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a cataract and a fearful storm. The rudderless bark is just about to plunge into the abyss below, while the Voyager (now in the prime of manhood) is imploring the only aid that can avail him in the trying hour, that of heaven. Demoniacal images are holding forth their temptations in the clouds around him, but he heeds them not. His confidence in God supports him, the previous agony of his soul is dispelled or subdued by a reflection of immortal light stealing through the storm, and by the smiles of his guardian angel, visibly stationed in the far-off sky.

The Voyage of Life is ended, and our voyager, now white with hoary hairs, has reached that point where the waters of time and eternity mingle together a bold conception, which is finely embodied by the daring genius of the painter. The hour-glass is gone, and the shattered bark is ready to dissolve into the fathomless waters beneath. The old man is on his knees, with clasped hands and his eyes turned heavenward, for the greenness of earth is for ever departed, and a gloom is upon the ocean of Eternity. But just above the form of our good voyager is hovering his angel, who is about to transport him to his home; and, as the eye wanders upward, an infinite host of heavenly ministers are seen ascending and descending the cloudy steps which lead to the bosom of God. Death is swallowed up in life, the glory of heaven has eclipsed that of the earth, and our voyager is safe in the haven of eternal rest. And thus endeth the allegory of Human Life.

With regard to the mechanical execution of these paintings, we consider them not equal to some of the earlier efforts of the same pencil. They are deficient in atmosphere, and have too much the appearance of paint. The water in the first, second and third pictures, is superior, and the knowledge of perspective in the last of them is masterly. In all of them the figures are very fine, considering the difficulty of managing such peculiar characters. In the first we are pleased with the simplicity of the composition; in the second with the variety, there being portrayed the elm of England, the plane of Tuscany, the palm of tropic climes, the mountains of Switzerland and the oak of America; in the third, with the genius displayed in using the

very storm to tell a story; and in the fourth, with the management of the light, and the apparent reality of those rays of glory. These pictures were painted for the late Samuel Ward, of New York, and the price received for them was five thousand dollars.

Thus have we attempted to describe the prominent imaginative paintings of Thomas Cole, with the object in view, of making the public at large acquainted with the fact that great acquisitions have been and are being made to the Fine Arts, even in our own country. His is a name which we should not willingly let die. A man of fine, exalted genius, by his pencil he has done a great deal of good, not only to his chosen art, by becoming one of its masters, but also in a moral point of view. And this reminds us of the influences which may be exerted by the landscape painter. That these are of importance no one can deny. Is not painting as well the result and expression of thought as writing? What though, instead of pen, ink and paper, the painter uses canvass, a pencil, and the colors of the rainbow, yet these, if he is a poet in his soul, can display his power to scarcely less effect than though, to give utterance to his " thoughts that glow," his means were the "words that burn." With these, if he is a wise and good man, he may portray, to every eye that rests upon his canvass, the loveliness of virtue and religion, or the deformity and wretchedness of a vicious life. He may warn the worldling of his folly and impending doom, and encourage the Christian in his pilgrimage to heaven. He may delineate the marvellous beauty of nature, so as to lead the mind upward to its Creator, or proclaim the ravages of time, that we may take heed to our ways and prepare ourselves for a safe departure from this world into that be yond the Valley of the Shadow of Death. A goodly portion of all these things have been accomplished by Thomas Cole. As yet, he is the only landscape painter in this country who has attempted imaginative painting, and the success which has followed him in his career, even in a pecuniary point of view, affords great encouragement to our young painters in this department of the art. Cole has indeed done some great things, but a thousandfold more he has left undone. He has

but set a noble example, which ought to be extensively followed. Mind, we do not mean by this that his subjects ought to be imitated. Far from it, because they are not stamped with a national character, as the production of all painters should be. Excepting his actual views of American scenery, the paintings of Cole might have been produced had he never set foot upon our soil. Let our young painters aspire to something above a mere copy of nature, or even a picture of the fancy; let them paint the visions of their

imagination. No other country ever offered such advantages as our own. Let our young painters use their pencils to illustrate the thousands of scenes, strange, wild and beautiful, of our early history. Let them aim high, and their achievements will be distinguished. Let them remember that theirs is a noble destiny. What though ancient wisdom and modern poetry have told us that "art is long and time is fleeting !"-let them toil and toil with nature as their guide, and they will assuredly have their reward.

