go so far from home as that to find wonders, when here, in the very heart of America, we have the most astonishing ruins that the world can afford? We talk of visiting the banks of the Nile to see pyramids, when here at home we have pyramids equally as vast and wonderful, and, in all probability, as old. We talk of the ruins of Ninevah, that "exceeding great city of three days' journey," when here, within a week's travel of New Orleans, we have Ninevahs and Tadmors, and Baalbecs, and hundred-gated Thebes! These vast ruins, through the exquisite architectural skill which they display, their Cyclopean dimensions, and the astonishing mechanical force which the architects must have had at their command,* are the enduring, living monuments and witnesses of what the first inhabitants of this continent must have been. From Yucatan to the southern limits of Peru, these ruined cities are scattered a distance of more than two thousand miles, and all bearing the same evidence of vast antiquity as those of Egypt, of Syria and of India. 1 They could have been no puny, half-civilized race; nor did they acquire such skill in architecture, in painting, and in many of the common arts of life, as is displayed by abundant remains, in a few short centuries only. We are prepared to defend the high antiquity of our American ruins, notwithstanding the Toltec origin assigned to many of them by Stephens and Catherwood. A succession of architectural formations, observable in these ruins, carries us far back into the misty past, where truth is mingled with fable, men with demi-gods, and where it is difficult to fix the starting point of history. Each stone in these ruins proclaims, by its mysterious hieroglyphics, the mighty race that wrought them-living, too, far anterior to the commencement of history. We can read the age of the world as distinctly in its architectural transitions, as in its geological series; and, indeed, where geology ceases to continue the record of the world's history, there architecture takes up the tale and brings it down to the present age. "The genius of the past," says a late writer,† "stands revealed to us in a succession of architectural formations, which succeed each other in a regular series. While Egypt builds pyramids, other nations of the globe are not shaping domes; while Greece erects the columns around * Humboldt says, that he found, in the ruins of Peru, blocks of hewn stone, composing the walls of edifices, some of which blocks were thirty-six feet long, nineteen wide, and six thick. What must have been the mechanical skill and the machinery, by which they handled such blocks? But this is not all they were taken from quarries in the side of a mountain thirteen thousand feet high, and transported ten miles. The skill of the workmen employed in the masonry is not surpassed at the present day.—Humboldt's Rescarches. + R. Carey Long. her shrines, her cotemporaries are no where building spires. The pyramid jutting forth in Egypt, like the primitive granite among the mountain pines, underlies all these subsequent architectural developments. The succession of these architectural forms produces a complete chain, which carries man's history and his manifestations into regions of time where the pen of the historian trembles to penetrate. Give but a link of this chain, and the archæologist can assign its place in the whole series, with the same exactness as the geologist determines the chronological era of the fossil by its peculiar strata." There is, then, what is called an architectonic ethnography, by which we may discern the interior quality of a people, the character of their religion, laws and institutions, and the era of their existence. And what a vast field for discovery do these ruins of America afford to the world. We have an Egypt, with all of its pyramids, temples, colossal statues and hieroglyphics, here in the very heart of the western continent. The mighty race that formed these vast masses of exquisite masonry, unsurpassed in workmanship and proportions by any thing of the present day, have left upon them their language and their history-but, alas, we cannot read them! The genius of the past beckons to the wondering traveler, as he wanders amid the broken fragments of these remains, pointing him to Chi-Chen, Palenque and Copan. There read the hieroglyphics of the temples and statues, and the thousand questions that seem to start up in your mind will be answered. But, alas! no mortal eyes-the eye of God alone-can read these inscriptions. We have no Rosetta stone, no Champollion. Wonderful, too, as these ruins are, with what perfect indifference are they looked upon by our government! It is true that some facilities were afforded to Mr. Stephens for making explorations; it is true that Mr. Squiers, now in Central America, is commmissioned to make explorations; but how inadequate the means thus afforded for exploring the vast ruins of what was once another world! It is quite evident that our government, thus far, looks upon these ruins as matters, perhaps, of some curiosity, but yet of quite secondary importance, when compared with the duties of a charge d'affaires to a petty military despotism of Central America; and, so long as such a view is taken of the subject, just so long will these vast ruins be neglected. Such is the real importance of these vast ruins, that the historical societies, and other scientific associations of this country, should immediately take the subject in hand; and, if they could not persuade our government at Washington to undertake the exploration of these ruins, on a scale suited to their extent and importance, then the scientific associations themselves should combine and fit out a corps of scientific explorers, to enter the ruins, make excavations, drawings, measurements, etc., etc., leaving nothing untouched, no stone unturned. It would be a glorious work, and one that, while it enriched history and many departments of science, would reflect high and enduring honor on those who were engaged in it. ART. VIL-THE BEAUTIFUL. BY THE EDITOR. * Beautiful! How beautiful is all this visible world!