awful responsibility of time, and the aggregate of pain, and despair, and agony that was felt by the hundreds who were dying at that moment, and the guilt that was festering in the darkness the hearts of those who may not sleep, and, over all, my own thoughtless and immeasurable prodigality of time and health and opportunity, crowded into my soul as if its capacity were equal to the concentrated anguish of a demon. The machinery at last began to stir. It seemed to me as if every vein in my body was an icy worm. My nerves stretched to an intenser pitch-large drops of sweat rolled from my forehead, and my heart stopped-almost. It struck !—and I fell back in my chair in a paroxism of hysterical laughter! I have watched often since, and have been in situations far more calculated to excite terror, but nothing ever overcame me like that solitary vigil. I had been up night after night with my friend, and was certainly much unnerved by fatigue and exhaustion; but the circumstance furnishes matter of speculation to the inquirer after the phenomena of human nature. The music of church bells has become a matter of poetry. Thomas Moore, (whose mere sense of beauty is making him religious, and who knows better than any other man what is beautiful,) has sung those evening bells,' in some of the most melodious of his elaborate stanzas. I remember, though somewhat imperfectly, a touching story connected with the church bells of a town in Italy, which had become famous all over Europe for their peculiar solemnity and sweetness. They were made by a young Italian artizan, and were his heart's pride. During the war, the place was sacked, and the bells carried off, no one knew whither. After the tumult was over, the poor fellow returned to his work, but it had been the solace of his life to wander about at evening, and listen to the chime of his bells, and he grew dispirited and sick, and pined for them till he could no longer bear it, and left his home, determined to wander over the world, and hear them once again before he died. He went from land to land, stopping in every village, till the hope that alone sustained him began to falter, and he knew at last that he was dying. He lay one evening in a boat that was slowly floating down the Rhine, almost insensible, and scarce expecting to see the sun rise again, that was now setting gloriously over the vine-covered hills of Germany. Presently, the vesper bells of a distant village began to ring, and, as the chimes stole faintly over the river with the evening breeze, he started from his lethargy. He was not mistaken. It was the deep, solemn, heavenly music of his own bells, and the sounds that he had thirsted for years to hear, were melting over the water. He leaned from the boat, with his ear close to the calm surface of the river, and listened. They rung out their hymn and ceased and he still lay motionless in his painful posture. His companions spoke to him, but he gave no answer-his spirit had followed the last sound of the vesper chime. There is something exceedingly impressive in the breaking in of church bells on the stillness of the Sabbath. I doubt whether it is not more so in the heart of a populous city than anywhere else. The presence of any single, strong feeling, in the midst of a great people, has something of awfulness in it which exceeds even the impressiveness of nature's breathless Sabbath. I know few things more imposing than to walk the streets of a city when the peal of the early bells is just beginning. The deserted pavements, the closed windows of the places of business, the decent gravity of the solitary passenger, and, over all, the feeling in your own bosom that the fear of God is brooding like a great shadow over the thousand human beings who are sitting still in their dwellings around you, were enough, if there were no other circumstance, to hush the heart into a religious fear. But when the bells peal out suddenly with a summons to the temple of God, and their echoes roll on through the desolate streets, and are unanswered by the sound of any human voice, or the din of any human occupation, the effect has sometimes seemed to me more solemn than the near thunder. Far more beautiful, and, perhaps, quite as salutary as a religious influence, is the sound of a distant Sabbath bell in the country. It comes floating over the hills like the going abroad of a spirit, and as the leaves stir with its vibrations, and the drops of dew tremble in the cups of the flowers, you could almost believe that there was a Sabbath in nature, and that the dumb works of God rendered visible worship for his goodness. The effect of nature alone is purifying, and its thousand evidences of wisdom are too eloquent of their Maker not to act as a continual lesson; but combined with the instilled piety of childhood, and the knowledge of the inviolable holiness of the time, the mellow cadences of a church bell give to the hush of the country Sabbath a holiness to which only a desperate heart could be insensible. Yet, after all, whose ear was ever 'filled with hearing,' or whose 'eye with seeing? Full as the world is of music-crowded as life is with beauty which surpasses, in its mysterious workmanship, our wildest dream of faculty and skill-gorgeous as is the overhung and ample sky, and deep and universal as the harmonies