knowledge, virtue, and true religion. In thus investigating our subject, we have discovered the fearful responsibilities resting upon those who enjoy the elective franchise. To them has been committed the most important rights, the dearest interests of our race. The friends of man are awaiting with intense interest the result of their experiment. Soon their fondest hopes will be realized; the world will be regenerated from moral, intellectual, and political darkness, and every man will walk forth in the enjoyment of rational liberty, or the friends of tyranny will hold a jubilee over a prostrate world. S. E. ON PARTING WITH A LATELY-ACQUIRED FRIEND. Yale. I LOVE not thoughts of sadness; Yet are there times when the warm, frequent tear, Will start unbidden from the eye; and when We feel most deeply that our earthly life Is but a pilgrimage, and that where'er We find the welling springs of pure delight, And fain would pitch our tents and fix our home Our stay must not be there; our motto still Is "Onward!" 'till we reach those promised mansions, The parting hour! the word farewell!-how oft T. T. T. 93 PAPERS FROM THE ATTIC. No. III. FUSSY MEN. THERE is nothing more ridiculous in the world than the fuss that some folks are eternally making about just nothing at all. This is the peculiar province of little men, who unable to get up any thing of importance, contrive to make a sound and think that will pass off for sense. You will see them swelling up their puny nothings, like boys blowing soap bubbles; and with the same assiduity will they prosecute the work, though each successive effort but evinces the folly of their undertaking. Now it were well that every such man inform himself of the fact that the world has something in it besides folly, and that some men are not fools. There are here and there, scattered through society, numbers of those who can easily sift the wheat from the chaff; and to come into contact with such, to which there is great liability every hour, is certain detection. Base coin rings too loud, and practiced ears detect it with the certainty of intuition. But what possible pleasure there can be in trying to impose on mankind, or in keeping up such an imposition, supposing it successful, is a question which for one I could never answer. The only emotion of the mind which ought to be dignified with the name of happiness, is such as springs from correct moral feeling, or exists in some way connected with it; and how correct moral feeling can exist with the consciousness of successful knavery, or the intention of it even, requires more than an ordinary understanding to comprehend. Hence there is no happiness for such minds properly so called. The happiness, if any such there is, is that of vulgar and bad men; and all the pleasures of this nature which could be gathered together in the universe, ought not for a moment to be put in competition with the bliss of that heart, which in obscurity preserves undefiled the consciousness of lowliness and virtue. I would not give a cent for a fussy man; ten to one he is an impostor. He is either very shallow, and therefore worth nothing, or else he has a wily nature that would impose upon you under the semblance of industry. True excellence, in whatever class or condition you find it, is not ever showy. Men of real worth have a better opinion of the world's judgment than to think it will neglect them; and with justice do they think so, for my experience and the experience of every other man, I think, goes to testify, that real worth in the end most certainly meets its reward. This is true every A where and in every thing, be it a matter of head or heart. The good man, though his maxims are spurned and his creed rejected, is certain of justice; for the vilest and most profligate will occasionally retract, and thus render ineffective their efforts at opposition. And men of genius, too, they should feel this; and not quail, as they will, at injustice and severity. It is a sad thing, that men of real genius must have such a sensibility appendaged to it as subjects them more or less to vexations and difficulties all the days of their lives. 'Why are they not made sordid as their fate, and wanting in all those elegant feelings that make up elegant man?'* A question very easily answered, since it is the sensibility of genius which is the soul of it. I know of no difference betwixt a man of genius and any other man of powerful intellect, than that the one's mind always acts under intenser excitement than the other, which is created by its more delicate perceptions; these perceptions, the windows, as it were, of the soul, being more exquisitely reflective, carrying into the heart the finer influences about us, and impressing them there with a more perfect distinctness. It would be well here for those who seem disposed to withhold from genius any prerogatives over other minds, that they distinctly understand this. The man of genius possesses no new faculty, except in the common use of that term; as when it is asserted that this or that man has a happier faculty at this or that handicraft, where nothing more is meant than the results of a more exquisite arrangement of the same faculties possessed by all. The man of genius has the same powers precisely with every other man; there's nothing new in him, unless perhaps the predominance of one faculty over another, and which, it may be, is nothing else than education. In the pack-horse or post-carrier, the memory predominates; in the poet it is the imagination. But it is not this alone which makes the poet; it is the higher order which affords a higher exercise of these same powers, that gives him the ascendency over all other men whatsoever; and just in proportion to the delicacy of this conformation, is he more or less a man of genius. Hence it is apparent that every man is more or less a poet; and hence, also, the production of a single piece of genuine poetry, marks as decidedly the born poet as the contents of a volume. But I was saying something of fussy men. You can't look over society but you find it full of them; little, pert, frisking, waspish fellows, with less brains in their heads than their heels, and more brass in their faces than would have made Falstaff a warming-pan. They are here, they are there, they are every where; and Congress would as effectually serve the country by legislating about it as by sending out certain scores to operate against the flat-nosed Indians. They are the very fellows that Chesterfield says, seize a man by the * Otway. button-hole and talk him to death; flies that buzz about your ears in warm weather; or musquitoes in your nose at midnight in the hottest of dog-days. Now such as these are not happy; they cannot be. They cannot have forced themselves into the belief, that we do not see through them and hate their officiousness; and how in the name of common sense the jibes and jeers they get as they move through the world do not knock wisdom into them, is above an honest man's comprehension. I would absolutely be a fool, or the tenant of a mad house in preference, and think it a loss to change places with them. True worth is never noisy. It carries with it a conscious dignity that will not let it descend to meanness, and its own lowliness is its greatest distinction. Yale College. A. The memory of the tempest's roar Too high for earth's imaginings, No terror wakes, where 'mid the bloom In her own temple; not a smile Of flowers and spicy groves reclined, That soft delicious joy we woo And the full heart finds vent in tears. Lights up his countenance the while flames He marks not--recks not--nay, con temns. His thoughts on loftier musings bent, The breast with woes and sorrows rife, Where isles of magic beauty sleep Instinct with love, and light, and life. 'Tis he-the Genoese! whose bold In wrath no longer sweeps the land, In robes of brilliant hue, sweet Peace She bids us rouse the tuneful lyre And daring genius shall unfold The mighty Ocean's mystery; Whose arm shall rive the chains that bind In ignorance the godlike mind, And give the captive liberty. All glowing with celestial fire. air. V. The princely retinue has passed Across his breast he folds his hands, While with the spiritual habitant Heaven is thy patron; sure the meed VI. Time flies apace! three light barks brave On! on! from day to day, They hold their fearful way, |