her race are, when any one will take the pains to teach them. At the age of sixteen she joined the Old South Church, and became an ornament to it. The little poem following may serve to exemplify the quiet piety which is the characteristic of all her writings.

"" ON BEING BROUGHT FROM AFRICA TO AMERICA.

"'T was mercy brought me from my pagan land,
Gave my benighted soul to understand

That there's a God, that there's a Saviour too :
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful eye,
'Their color is a diabolic dye.'

Remember, Christians, negroes black as Cain

May be refined, and join the angelic train."— p. 42.

In the winter of 1773 Phillis's health had so far declined, that her physician recommended a sea voyage. A son of Mr. Wheatley, being about to proceed to England on business, took Phillis with him, in the nineteenth year of her age. Her fame had gone before her, and she was received. with singular distinction by very many distinguished individuals, and her poems were then first published, dedicated to the Countess of Huntingdon. That so much flattering notice should not have turned her head and changed her heart, is highly to her honor. She was invited to remain in London till the court should return to St. James's, in order that she might be presented to the king, and would probably have consented; but, hearing that her beloved mistress was sick and desired her to return, she reëmbarked without hesitation or delay. O woman, worthy of a better fate!

Mrs. Wheatley died the next year, and her husband soon followed her to the grave. Their son had settled in England, and Phillis was left utterly desolate. Poverty was upon her with all its countless miseries, when she accepted an offer of marriage from a colored man named Peters, the best match, apparently, she could make. He was a man of polished manners and dressed well. He was moreover a person of good education, had studied law, and tradition says, that he actually did plead many cases at the bar, and generally with success, a fact we do not find noticed in the book. Soon after he married Phillis he became a bankrupt,

and being, in his own opinion, too much of a gentleman to practice any manual occupation, his wife was reduced to great distress. The Revolution broke out, the people were fleeing from Boston, and Phillis suffered, at the same time, from sickness and absolute want. She became in those stormy times the mother of three children, all of whom died young.

Phillis and her husband went to Newburyport during the siege of Boston. After the evacuation of the city by the king's troops, she returned and was received into the house of a niece of her former mistress, who was a widow and kept a small school for her support. She and her daughter ministered to Phillis and her children for six weeks, when her husband took them away to an apartment he had hired, but did little or nothing for their support. What became of them afterwards will be best told in the words of the writer of the Memoir himself.

"In a filthy apartment, in an obscure part of the metropolis, lay the dying mother and the wasting child. The woman, who had stood honored and respected in the presence of the wise and good of that country which was hers by adoption, or rather compulsion, who had graced the ancient halls of Old England, and rolled about in the splendid equipages of the proud nobles of Britain, was now numbering the last hours of life in a state of the most abject misery, surrounded by all the emblems of squalid poverty!

"Little more remains to be told. It is probable (as frequently happens when the constitution has long borne up against disease), that the thread of life, attenuated by suffering, at last snapped suddenly; for the friends of Phillis, who had visited her in her sickness, knew not of her death. Peters. did not see fit to acquaint them with the event, or to notify to them her interment. A grand niece of Phillis's benefactress, passing up Court Street, met the funeral of an adult and a child; a bystander informed her they were bearing Phillis Wheatley to that silent mansion, 'where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest.'

"They laid her away in her solitary grave, without a stone to tell that one so good and so gifted sleeps beneath; and the waters of oblivion are rapidly erasing her name from the sands of time.' pp. 23, 24.

Such was the fate of Phillis Wheatley, a heroine, though a black one. Perhaps her genius, her unquestionable virtues,

the vicissitudes of her life, and her melancholy end ought to excite as much interest as the fate of Lady Jane Grey, of Mary, Queen of Scots, or any other heroine, ancient or modern; but such, we fear, will not be the case. She was

a negro, and therefore entitled to no pity or regard. What
matters it that a negro has talents and virtues? what
matters it that she suffers ?
We turn to her poetry. It seems to us respectable,
though not of a high order. Yet how many of the white
writers of this country have enjoyed a transient reputation
on much less intrinsic merit! What proportion of the
rhymesters, who enrich our newspapers and magazines with
their effusions, can write half so well as Phillis Wheatley?
She had no assistance. Like one of her favorite authors,
"she lisped in numbers, for the numbers came." She
seems to have begun to write verses as soon as she had suf-
ficient command of the English language to express her
ideas, certainly before she could have known any thing of
the rules of composition. Accordingly, we find some ill-
constructed and harsh and prosaic lines, but not so many by
half as in the verses of most of her contemporary American
poets. That her lines are full of feeling, no one will deny
who has read the extract we have already given. That she
had considerable originality will be apparent from her epi-
taph on Dr. Sewall.