are which are wandering perpetually in the atmosphere of this spacious and beautiful world-who has ever heard music and not felt a capacity for better, or seen beauty, or grandeur, or delicate cunning, without a feeling in his inmost soul of unreached and unsatisfied conceptions? I have gazed on the dazzling loveliness of woman till the value of my whole existence seemed pressed into that one moment of sight; and I have listened to music till my tears came, and my brain swam dizzily—yet when I turned away I wished that the beauty of the woman had been perfecter, and my lips parted at the intensest ravishment of that dying music, with an impatient feeling that its spell was unfinished. I used to wonder when I was a boy how Socrates knew that this world was not enough for his capacities, and that his soul therefore was immortal. It is no marvel to me now. . THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS. Or all the known laws of nature, none seems so universal as that which demands in all things a constant fluctuation. Naturalists have remarked its predominance in the system of physical existence. The planets maintain their places, only by a series of complicated motions; the sea and air are both subject to successive and unceasing ebbs and flows; the life of animals and plants is but a sequence of countless changes; even the 'great globe itself' has been shattered by convulsions the most portentous and astonishing. The intellectual and moral, no less than the physical world, supply abundant evidence of this universal mutability. Governments and laws, religion and philosophy, bear about them strange marks of the changes they have suffered, and, among the rest, the Republic of Letters can tell of singular and unimagined revolutions. If we trace back its history but four or five centuries, we find it consisting of a few enthusiastic scholars, who spent their lives in wandering from monastery to monastery, in search of ancient manuscripts, and in copying them, when found, with their own hands, supremely happy at being able to restore a corrupted passage, or explain an obscure allusion; a few hair-splitting schoolmen, deeply versed in all the mysteries of entities and quiddities, who proudly undertook to investigate every branch of knowledge, human and divine, by mere dint of reasoning, and who were ready, at half an hour's warning, to dispute with any opponent de omni scibili et qui busdam aliis concerning all things knowable, and some things else; a few monks, who, unable to endure the religious idleness in which their brethren slept away the time, amused themselves with composing rude chronicles, or inventing miraculous legends in honor of holy church and their patron saint; a few manufacturers of romances, who rendered the old metrical histories of Huon and Ronaldo, Arthur and Sir Tristram, into rambling prose; and now and then a poet-for when was the sacred muse entirely silenced?-witness the well known names of Dante, William de Lorris, and Chaucer. If the number of writers was small, the readers were not numerous. The monks hoped not to be known beyond the walls of their own abbey; the schoolmen were satisfied if their deep disquisitions were studied and applauded at the universities; the scholars trusted their fame to the pious care of the few disciples whom they were able to inspire with their own devoted enthusiasm ; while the romancers and the poets had no higher ambition, than now and then to dispel the ennui of some ducal court or baronial castle. Such was then the republic of letters. Grave and clerkly were all its members, men by no means deficient in genius or in learning, but so small was their number, and so slight their influence, that all their exertions availed little more towards humanizing those barbarous and bloody times, than do the scattered sunbeams which struggle through a thunder cloud towards soothing the dark and angry sea which trembles under the influence of the coming storm. Pass over the intervening years, and, in our times, the republic of letters is a multitude that cannot be counted. The little community late so unknown to fame, has expanded into a mighty empire; and it seems as if the edict of another Caracalla had gone forth, proclaiming that all the world may claim the privilege of citizenship. The fair sex, in a body, have been repeatedly welcomed as members of the great literary fraternity; a scholar and a gentleman are almost synonymous terms; and what with newspapers and magazines and reviews, and all those other turnpike roads to Parnassus which this age has discovered, few and unhappy are the individuals, (if indeed there be any such,) who have not solaced themselves with a sip or two of the Castalian fountain. Indeed, there are not wanting those, who appear to anticipate a sort of intellectual millennium, when we shall no longer be obliged to thank nature for the modicum of sense she may have blessed us with, as it will be in every man's power to be as wise and as witty as he pleases. Whether we can reasonably expect such a consummation, how devoutly soever it may be wished for, is, perhaps, a little doubtful; for there are some philosophers, and deep ones too, who have ever maintained, that dunces are an indispensable part of creation. And to confess the truth, though books and readers have |