BOOKS FOR THE PEOPLE.

BY MISS ANNE C. LYNCH.

"Let there be light."

LIGHT to the darkened mind

Bear like the sun the world's wide circle round,
Bright messengers that speak without a sound!
Sight on the spirit-blind

Shall fall where'er ye pass; your living ray
Shall change the night of ages into day;
God speed ye on your way!

In closet and in hall,

Too long alone your message hath been spoken;
The spell of gold that bound ye there is broken,
Go forth and shine on all!
The world's inheritance, the legacy
Bequeathed by Genius to the race are ye;
Be like the sunlight, free!

A mighty power ye wield!

Ye wake grim centuries from their deep repose,
And bid their hoarded treasuries unclose,
The spoils of time to yield.
Ye hold the gift of immortality;

Bard, sage, and seer, whose fame shall never die,
Live through your ministry.

Noiseless upon your path,

Freighted with love, romance, and song, ye speed,
Moving the world in custom and in creed,
Waking its love or wrath.
Tyrants, that blench not on the battle-plain,
Quail at your silent coming, and in vain
Would bind the riven chain.

Shrines that embalm great souls!

Where yet the illustrious dead high converse hold,
As gods spake through their oracles of old;
Upon your mystic scrolls

There lives a spell to guide our destiny;
The fire by night, the pillared cloud by day,
Upon our upward way!

Providence, R. I.

BUDS AND BIRD-VOICES.

BY NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE.

BALMY Spring-weeks later than we expected, and months later than we longed for her-comes at last, to revive the moss on the roof and walls of our old mansion. She peeps brightly into my study-window, inviting me to throw it open, and create a summer atmosphere by the intermixture of her genial breath with the black and cheerless comfort of the stove. As the casement ascends, forth into infinite space fly the innumerable forms of thought or fancy that have kept me company in the retirement of this little chamber, during the sluggish lapse of wintry weather;-visions, gay, grotesque, and sad; pictures of real life, tinted with nature's homely grey and russet; scenes in dream-land, bedizened with rainbow hues, which faded before they were well laid on;-all these may vanish now, and leave me to mould a fresh existence out of sunshine. Brooding meditation may flap her dusky wings, and take her owl-like flight, blinking amid the cheerfulness of noontide. Such companions befit the season of frosted window-panes and crackling fires, when the blast howls through the black ash-trees of our avenue, and the drifting snow-storm chokes up the wood-paths, and fills the highway from stone-wall to stone-wall. In the spring and summer time, all sombre thoughts should follow the winter northward, with the sombre and thoughtful crows. The old paradisiacal economy of life is again in force; we live, not to think, nor to labor, but for the simple end of being happy; nothing, for the present hour, is worthy of man's infinite capacity, save to imbibe the warm smile of heaven, and sympathize with the reviving earth.

The present spring comes onward with fleeter footsteps, because winter lingered so unconscionably long, that with her best diligence she can hardly retrieve half the allotted period of her reign. It is but a fortnight since I stood on the brink of our swollen river, and beheld the accumulated ice of four frozen months go down the stream.

