per

sees not their sure though slow results; soon becomes plexed and bustling, and the more bustling for being perplexed; and having no single and generally operative truth to look to, runs into expedients, and is borne along in the series of ever-shifting events. In the rush of present things, stability of character is swept away, and the man gets overheated by the friction of close grinding circumstances, and giddy in their whirl. Shut out from the calm past, by the thronging of the exciting and urgent present, and standing too near to objects to take in their outline, they grow gigantic to him; then the spirit of exaggeration possesses him, disproportion follows, and the end is monstrous deformity. And this is the natural, nay, necessary termination; for, as old Bates well remarks, "To proportion, excesses as well as defects are opposite.' And hence it is, that we are all of us so besotted with the spirit of the age; and that men and women are perpetually set astare with some nine days' wonder. It all comes of the short-sighted, unstable, exaggerating present.

Are there not moral evils involved in these influences? Is not he who sees truth partially and limitedly, less likely to reverence it singly, than if he knew something of its silent, but deep and wide-working power? Will he not be more likely to resort to contrivance, to gain an immediate end, than to wait quietly upon some great principle, of which he can but poorly discern the tendency, the certainty, and the strength?

Besides, there is a certain impatience attendant upon the present; and as error is rapid, and truth slow, and nature, though working wider than art, moving so evenly and all together, as apparently to move scarcely at all, the creature of the mere present will consort with his like, and be in sympathy with error and art, rather than with nature and truth.

Association with the present, making it difficult for the mind to extricate itself from the near and the visible, and withdraw apart for meditation and abstraction, the consequence is, a want of true self-acquaintance, and from this again, an over-estimate of the good in us, and an underestimate of the ill. More familiar with the outward world, than with that more important world within, our rule of judging is not a simple, permanent principle of perfectness and truth-which is not hard of apprehension to the inward-turned mind-but it is the outward, the changeable,

the mixed-that which chances to go current for the time, under the blessedly vague and comprehensive appellativethe respectable. The way being thus made easy, each man comes to judge himself, with the subtile purpose of justifying himself; and to this end, will, when hard pressed, even turn to justifying his neighbor, and so shelter himself under his charity for another. With finite to regulate the finite, with fallible the fallible, he soon becomes content with the secondary, seizes upon some convenient particular, and losing the apprehension of the one, great, motive power to all good, fails of that fulness of moral tone, that nobleness of inward impulse, which are his, who sees truth in its vastness, and feels it in its steady, and harmonious, and eternal goings-on.

Meditative abstraction is not only necessary to a right self-judging, but to that well disciplined composure which shall preserve self-thoughtfulness amidst the changing activity and exciting influences which every man must go out to meet, when he goes into the world. It is true, that it will not always help him to meet foreseen particulars; but what is better, it will help him to go with a prepared spirit. But what preparation has he, to whom abstraction is pain, and not a delight, because not habitual? And how predisposed does he go, to take the shape and hue of the surrounding present, who thinks too little of the past to draw from it experience, and whose extravagant notions of the present, impart new power, to re-act upon himself, to that which has already too much, from being visible and near?

A particular bent of mind, not only strengthens, upon the principle that inward power increases with action, and also from a sympathetic association with that of the outward, which resembles it in tendency and kind; but as it strengthens, so grows its distaste to that which is the contrary of itself. And the man in whom the present once becomes predominant, retires more and more reluctantly and infrequently into the past and the reflective, into the unseen but conscious state of being within. Principles lose possession of his mind, and things take their places. And though not seeing far or justly, he had rather see much and many, than think much and deeply. The action of his mind is outward, outward; and observation justles aside reflection. He may attain to a certain sagacity which will give him a ready mastery over present things, as to present uses, but will not be aware the

while, that there is a secretly pervading power in what he is managing, which makes him servant to that he rules over.

Knowledge, or the immediate and obvious uses of knowledge, rather than its final purposes, being his aim, acquiring takes the character of an indiscriminating passion, or more properly, appetite, and so the mind be well filled, he thinks not to ask himself, why all this jumble of things here? The near or remote, the like or the unlike, are all the same to him; and if not adapted to his nature, he has only to adapt his nature to them. And this, his process of working does for him speedily. For the objects of his mind lying in accidental juxtaposition, and not being united by any permanent relationship in the nature of things, the weak principle of unity within, is soon broken up, and he sees only parts, and thinks only of parts. There is truth, in more senses than one, in the term applied to a clever man—a man of parts for we scarcely think of him as an individual whole -a unit. Indeed, the term, a man of knowledge, does not describe him; for the singular, knowledge, gives the impression of oneness. So, seeing that we now have the plural, literatures, why not have another plural, and call him a man of knowledges?

