pure wealth she has left to this matter-of-fact-ridden world. But it happened to me one day to mount the high grounds overhanging the streets of Pera; I sated my eyes with the pomps of the city, and its crowded waters, and then I looked over where Scutari lay half vei'ed in her mournful cypresses; I looked yet farther, and higher, and saw in the heavens a silvery cloud that stood fast, and still against the breeze; it was pure, and dazzling white as might be the veil of Cytheria, yet touched with fire, as though from beneath, the loving eyes of an immortal were shining through and through. I knew the bearing, but had enormously misjudged its distance, and underrated its height, and so it was a sign and a testimony- almost as a call from the neglected gods, that now I saw and acknowledged the snowy crown of the Mysian Olympus!"

We know not when we have received so forcible an impression of the real character of the Dead Sea as may be derived from the ensuing paragraphs:

'I WENT on, and came near to those waters of Death; they stretched deeply into the southern desert, and before me, and all around, as far away as the eye could follow, blank hills piled high over hills, pale, yellow, and naked, walled up in her tomb for ever, the dead, and damned Gomorrah. There was no fly that hummed in the forbidden air, but instead a deep stillness-no grass grew from the earth-no weed peered through the void sand, but in mockery of all life, there were trees borne down by Jordan in some ancient flood, and these grotesquely planted upon the forlorn shore, spread out their grim skeleton arms all scorched, and charred to blackness, by the heats of the long silent years.

I bathed in the Dead Sea. The ground covered by the water, sloped so gradually, that I was not only forced to 'sneak in,' but to walk through the water nearly a quarter of a mile before I could get out of my depth. When at last I was able to attempt a dive, the salts held in solution made my eyes smart so sharply that the pain which I thus suffered acceding to the weakness occasioned by want of food, made me giddy and faint for some moments, but I soon grew better. I knew beforehand the impossibility of sinking in this buoyant water, but I was surprised to find that I could not swim at my accustomed pace; my legs and feet were lifted so high and dry out of the lake, that my stroke was baffled, and I found myself kicking against the thin air, instead of the dense fluid upon which I was swimming. The water is perfectly bright and clear; its taste detestable. After finishing my attempts at swimming and diving, I took some time in regaining the shore, and before I began to dress, I found that the sun had already evaporated the water which clung to me, and that my skin was thickly encrusted with sulphate of magnesia.'

It would seem from a passage which we find in the description given by our author of the sacred scenes in Jerusalem, that the localities of the Empress CONSTANTINE are not always to be depended upon, and that some of the stories repeated to travellers at Jerusalem are to be taken cum grano salis :

'A PROTESTANT, familiar with the Holy Scriptures, but ignorant of tradition and the geography of Modern Jerusalem, finds himself a good deal 'mazed' when he first looks for the sacred sites. The Holy Sepulchre is not in a field without the walls, but in the midst, and in the best part of the town, under the roof of the great Church which I have been talking about; it is a handsome tomb of oblong form, partly subterranean and partly above ground; and closed in on all sides, except the one by which it is entered. You descend into the interior by a few steps, and there find an altar with burning tapers. This is the spot which is held in greater sanctity than any other at Jerusalem. When you have seen enough of it, you feel perhaps weary of the busy crowd and inclined for a gallop; you ask your Dragoman whether there will be time before sunset to procure horses and take a ride to Mount Calvary. Mount Calvary, Signor? - eccolo!-it is up stairs on the first floor. In effect you ascend, if I remember rightly, just thirteen steps, and then you are shown the now golden sockets in which the crosses of our LORD and the two thieves were fixed. All this is startling, but the truth is, that the city having gathered round the Sepulchre, which is the main point of interest, has crept northward, and thus in a great measure are occasioned the many geographical surprises which puzzle the Bible Christian.'

The church of the Holy Sepulchre comprises very compendiously almost all the spots associated with the closing career of our LORD. Just there, on your right, he stood and wept; by the pillar on your left he was scourged; on the spot just before you he was crowned with the crown of thorns; up there he was crucified, and down here he was buried. A locality is assigned to every the minutest event connected with the recorded history of our Saviour; even the spot where the cock crew, when PETER denied his Master, is ascertained and surrounded by the walls of an Armenian convent.'