Except in streaks here and there upon the hill-sides, the whole visible universe was then covered with deep snow, the nethermost layer of which had been deposited by an early December storm. It was a sight to make the beholder torpid, in the impossibility of imagining how this vast white napkin was to be removed from the face of the corpse-like world, in less time than had been required to spread it there. But who can estimate the power of gentle influences, whether amid material desolation, or the moral winter of man's heart! There have been no tempestuous rains-even no sultry days-but a constant breath of southern winds, with now a day of kindly sunshine, and now a no less kindly mist, or a soft descent of showers, in which a smile and a blessing seemed to have been steeped. The snow has vanished as if by magic; whatever heaps may be hidden in the woods and deep gorges of the hills, only two solitary specks remain in the landscape; and those I shall almost regret to miss, when, to-morrow, I look for them in vain. Never before, methinks, has spring pressed so closely on the footsteps of retreating winter. Along the road-side, the green blades of grass have sprouted on the very edge of the snow-drifts. The pastures and mowing fields have not yet assumed a general aspect of verdure; but neither have they the cheerless brown tint which they wear in latter autumn, when vegetation has entirely ceased; there is now a faint shadow of life, gradually brightening into the warm reality. Some tracts, in a happy exposure-as, for instance, yonder south-western slope of an orchard, in front of that old red farm-house, beyond the river-such patches of land already wear a beautiful and tender green, to which no future luxuriance can add a charm. It looks unreal-a prophecy-a hope-a transitory effect of some peculiar light, which will vanish with the slightest motion of the eye. But beauty is never a delusion; not these verdant tracts, but the dark and barren landscape, all

around them, is a shadow and a dream. Each moment wins some portion of the earth from death to life; a sudden gleam of verdure brightens along the sunny slope of a bank, which, an instant ago, was brown and bare. You look again, and behold an apparition of green grass!

The trees, in our orchard and elsewhere, are as yet naked, but already appear full of life and vegetable blood. It seems as if, by one magic touch, they might instantaneously burst into full foliage, and that the wind, which now sighs through their naked branches, might make sudden music amid innumerable leaves. The moss-grown willow-tree, which for forty years past has overshadowed these western windows, will be among the first to put on its green attire. There are some objections to the willow; it is not a dry and cleanly tree, and impresses the beholder with an association of sliminess. No trees, I think, are perfectly agreeable as companions, unless they have glossy leaves, dry bark, and a firm and hard texture of trunk and branches. But the willow is almost the earliest to gladden us with the promise and reality of beauty, in its graceful and delicate foliage, and the last to scatter its yellow yet scarcely withered leaves upon the ground. All through the winter, too, its yellow twigs give it a sunny aspect, which is not without a cheering influence, even in the greyest and gloomiest day. Beneath a clouded sky, it faithfully remembers the sunshine. Our old house would lose a charm, were the willow to be cut down, with its golden crown over the snow-covered roof, and its heap of summer verdure.

The lilac-shrubs, under my studywindows, are likewise almost in leaf; in two or three days more, I may put forth my hand, and pluck the topmost bough in its freshest green. These lilacs are very aged, and have lost the luxuriant foliage of their prime. The heart, or the judgment, or the moral sense, or the taste, is dissatisfied with their present aspect. Old age is not venerable, when it embodies itself in lilacs, rose-bushes, or any other ornamental shrubs; it seems as if such plants, as they grow only for beauty, ought to flourish only in immortal youth, or, at least, to die before their sad decrepitude. Trees of beauty are

trees of Paradise, and therefore not subject to decay, by their original nature, but have lost that precious birthright by being transplanted to an earthly soil. There is a kind of ludicrous unfitness in the idea of a timestricken and grandfatherly lilac-bush. The analogy holds good in human life. Persons who can only be graceful and ornamental-who can give the world nothing but flowers-should die young, and never be seen with grey hair and wrinkles, any more than the flowershrubs with mossy bark and blighted foliage, like the lilacs under my window. Not that beauty is worthy of less than immortality,-no, the beautiful should live for ever, and thence, perhaps, the sense of impropriety, when we see it triumphed over by time. Apple-trees, on the other hand, grow old without reproach. Let them live as long as they may, and contort themselves into whatever perversity of shape they please, and deck their withered limbs with a spring-time gaudiness of pink-blossoms, still they are respectable, even if they afford us only an apple or two in a season. Those few apples-or, at all events, the remembrance of apples in by-gone years -are the atonement which utilitarianism inexorably demands, for the privilege of lengthened life. Human flower-shrubs, if they will grow old on earth, should, beside their lovely blossoms, bear some kind of fruit that will satisfy earthly appetites; else neither man, nor the decorum of nature, will deem it fit that the moss should gather on them.