"Lo, here, a man, redeemed by Jesus' blood,
A sinner once, but now a saint with God.
Behold, ye rich, ye poor, ye fools, ye wise,
Nor let his monument your heart surprise;
'T will tell you what this holy man has done,
Which gives him brighter lustre than the sun.
Listen, ye happy, from your seats above.
I speak sincerely, while I speak and love.
He sought the paths of piety and truth,
By these made happy from his early youth.
In blooming years that grace divine he felt,
Which rescues sinners from the chains of guilt.
Mourn him, ye indigent, whom he has fed,
And henceforth seek, like him, for living bread;
Ev'n Christ, the bread descending from above,
And ask an int'rest in his saving love.
Mourn him, ye youth, to whom he oft has told
God's gracious wonders, from the times of old.

I, too, have cause, this mighty loss to mourn,
For he, my monitor, will not return.

Oh, when shall we to his blest state arrive?
When the same graces in our bosoms thrive?"

pp. 45, 46. Phillis had a peculiarity of intellect which is not often met with. Her memory was very ill regulated. That it must have been uncommonly strong, in some things, is selfevident, else how could she have acquired the English language in so short a time? how could she have mastered the Latin? Yet in other matters it was very defective. It has been seen that she could remember but one solitary fact, connected with her life, previous to her seventh year. The memory of other children reaches much further back. When she composed, she could not retain her own composition in her mind, and was obliged either to lose it or commit it instantly to paper. We offer no solution of this anomaly, it is enough that it must have been a great disadvantage to a person of literary pursuits.

Phillis Wheatley, we think, was a precocious genius, destined very rapidly to acquire a certain degree of excellence, and there to stop for ever. As mediocrity, or even moderate merit in song, is never tolerated, we dare not hope that her works will ever be very popular or generally read; for readers never take into account the disadvantages the writer may have labored under. It is not just that they should; for otherwise the land would be flooded with bad writings, to the exclusion and discouragement of good. It is little consolation to him, who has wasted his time and money in buying and reading a wretched production, to be told that it was written by an apprentice or a woman. We do not mean by this to express any disapprobation of the publication before us, but merely to say that, singular as its merits are, they are not of the kind that will command admiration. Still the work will live, there will always be friends enough of liberty and of the cause of negro improvement not to let it sink into oblivion, and many will desire to possess it as a curiosity. We wish the publisher success, and, if any thing we can say shall contribute to it, we shall heartily rejoice. As a friend of the Africans and of mankind at large, we are happy to record our tribute of praise in behalf of one who was an honor and ornament to her race and her kind.

Born in a land of darkness, the grasp of the spoiler first woke her from the dream of her infancy. Ruthlessly torn from home and parents, no kind arm supported her head or ministered to her wants during the horrors of the middle passage. The crack of the whip, the screams of suffocating and famishing human beings, and the clank of chains were the lullaby of her childish slumbers. Ignorant, naked, and forlorn, she stood up in a foreign land to be sold, like a beast in the market, to strangers whose pity she had not even a voice to demand. A brighter dawn flashed on her mind. Her own intelligence and energy supplied the want of instruction. In the midst of the obloquy attached to her hue, she reached an intellectual eminence known to few of the

females of that day, and not common even now. The treasures of literature became hers, the gospel shone upon her. Grateful, humble, pious, and affectionate, prosperity made no change in her heart. Flattery could not make her vain, pleasure diminished not her gratitude, — starvation and il usage never turned her from her duty. Her worthless husband never heard a syllable of reproach from the dying mother by the side of her dying child. She died in suffering and starvation, and is gone to take the rank which she earned, in a place where many who may despise her for a skin not colored like their own, will never come.

[For the Christian Examiner.]

ART. III. Spirit of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Creation.

No. I. The

In order to comprehend the Spirit of the Old Testament, we must not look into it for what is not there. We must remember, that the instructions it contains were addressed to men in the infancy of the race, and through the instrumentality of men, who, though taught by "the Spirit which giveth understanding," yet were limited in their power of taking in what was so freely poured upon them, not only by the finiteness common to all men, but by their partaking of the spirit and character of the age in which they lived. We should remember too, that, although this limitation of