We have encountered in no other work so vivid a description of the desert as is to be found in the successive and incidental pictures which this volume affords. We follow the traveller in his solemn progress, ever the centre of a round horizon, with its circle of flaming sky and glaring sand, with an interest almost intense; especially when we lie awake with him at night, and hear the great packs of hungry jackals hurrying past, with their strangely human cry. We have clipped a few paragraphs for our reader's gratification:

WHEN the cold, sullen morning dawned, and my people began to load the camels, I always felt loath to give back to the waste this little spot of ground that had glowed for a while with the cheerfulness of a human dwelling. One by one the cloaks, the saddles, the baggage, the hundred things that strewed the ground, and made it look so familiar-all these were taken away and laid upon the camels. A speck in the broad tracts of Asia remained still impressed with the mark of patent port

manteaus, and the heels of London boots; the embers of the fire lay black and cold upon the sand, and these were the signs we left.

My tent was spared to the last, but when all else was ready for the start, then came its fall; the pegs were drawn, the canvass shivered, and in less than a minute there was nothing that remained of my genial home but only a pole and a bundle. The encroaching Englishman was off, and instant, upon the fall of the canvass, like an owner, who had waited, and watched, the Genius of the desert stalked in... You, you love sailing: in returning from a cruise to the English coast, you see often enough a fisherman's humble boat far away from all shores, with an ugly black sky above, and an angry sea beneath-you watch the grisly old man at the helm, carrying his craft with strange skill through the turmoil of waters, and the boy supple-limbed, yet weather-worn already, and with steady eyes that look through the blast; you see him understanding commandments from the jerk of his father's white eye-brow now belaying, and now letting go-now scrunching himself down into mere ballast, or bailing out Death with a pipkin. Stale enough is the sight, and yet, when I see it I always stare anew, and with a kind of Titanic exultation, because that a poor boat with the brain of a man and the hands of a boy on board, can match herself so bravely against black Heaven and Ocean; well, so when you have travelled for days and days over an eastern desert, without meeting the likeness of a human being, and at last see an English shooting-jacket and his servant come listlessly slouching along from out the forward horizon, you stare at the wide unproportion between this slender company, and the boundless plains of sand through which they are keeping their way.' ON the fifth day of my journey the air above lay dead, and all the whole earth that I could reach with my utmost sight and keenest listening, was still and lifeless as some dispeopled and forgotten world, that rolls round and round in the heavens, through wasted floods of light. The sun, growing fiercer and fiercer, shone down more mightily now than ever on me he shone before, and as I drooped my head under his fire and closed my eyes against the glare that surrounded me, I slowly fell asleep, for how many minutes or moments, I cannot tell, but after a while I was gently awakened by a peal of church bells my native bells the innocent bells of Marlen, that never before sent forth their music beyond the Blaygon hills! My first idea naturally was, that I still remained fast under the power of a dream. I roused myself and drew aside the silk that covered my eyes, and plunged my bare face into the light. Then at least I was well enough wakened, but still those old Marlen bells rung on, not ringing for joy, but properly, prosily, steadily, merrily ringing 'for church. After a while the sound died away slowly; it happened that neither I nor any of my party had a watch by which to measure the exact time of its lasting, but it seemed to be that about ten minutes had passed before the bells ceased. I attributed the effect to the great heat of the sun, the perfect dryness of the clear air through which I moved, and the deep stillness of all around me; it seemed to me that these causes, by occasioning a great tension, and consequent susceptibility of the hearing organs, had reudered them liable to tingle under the passing touch of some mere memory, that must have swept aeross my brain in a moment of sleep. Since my return to England it has been told me that like sounds have been heard at sea, and that the sailor becalmed under a vertical sun, in the midst of the wide ocean, has listened in trembling wonder to the chime of his own village bells.'

One of the most striking chapters in the volume is that upon Cairo and the Plague.' It is replete with the most terrific pictures of the dreadful mortality of that scourge of the East. We must close our extracts, however, with the following first impressions' of the Pyramids :

'I WENT to see, and to explore the Pyramids.

'Familiar to one from the days of early childhood are the forms of the Egyptian Pyramids, and now, as I approached them from the banks of the Nile, I had no print, no picture before me, and yet the old shapes were there; there was no change; they were just as I had always known them. I straightened myself in my stirrups, and strived to persuade my understanding that this was real Egypt, and that those angles which stood up between me and the West were of harder stuff and more ancient than the paper pyramids of the green portfolio. Yet it was not till I came to the base of the great Pyramid, that reality began to weigh upon my mind. Strange to say, the bigness of the distinct blocks of stone was the first sign by which I attained to feel the immensity of the whole pile. When I came, and trod, and touched with my hands, and climbed in order that by climbing I might come to the top of one single stone, then, and almost suddenly, a cold sense and understanding of the Pyramid's enormity came down overcasting my brain.