This certainly is the tendency of the present upon the character, so that he who lives mainly in it, has but little acquaintance with the intuitive, the principal of spiritual life not having been awakened in him. In that life are included inward growth and action; but his action is outward, and his increase not that of a single internal expansive principle, but that of accretion; and he is little better than an aggregation of unchanged, foreign bodies, adhering to him and to one another not so much by any elective affinities, as by some external propulsion.

I know not how better to illustrate the two orders of minds, than by a piece of variegated marble, in which the delicately tinted branchings seem but the veins and arteries of one original body, the issues of its own life; and next, by an uncouth, dead mass of pudding-stone. Here it is! bulky enough, to be sure. But where its unity? A mere heap of stones, tumbled together by some rolling flood of fire or water, and left to cool down, or thicken, into this shapeless loose mass, from which one may take out piece after piece, without marring their beds. But can you unvein the marble? The present, by diminishing the inward life and action,

and of course, the sources of individual internal enjoyment, soon makes seclusion inert and wearisome, and drives men out, to congregate for the sake of sensation and action. This brings about not a social, but a gregarious state. For the life of the social principle springs not from inward vacuity, but from inward love-a living and a life-imparting quality of the soul. So that the more gregarious a man becomes, the less a social creature is he. He mixes not with men to make friendly interchange of rich things, or to bestow of the affluence of his own soul, but because of the poverty at home. He leaves his door a beggar of his daily bread, and hears said unto him, "Be ye warmed, and be ye clothed," and returns emptier, and nakeder, and colder, than he went: He goes, not to give but to get; and the root and the offspring of this is selfishness.

Going forth without a strong individuality of character, the growth of retired meditation and few and close attachments and habits that have worked into the constitution of the mind, men assimilate carelessly and unconsciously, with the circumstances, views and notions which happen to be in fashion at the time. A conventional uniformity gathers over the multitude; manners take the place of character; and how to bear one's self, and how to express one's self, and not how to think and feel, become the object of life :-conventional gratulations, conventional regrets, conventional indifference, conventional extasies, conventional smiles, andconventional tears? O, no; that would put one out of all conventions!

It is, thus, easy to see, that, to be a social creature, in the true sense of the term, a man must be the creature of seclusion for the larger portion of his time; so that what makes him to differ from other men, and constitutes his individuality, may be allowed to expand and strengthen from its own living energy. Else, that variety which breathes spirit into intercourse, must be tamed down into an insipid sameness, and that inanity of which men complain, and wonder why it is, must be the necessity and not the accident of such a state. To think of passing day after day in the world, and being doomed, in every face we look upon, to behold our own likeness; in every act of recognition, to see repeated our own smile and our own bow; and from every mouth to hear echoed back our own remarks and our own turn of words! Would not the hermit's cell be more patiently borne with than this?

True it is, that nature is stronger than art, and being essentially various, art will never be able to bring society quite up to its notion of perfect similitude; yet the artificial is a process of assimilation, and as the social state departs from nature, it will always be approximating a sameness. Besides, where the resemblance in character does not exist in reality, it does in appearance, and real difference is hid under a seeming likeness; so that to the tendency toward the former evil, is added that of deception, and means and ends are both alike cursed.

True society, that which awakens life within us, and warms the heart, and stirs the intellect, that which is perpetually setting before us something to give healthful diversity to our thoughts, and something fresh to carry home with us for reflection, is made up of distinctly marked individuals, with just enough in common to understand one another, but with all else each man's own, and such as he, and he alone, would have thought of at all, or, at most, would have thought of or said in that particular way.

To draw good or pleasure from a man, he must have that in him which, in form or matter, we had not been conscious of in ourselves, yet not so the contrary of what is in us, but that it shall touch some chord in our own souls, and call out sounds which had slept silent there, from the time the hand of God first strung the instrument. To adopt Coleridge's distinction between the words, while contraries repel, opposites combine. To be a social creature, then, man must be a solitary creature too; to fit men for each other, each must be much alone.

These evil effects seem to grow, not only naturally but unavoidably, from absorption in the present, and a consequent hankering for herding together in multitudes. And what a blight it is upon the heart. And with all its excitements, how joyless life is made by it. For, pray, who is the better off? He who has his thousand friends, or he who chances not to have one? Why, in very deed, the latter; for he has no part to play; and it may be that he has a heart yet for a friend. But the other!-his heart! Why, he has quite forgot what has become of that; some one, or all, of his thousand friends must have it-somewhere.

Truly, one would think that the end of coming together, was to give no offence, and to produce an impression, as it is termed. And what are called the courtesies of life, require