-MANFRED. THE truths of philosophy are the sober revelations of the intellect; the truths of poetry are the lights of the soul, the rapt visions of ideal glory, which shadow forth the high destinies of the immortal. There is a head and a heart to humanity; in the one originates the philosopher, in the other the poet. With his abstraction, and his metaphysics, dim thought sits upon the philosopher's brow; but the fervor, the devotion and the enthusiasm, light up the poet's world. With man, the philosopher, we have no sympathy now; in the midnight, the taper and the closet, comes man, the philosopher, with his diagrams and his tomes the Bacon, the Locke, the Des Cartes, the Kant-a gloomy array! Our thoughts are rebellious under the restraint; they would wanton amid other prospects, they pant for the plenitude of freedom with man, the poet. The Beautiful! how often have our souls been ravished with its contemplation! The Religious! has it not interwoven itself with every fiber of our constitution! Can we say no more? Are the ideas independent and isolated, or do they harmonize and blend? Who has not sought for and realized the beautiful in the religious? The beautiful in the religious! does not the religious live and breathe in the beautiful? Search the heart, heedless mortal; there is more there than the loftiest flight of your philosophy has revealed let the head not repine at its ignorance, the HEART will understand us. The Beautiful speaks, and the soul answers from its depths; what if the sage only can reach the philosophy of its language, the whole world. * If this "unconsidered trifle," the product of past hours, could afford to the reader one tithe of the pleasure the author realizes in the thousand associations of other days that cluster around it, he would, with all his heart, pardon the innocent egotism of its insertion. is possessed of its alphabet and its grammar. Go, sage, and in the sublime regions of thought and mathematics, build for yourself a world, and find a God; humble yourself before that God. Come, peasant, you have never heard of abstraction and mathematics; savage, leave your cave; is there need for a God to you-a God portrayed in the lineaments of mildness and of love? Take courage, the sensibility plays as important a part as the intellect; poetry is as true as prose: both harmonize and work, both play their grand parts in the constitution of nature. The Beautiful! O God! what a field have we to roam over herewhat a miracle is this world to us; this world, with its features of loveliness, chiseled, and softened, and glowing! Plato, who can wonder that these features had a soul within for thee, the soul of Beautypierce through the external crust and reach it--the concentration and the essence-God! God in nature, hear him, see him, Osos Ev eμir. * The thunders and the lightning, the earthquake; the sky shakes and the heavens are convulsed. How dreadfully the flame darts! Splintered, riven, how yon sturdy oak stretches forth its old arms from the sapless trunk! Where have fled the vigor and the life of yon fearful, blackened corpse? but a moment since, and those livid lips were fair and warm to discourse of love. Shrink back, son of earth, trembling, sinking; there is no beauty here for you-there is fear. Nature makes other revelations than those of the terrible, or man had never yielded to the soft impulses of love; man had never been religious. The little infant-watch the gradual opening and development of mind. Does the darkness delight, or does it turn to seek the light? Shut out the day's radiance and its gaze is fastened upon the taper, it follows it; how its little arms are outstretched to reach the moon! Man, watch that infant-it smiles, the innocent smiles, those scarce developed features are not dumb, that infant already feels the mysterious agency of the beautiful. O! who can tell, in the ignorance and darkness which surround us and baffle our inquiries-who can tell, but in that first thought is fixed the incipiency of the idea, which, developing and perfecting itself in after times, arrives, at last, on the confines of thought, to acknowledge the Eternal-the Omnipotent— the God. Throw away your books, philosopher, leave your closet and your speculations; the peasant has a lesson for you, and will teach it cheer We have no favor for the pantheism which exists in Plato. Divinity may be found in nature without being confounded with it. Plato's language is plain, ours figurative; he looked into, we “through nature up to nature's God." Nor have we much sympathy for the transcendental philosophy which seeks to confuse all things in its idealism. fully; the poor Indian cares nothing for your books and your closets. He has a book-it is nature; he has a closet-it is the world. See him bow to the East, on Persia's shore, to greet the chariot of the sun as it rolls along the sky. Is there error in that poor Indian, to see "God in clouds, and hear him in the wind?" The worshipers of the sun are the worshipers of the Beautiful; even the error, rather than the ignorance: "I had rather believe," says Bacon, "in all the fables of the Alcoran and the Talmud, than that this universal frame is without mind." * How touching, how exquisitely touching, the conception of Magna Græcia's sage! Was it not enough that the old philosopher found all nature vocal here-the songsters of the grove, the forest's dirge, the sublime ocean's roar, the harp of Æolus! "Wild nature, warbling all beyond the reach of art.” Is there even music beyond this empire of clay? Is it the characteristic of æsthetics to be terrestrial? Mount the sky, philosopher, upward, through the ethereal vault; softly, gently. What touch was that that swept the strings? Distant melody, scarce audible, like angels' whispers; rising, swelling, it breaks upon the ear-entrancing! ecstacy! Eternal strains of melody and song! harp strung with worlds, and swept by the minstrelsy of God! Do we dream how much we are indebted to music, when the soul feels its imperishable essence-when the bonds gall it, the crime disgusts it, the fetters break and the spirit soars, reveling amid worlds, and suns, and systems, on the bosom of eternity? "Music religious hearts inspires; It wakes the soul-it lifts it high- And fits it to bespeak the Deity." What sermons, too, the fragile flowers of the field preach! Is the language of the flower but the fiction of the poet? Is the primrose "the primrose, and no more?" Heartless man! Have you never conversed with the flowers of the field when the dew-drop glistened on them, and they turned their heads to Heaven? Go, dwell at the pole, where the ice congeals into the mountain, and the snows never thaw; you have not known love, you have not known religion. These flow *Pythagorus, who "the full consenting choir beheld, |