Now try to endure this homely, sick-nursish illustration of the effect produced upon one's mind by the mere vastness of the great Pyramid: when I was very young (between the ages, I believe, of three and five years old,) being then of delicate health, I was often in time of night the victim of a strange kind of mental oppression; I lay in my bed perfectly conscious, and with open eyes, but without power to speak, or to move, and all the while my brain was oppressed to distraction by the presence of a single and abstract idea - the idea of solid immensity. It seemed to me in my agouies that the horror of this visitation arose from its coming upon me without form or shape that the close presence of the direst monster ever bred in hell would have been a thousand times more tolerable, than that simple idea of solid size; my aching mind was fixed, and riveted down upon the mere quality of vastness, vastness, vastness; and was not permitted to invest with it any particular object. If I could have doue so the torment would have ceased. When at last I was roused from this state of suffering, I could not of course in those days (knowing no verbal metaphysics, and no metaphysics at all, except by the dreadful experience of an abstract idea,) I could not of course find words to describe the nature of my sensations, and even now I cannot explain why it is that the forced contemplation of a mere quality, distinct from matter, should be so terrible. Well, now my eyes saw and knew, and my hands and my feet informed my understanding, that there was nothing at all abstract about the great Pyramid; it was a big triangle, sufficiently concrete, easy to see, and rough to the touch; it could not of course, affect me with the peculiar sensation which I have been talking of, but yet there was something akin to that old night-mare agony in the terrible completeness with which a mere mass of masonry could fill and load my mind.

'And Time too; the remoteness of its origin, no less than the enormity of its proportions, screens an Egyptian pyramid from the easy and familiar contact of our modern minds; at its base the common earth ends, and all above is a world- one not created of GOD; not seeming to be made by men's hands, but rather, the shear giant-work of some old dismal age weighing down this younger planet.'

We can add nothing by way of comment to the favorable effect of the foregoing extracts; nor need we if we could. The publishers, we are glad to perceive, have presented the work in a garb befitting its rare literary merits.

THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, for the April Quarter. Volume LX. pp. 502. Boston: OTIS, BROADERS AND COMPANY. New-YORK: C. S. FRANCIS AND COMPANY.

THERE are eight 'articles' proper in the present number of the North American,' and a list containing ten briefer 'Critical Notices.' The first paper, and one of much interest, is upon the writings of PASCAL. The reviewer has a thorough appreciation of the genius and productions of his author, which are examined with perspicuity and force. The following collated passages from PASCAL'S 'Thoughts upon Religion and other Topics,' afford a striking contrast of the nothingness of man in the midst of nature, with his grandeur as a thinking soul :

'WHAT is man in the midst of nature? A cipher in respect to the infinite, and all in comparison with nonentity. -a mean betwixt nothing and all. He is infinitely far removed from the two extremes; and his being is not less distant from the nothingness whence he was drawn, than from the infinite in which he is ingulfed. In the order of intelligent things, his intellect holds the same rank that his body does in the expanse of nature; all that he can do is to discern some phenomena from the midst of things, in eternal despair of ever knowing their beginning or their end. All things came from nothing, and extend even to the infinite. Who can follow this astonishing progress? The author of these marvels understands them; to all others they are unintelligible. We burn with desire to know every thing, and to build a tower which shall rise even to the heavens. But our whole edifice cracks, and the earth opeus beneath us even to the abyss.' MAN is the feeblest branch of nature, but it is a branch that thinks. It is not necessary that the whole universe should rise in arms to crush him. A vapor, a drop of water, is enough to kill him. But if the universe should crush him, he would still be nobler than that which causes his death; for he knows that he is dying, and the universe knows nothing of its power over him.'

PASCAL's fine remark, in speaking of the weight due to authority, that the ancients after all were only the children among mankind, has been so often cited without giving him credit for it, that the reviewer condenses it in his own words:

'ANIMALS make no progress. The hexagonal cells of bees were as accurately measured and finished a thousand years ago, as they are at the present day. It is not so with man, who is born for eternity. He is ignorant at first, but constantly acquires knowledge, not only from his own experience, but from the accumulated wisdom of his predecessors. Men are now very nearly in the same condition that the ancient philosophers would have arrived at, if they could have lived till our times, constantly adding to their knowledge what they might have acquired by study during so many centuries. All the generations of men during so many ages ought to be considered only as one man, who lives forever, and is continually learning. Hence, how improper it is to respect philosophers for their antiquity! For as old age is the period farthest removed from infancy, who does not see, that the old age of this universal man ought not to be sought for in the years nearest to his birth, but in those most remote from it? Those whom we call the ancients were truly young in all things, and formed the infancy of mankind. As we have joined to their knowledge the experience of the ages which came after them, it is in us that this antiquity is to be found which we are wont to revere in others.'