One of the first things that strikes the attention, when the white sheet of winter is withdrawn, is the neglect and disarray that lay hidden beneath it. Nature is not cleanly, according to our prejudices. The beauty of preceding years, now transformed to brown and blighted deformity, obstructs the brightening loveliness of the present. Our avenue is strewn with the whole crop of autumn's withered leaves. There are quantities of decayed branches, which one tempest after another has flung down, black and rotten; and one or two with the ruin of a bird's nest clinging to them. In the garden are the dried bean-vines, the brown stalks of the asparagus-bed, and melancholy old cabbages which were frozen into the soil before their

unthrifty cultivator could find time to gather them. How invariably, through out all the forms of life, do we find these intermingled memorials of death! On the soil of thought, and in the garden of the heart, as well as in the sensual world, lie withered leaves; the ideas and feelings that we have done with. There is no wind strong enough to sweep them away; infinite space will not garner them from our sight. What mean they? Why may we not be permitted to live and enjoy, as if this were the first life, and our own the primal enjoyment, instead of treading always on these dry bones and mouldering relics, from the aged accumulation of which springs all that now appears so young and new? Sweet must have been the spring-time of Eden, when no earlier year had strewn its decay upon the virgin turf, and no former experience had ripened into summer, and faded into autumn, in the hearts of its inhabitants! That was a world worth living in! Oh, thou murmurer, it is out of the very wantonness of such a life, that thou feignest these idle lamentations! There is no decay. Each human soul is the first created inhabitant of its own Eden. We dwell in an old moss-covered mansion, and tread in the worn foot-prints of the past, and have a grey clergyman's ghost for our daily and nightly inmate; yet all these outward circumstances are made less than visionary, by the renewing power of the spirit. Should the spirit ever lose this power -should the withered leaves, and the rotten branches, and the moss-covered house, and the ghost of the grey past, ever become its realities, and the verdure and the freshness merely its faint dream-then let it pray to be released from earth. It will need the air of heaven, to revive its pristine energies!

What an unlooked-for flight was this, from our shadowy avenue of black-ash and Balm of Gilead trees, into the infinite! Now we have our feet again upon the turf. Nowhere does the grass spring up so industriously as in this homely yard, along the base of the stone-wall, and in the sheltered nooks of the buildings, and especially around the southern doorstep; a locality which seems particularly favorable to its growth, for it is already tall enough to bend over, and

wave in the wind. I observe, that several weeds-and, most frequently, a plant that stains the fingers with its yellow juice-have survived, and retained their freshness and sap throughout the winter. One knows not how they have deserved such an exception from the common lot of their race. They are now the patriarchs of the departed year, and may preach mortality to the present generation of flowers and weeds.

Among the delights of spring, how is it possible to forget the birds! Even the crows were welcome, as the sable harbingers of a brighter and livelier race. They visited us before the snow was off, but seem mostly to have departed now, or else to have betaken themselves to remote depths of the woods, which they haunt all summer long. Many a time shall I disturb them there, and feel as if I had intruded among a company of silent worshippers, as they sit in sabbath-stillness among the tree-tops. Their voices, when they speak, are in admirable accordance with the tranquil solitude of a summer afternoon; and, resounding so far above the head, their loud clamor increases the religious quiet of the scene, instead of breaking it. A crow, however, has no real pretensions to religion, in spite of his gravity of mien and black attire; he is certainly a thief, and probably an infidel. The gulls are far more respectable, in a moral point of view. These denizens of sea-beaten rocks, and haunters of the lonely beach, come up our inland river, at this season, and soar high overhead, flapping their broad wings in the upper sunshine. They are among the most picturesque of birds, because they so float and rest upon the air, as to become almost stationary parts of the landscape. The imagination has time to grow acquainted with them; they have not flitted away in a moment. You go up among the clouds, and greet these lofty-flighted gulls, and repose confidently with them upon the sustaining atmosphere. Ducks have their haunts along the solitary places of the river, and alight in flocks upon the broad bosom of the overflowed meadows. Their flight is too rapid and determined for the eye to catch enjoyment from it, although it never fails to stir up the heart with the sportsman's ineradicable instinct. They

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