No. VI. SUNTHIN' IN THE PASTORAL LINE. To the Editors of the ATLANTIC MONTHLY. Jaalam, 17th May, 1862. GENTLEMEN,-At the special request of Mr. Biglow, I intended to inclose, together with his own contribution, (into which, at my suggestion, he has thrown a little more of pastoral sentiment than usual,) some passages from my sermon on the day of the National Fast, from the text, "Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them," Heb. xiii. 3. But I have not leisure sufficient at present for the copying of them, even were I altogether satisfied with the production as it stands. I should prefer, I confess, to contribute the entire discourse to the pages of your respectable miscellany, if it should be found acceptable upon perusal, especially as I find the difficulty of selection of greater magnitude than I had anticipated. What passes without challenge in the fervour of oral delivery, cannot always stand the colder criticism of the closet. I am not so great an enemy of Eloquence as my friend Mr. Biglow would appear to be from some passages in his contribution for the current month. I would not, indeed, hastily suspect him of covertly glancing at myself in his somewhat caustick animadversions, albeit some of the phrases he girds at are not entire strangers to my lips. I am a more hearty admirer of the Puritans than seems now to be the fashion, and believe, that, if they Hebraized a little too much in their speech, they showed remarkable practical sagacity as statesmen and founders. But such phenomena as Puritanism are the results rather of great religious than merely social convulsions, and do not long survive them. So soon as an earnest conviction has cooled into a phrase, its work is over, and the best that can be done with it is to bury it. Ite, missa est. I am inclined to agree with Mr. Biglow that we cannot settle the great political questions which are now presenting themselves to the nation by the opinions of Jeremiah or Ezekiel as to the wants and duties of the Jews in their time, nor do I believe that an entire community with their feelings and views would be practicable or even agreeable at the present day. At the same time I could wish that their habit of subordinating the actual to the moral, the flesh to the spirit, and this world to the other were more common. They had found out, at least, the great military secret that soul weighs more than body. But I am suddenly called to a sick-bed in the household of a valued parishioner. With esteem and respect, Your obedient servant, HOMER WILBUR, ONCE git a smell o' musk into a draw An' it clings hold like precerdents in law : Your gran'ma'am put it there,-when, goodness knows,-To jes' this-worldify her Sunday-clo'es; But the old chist wun't sarve her gran'son's wife, (For, 'thout new funnitoor, wut good in life?) An' so ole clawfoot, from the precinks dread O' the spare chamber, slinks into the shed, Where, dim with dust, it fust or last subsides Jes' so with poets: wut they've airly read Nor hev a feelin', ef it doos n't smack O' wut some critter chose to feel 'way back : O little city-gals, don't never go it I, with my trouses perched on cow-hide boots, Your muslin nosegays from the milliner's, Ef Dooty tells us thet the thing's to du, I, country-born an' bred, know where to find Bloodroots, whose rolled-up leaves ef you oncurl, Thet's Northun natur', slow an' apt to doubt, But when it doos git stirred, ther''s no gin-out! Fust come the blackbirds clatt'rin' in tall trees, Then saffern swarms swing off from all the willers Then gray hossches'nuts leetle hands unfold Then seems to come a hitch,—things lag behind, |