The succeeding paper is upon WHEATON's History of the Law of Nations,' which we have not as yet found leisure to read; and is followed by an article upon The Modern Jews,' in which the late and present condition of the 'ancient covenant people' in Europe and elsewhere is clearly set forth. CHALMERS' History of the American Colonies,' 'HILDRETH'S Theory of Morals,' and the 'Travels of the Bohemian Nobleman, LEO VON ROZMITAL,' through the western countries of Europe, in 1465, are titles of papers which ensue, and the last-named of which we perused with no little interest. The Vestiges of Creation,' a work which we fear is destined to be over-written upon, is next reviewed by a writer evidently well acquainted with every branch of his subject. The arguments and hypotheses of the book are treated with elaborate analysis and caustic severity. The 'Memoirs.

of the Marquis POMBAL of Portugal' concludes the distinctive papers,' leaving for the ninth article the usual batch of short Critical Notices.' LONGFELLOW's Waif' is deservedly commended, as are also LOWELL'S 'Conversations.' The latter receives a slight castigation, however, for one of his 'views' in a matter of art:

'QUESTIONS of art are sometimes decided by Mr. LOWELL in an off-hand manner, which those who know the least about the subject are the most likely to adopt. The beautiful piece of sculpture executed by Mr. CRAWFORD for the Boston Athenæum-one of the very few works which we have in the United States in the highest classical style of the art-is' put down' by an unanswerable sneer concerning LEMPRIERE'S Classical Dictionary; and the great esthetic question of drapery in sculpture a question which may well require long study and profound consideration to settle it on its true grounds is quite summarily despatched, by the usual cant about the improbability of General WASHINGTON appearing in a Roman dress before an assembly of his countrymen; as if sculpture, ancient or modern, were called upon to perpetuate the conceptions of the tailor, the shoemaker, and the hatter; and as if the pig-tail, the cocked-hat, and the breeches, which have so ludicrously disguised the dignity of the human form in modern times, must be rendered perdurable, by being sent down to posterity in the eternal marble. The mistake arises from confounding drapery with dress, two things essentially different, and not more different now than they were in the highest bloom of Grecian art. The one is a matter of art, and wholly subservient to artistic effect; the other a matter of personal convenience, and shifting in form and fashion every day. The young gentlemen of Athens no more appeared in the streets in the dresses of the immortal Panathenaic procession on the friezes of the Parthenon, than they rode living horses unsaddled and unbridled, as those figures bestride their marble steeds.'

A few lines are devoted to Mr. CHARLES LANMAN'S 'Letters from a Landscape-Painter,' in which that ambitious littérateur's affected, ungrammatical style, the interjections and exclamations with which his letters are studded over,' and his studied pleasantry and smartness,' are felicitously exposed. A couple of similes, the first borrowed from WORDSWORTH's idea of the army of clouds' coming out of the horizon and rolling up the zenith, and the second as familiar to our ears as household words,' are commended by the reviewer. It is unfortunate, that what was intended to relieve just condemnation, happens to prove the severest portion of the brief notice under consideration. The North American' preserves its usual excellence in externals, under the supervision of its new and enterprising proprietors.

CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN SCHILLER AND GOETHE, from 1794 to 1805. Translated by GEORGE H. CALVERT. Volume First. pp. 392. New-York and London: WILEY AND PUTNAM.

THE letters between SCHILLER and GOETHE are a record kept by friendship of the habitual feelings and thoughts of two great poets; and our translator is of opinion that if he has adequately executed his task, he has opened to American and English readers' the richest epistolary treasure that the literature contains.' There is no other instance of affectionate union between two men of such genius, intellect, and culture; and that under circumstances peculiarly adapted to promote a rapid interchange of letters. The correspondence, which consists of more than nine hundred letters, embraces ten years of the prime of both, and ended only with SCHILLER'S life. This proximity of their places of residence fed the correspondence, by keeping their friendship warm through frequent personal intercourse. Their labors animated their letters, the letters created a want of the fuller and freer communication by conversation, conversation gave fresh impulse to their labors, and thus their friendship, founded on the broadest mutual esteem, and fostered by an ever-active circle of invigorating influences, uttered itself in a correspondence as cordial as it is intellectual. Poetry, science, literature, religion, art, philosophy, subjects that are the familiar inmates of such minds, come up constantly, of course, and are touched with the free and masterly strokes to be expected in confidential effusions between GOETHE and SCHILLER. The reader rises with them into the regions where such men have chiefly their being, and there with them partakes of their wholesome indifference to what are commonly regarded as the great interests of life. In the easy, eager, private discussion of the principles that underlie the fundamental departments of human thought, we behold in a manner the secret growth of these two extraordinary minds. We witness the

relaxation of giants; we can figure to ourselves what may be the sports of gods.' In putting the German into English, the translator has been as direct and literal as is compatible with our own idiom, preserving at the same time, with the original, the laxness proper to a sincere epistolary style.

