or force what private reason only disapproves; that they may disobey the law, because their judgment condemns it, or resist the public will, because they honestly wish to change it-he is then a criminal upon every principle of rational policy, as well as upon the immemorial precedents of English justice; because such a person seeks to disunite individuals from their duty to the whole, and excites to overt acts of misconduct in a part of the community, instead of endeavoring to change, by the impulse of reason, that universal assent, which, in this and in every country, constitutes the law for all..'']

The Field of Religion.

ALEXANDER DUFF.

The field of divine appointment is not Scotland or England, but "the world"-the world of "all nations." The prayer of divine inspiration is, "God bless and pity us," not that thy way may be known in all Britain, and thy saving health among all its destitute families, but "that thy way may be known on all the earth, and thy saving health among all nations." The command of divine obligation is not, "Go to the people of Scotland or of England," but, "Go unto all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.” And if we take our counsel from those blind and deluded guides that would, in spite of the Almighty's appointment, and in derision of our own prayers, persuade us, altogether, or for an indefinite period onward, to abandon the real proper Bible field, and direct the whole of our time, and strength and resources to home; if, at their antiscriptural suggestions, we do thus dislocate the divine order of proportion; if we do thus invert the divine order of magnitude, if we daringly presume to put that last which God hath put first; to reckon that least which God hath pronounced greatest, what can we expect but that he shall be provoked, in some displeasure, to deprive us of the precious deposit of misappropriated grace, and inscribe "Ichabod" on all our towers, bulwarks and palaces.

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And if he do, then, like beings smitten with judicial blindness, we may hold hundreds of meetings, deliver thousands of speeches, and publish tens of thousands of tracts and pamphlets and volumes in defense of our chartered rights and birthright liberties; and all this we may hail as religious zeal, and applaud as patriotic spirit; but if such prodigious activities be designed solely, or even chiefly, to concentrate all hearts, affections, and energies on the limited interests of our own land; if such prodigious activities recognize and aim at no higher terminating object than the simple maintenance and extension of our home institutions, and that, too, for the exclusive benefit of our own people, while, in contempt of the counsels of the Eternal, the hundreds of millions of a guilty world are cruelly abandoned to perish, oh! how can all this appear in the sight of heaven as anything better than a national outburst of monopolizing selfishness?

PAUSE AND THE PICTURE.

[Some descriptions are essentially suggestive, and their charm lies in the listener filling in the details from his own imagination. In other cases, the details, while concrete and arbitrary (as shape or dimension), may require time to enable the listener to put them together. Both processes take time, and an increase of the normal pause should be made just in the degree that the picture is hard to reconstruct or vast in its sweep.]

Prologue of Act III, Henry V.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.

Suppose that you have seen

The well-appointed king at Hampton pier
Embark his royalty; and his brave fleet
With silken streamers the young Phoebus fanning:
Play with your fancies, and in them behold.

Upon the hempen tackle ship-boys climbing;

Hear the shrill whistle which doth order give
To sounds confused; behold the threaden sails,
Borne with the invisible and creeping wind,
Draw the huge bottoms through the furrow'd sea,
Breasting the lofty surge: 0, do but think
You stand upon the rivage and behold

A city on the inconstant billows dancing;
For so appears this fleet majestical,

Holding due course to Harfleur. Follow, follow:
Grapple your minds to sternage of this navy,
And leave your England, as dead midnight still,
Guarded with grandsires, babies and old women,
Either past or not arrived to pith and puissance;
For who is he, whose chin is but enrich'd
With one appearing hair, that will not follow
These cull'd and choice-drawn cavaliers to France?
Work, work your thoughts, and therein see a siege;
Behold the ordnance on their carriages,

With fatal mouths gaping on girded Harfleur.

Suppose the ambassador from the French comes back;
Tells Harry that the king doth offer him
Katharine his daughter, and with her, to dowry,
Some petty and unprofitable dukedoms.
The offer likes not: and the nimble gunner

With linstock now the devilish cannon touches,
And down goes all before them. Still be kind,
And eke out our performance with your mind.

Niagara Falls.

EDWIN ARNOLD.

Before my balcony the great cataract is thundering, smoking, glittering with green and white rollers and rapids, hurl ing the waters of a whole continent in splendor and speed

over the sharp ledges of the long, brown rock by which Erie, "the Broad, steps proudly down to Ontario, "the Beautiful." The smaller but very imposing American Falls speaks with the louder voice of the two, because its coiling spirals of twisted and furious flood crash in full impulse of descent upon the talus of massive boulders/heaped up at its foot. The resounding impact of water on rocks, the clouds of watersmoke which rise high in air, and the river below churned into a whirling cream of eddy and surge and backwater, unite in a composite effect, at once magnificent and bewildering.

Far away, Niagara river is seen winding eagerly to its prodigious leap. You can discern the line of the first breakers, where the river feels the fatal draw of the cataracts, its current seeming suddenly to leap forward, stimulated by mad desire, a hidden spell, a dreadful and irresistible doom.

Far back along the gilded surface of the upper stream, these lines of dancing, tossing, eager, anxious and fate-impelled breakers and billows múltiply their white ranks and spread and close together their leaping ridges into a wild chaos of racing waves as the brink is approached. And then, at the brink, there is a curious pause-the momentary peace of the irrevocable. Those mad upper waters-reaching the great leap-are suddenly all quiet and glassy, and rounded and green as the border of a field of rye, while they turn the angle of the dreadful ledge and hurl themselves into the snow-white gulf of noise and mist and mystery underneath.

There is nothing more translucently green, nor more perennially still and lovely, than Niagara the greater. At this, her awful brink, the whole architrave of the main abyss falls gleams like a fixed and glorious work wrought in polished aquamarine or emerald. This exquisitely-colored cornice of the enormous waterfall-this brim of bright tranquillity/between fervor of rush and fury of plunge-is its principal

feature, and stamps it as far more beautiful than terrible. Even the central solemnity and shudder-fraught miracle of the monstrous uproar and glory is rendered exquisite, reposeful and soothing by the lovely rainbows hanging over the turmoil and clamor.

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From its crest of and silver, indeed, to its broad foot of milky foam and of its white-stunned waves, too broken and too dazed to begin at first to float away, Niagara appears not terrible, but divinely and deliciously graceful, glad and lovely-a specimen of the splendor of water at its finest-a sight to dwell and linger in the mind with ineffaceable images of happy and grateful thought, by no means to affect it in seeing or to haunt it in future days of memory with any wild reminiscences of terror or of gloom.

Shakespeare's Imagination.

ROBERT G. INGERSOLL.

Shakespeare exceeded all the sons of men in the splendor of his imagination. To him the whole world paid tribute, and Nature poured her treasures at his feet. In him all races lived again, and even those to be were pictured in his brain.

He was a man of imagination-that is to say, of genius, and having seen a leaf, and a drop of water, he could construct the forests, the rivers and the seas. In his presence all the cataracts would fall and foam, the mists rise, the clouds form and float.

If Shakespeare knew one fact, he knew its kindred and its neighbors. Looking at a coat of mail, he instantly imagined the society, the conditions, that produced it and what it, in turn, produced. He saw the castle, the moat, the drawbridge, the lady in the tower, and the knightly lover spurring across the plain. He saw the bold baron and the rude retainer, the