ESAYSS BY THEOPHILUS PARSONS. In one volume. pp. 228. Boston: OTIS CLAPP. New-York: JOHN ALLEN, 139 Nassau-street, and BARTLETT AND WELFORD, Astor-House.

THERE is a great purity in this beautiful book. It is presented to its readers with becoming modesty, which at once creates a feeling in favor of the writer, a lawyer of distinction in Boston, we have been informed, and a son of the late Chief Justice PARSONS, of that capital. 'Whatsoever,' says our author, 'is found in these hastily-written papers that is new and just and interesting, belongs to the system of truth, to be found in the writings of SWEDENBORG; and the obscurities which mingle with the light I have endeavored to borrow, are my own. I call them essays, only for want of another name; for if I knew one of less significance I should certainly adopt it.' Mr. PARSONS would be justified in giving his chapters a more significant name even than essays;' they are treatises indeed, upon the great themes of 'Providence,'' Life,' Natural and Spiritual Correspondences,' 'the Human Form,' Religion,' etc., each one of which will command the attention and respect of the reader, even though he may not perhaps agree with the writer in all his views. One thing may certainly be relied upon; the tenets of that truly great man, SweDENBORG, are every day acquiring wider prevalence. His works are becoming generally current in American communities, and the periodicals which set forth his benevolent doctrines are attaining an encouraging circulation. Perhaps no writer upon spiritual subjects is so much misunderstood by those whose knowledge of his belief and that of his followers is derived from hear-say.' Here, for example, in a few plain, clear sentences, there is that explained which has been often so distorted as to appear scarcely otherwise than utterly ridiculous. It concludes the chapter on ' Life,' and follows the remark, that in the bright world to which we go, man sees his own affections, his own thoughts, in form and activity; they grow as he grows, and change as he changes; they are always himself in outward repre

sentation:

'INTO this spirit-world man enters at death. While in this lower world his spiritual body was within his natural body, giving it life and power and sense. It was always his spiritual eye which saw, his spiritual ear which heard, his spiritual senses which took cognizance of all things about him. But while he lived in the material body, it was only through the material organs of that body, that the eye of his spiritual body could see and its ear could hear; and for that purpose these material organs were exquisitely fitted to the spiritual organs which they served as instruments But when these material organs or coverings fell off, the spiritual eye, the true and living eye, does not lose the power of seeing. It loses the power of seeing the material things for which it once possessed a material organ, and acquires the power of seeing the spiritual substances and forms which this material organ had veiled. So it is with all the senses, and with all the organs of the body. The man rises from that portion of earth which his soul once vivified; rises with the spiritual body he always had, and rises in full possession of all his senses and faculties, into a world of spiritual substances, of which his spiritual senses and organs now take cognizance in the same manner as the material organs here perceive material things. In a word, Death is Birth, and then man rises a man as before, but in a new world; yet, with all his organs, limbs, senses, faculties; and into a world like in its appearances, and analogous in its uses, to the world he has left.'

We surely need not ask our readers to admire with us this beautiful illustration of the inner life:

THE language of the Bible harmonizes with all human experience, in declaring that all progress implies effort, resistance, combat; but there are intervals of peace; intervals, when the battle of that day is won, and the wearied soldier rests and rejoices; intervals, when the climbing pilgrim has reached a mountain-top, and while he breathes the sweet freshness of its air, he looks back upon his nights of darkness and his days of toil, and around upon a world now glowing with beauty because the love which fills it is, for that hour, unveiled; and upward to a sky, from which the clouds have melted or else give back the sunshine in golden light; and forward, to the distant and loftier summits, where peace has a more abiding home. These are intervals of refreshing rest and calm and quiet gladness. They spring from the cessation of conflict between the life that lies latent in the inmost soul and that which animates the external character. This external life is not yet wholly obedient, wholly conformed to the life within; but for a while it is quiescent; for a while it yields so