disaster hang on the heels of conquest and renown; victor and vanquished presently pass away to oblivion, and the world holds on its course, with the loss only of so many lives, and so much treasure.

But if this is frequently, or generally, the fortune of military achievements, it is not always so. There are enterprises, military as well as civil, that sometimes check the current of events, give a new turn to human affairs, and transmit their consequences through ages. We see their importance in their results, and call them great, because great things follow. There have been battles which have fixed the fate of nations. These come down to us in history with a solid and permanent influence, not created by a display of glittering armour, the rush of adverse battalions, the sinking and rising of pennons, the flight, the pursuit, and the victory; but by their effect in advancing or retarding human knowledge, in overthrowing or establishing despotism, in extending or destroying human happiness. When the traveller pauses on the plains of Marathon, what are the emotions which strongly agitate his breast? what is that glorious recollection that thrills through his frame, and suffuses his eyes? Not, I imagine, that Grecian skill and Grecian valour were here most signally displayed; but that Greece herself was saved. It is because to this spot, and to the event which has rendered it immortal, he refers all the succeeding glories of the republic. It is because, if that day had gone otherwise, Greece had perished. It is because he perceives that her philosophers and orators, her poets and painters, her sculptors and architects, her government and free institutions, point backward to Marathon, and that their future existence seems to have been suspended on the contingency, whether the Persian or Grecian banner should wave victorious in the beams cf that day's setting sun. And, as his imagination kindles at the retrospect, he is transported back to the interesting moment; he counts the fearful odds of the contending hosts; his interest for the result overwhelms him; he trembles as if it were still uncertain, and seems to doubt whether he may consider Socrates and Plato, Demosthenes, Sophocles, and Phidias. as secure, yet, to himself and to the world.

"If we conquer," said the Athenian commander on the morning of that decisive day," if we conquer, we shall make Athens the greatest city of Greece." A prophecy how well fulfilled! "if God prosper us," might have been the more appropriate language of our fathers, when they landed upon this rock,-" if God prosper us, we shall here begin a work that shall last for ages; we shall plant here a new society, in the principles of the fullest liberty, and the purest religion; we shall subdue this wilderness which is before us; we shall fill this region of the great continent, which stretches almost from pole to pole, with civilization and Christianity; the temples of the true God shall rise where now ascends the smoke of idolatrous sacrifice; fields and gardens, the flowers of summer, and the waving and golden harvests of autumn, shall extend over a thousand hills, and stretch along a thousand valleys, never yet, since the creation, reclaimed to the use of civilized man. We shall whiten this coast with the canvass of a prosperous commerce; we shall stud the long and winding shore with a hundred cities. That which we sow in weakness shall be raised in strength. From our sincere, but houseless worship, there shall spring splendid temples to record God's goodness; from the simplicity of our social union, there shall arise wise and politic constitutions of government, full of the liberty which we ourselves bring and breathe; from our zeal for learning, institutions shall spring, which shall scatter the light of knowledge throughout the land, and, in time, paying back what they have borrowed, shall contribute their part to the great aggregate of human knowledge; and our descendants, through all generations, shall look back to this spot, and this hour, with unabated affection and regard."

Forest Scenery.—PAULDING.

By degrees, as custom reconciled me more and more to fasting and long rambles, I extended my excursions farther from home, and sometimes remained out all day without tasting food, or resting myself, except for a few minutes

upon the trunk of some decayed old tree or moss-covered rock. The country, though in a great degree in its native state of wildness, was full of romantic beauties. The Mohawk is one of the most charming of rivers, sometimes brawling among ragged rocks, or darting swiftly through long, narrow reaches, and here and there, as at the Little Falls, and again at the Cohoes, darting down high perpendicular rocks, in sheets of milk-white foam; but its general character is that of repose and quiet. It is no where so broad, but that rural objects and rural sounds may be seen and heard distinctly from one side to the other; and in many places the banks on either hand are composed of rich meadows, or flats, as they were denominated by the early Dutch settlers, so nearly on a level with the surface of the water, as to be almost identified with it at a distance, were it not for the rich fringe of water willows, that skirt it on either side, and mark the lines of separation. In these rich pastures may now be seen the lowing herds, half hidden in the luxuriant grass, and, a little farther on, out of the reach of the spring freshets, the comfortable farm-houses of many a sanguine country squire, who dreams of boundless wealth from the Grand Canal, and, in his admiration of the works of man, forgets the far greater beauty, grandeur, and utility of the works of his Maker. But I am to describe the scenery as it was in the days of my boyhood, when, like Nimrod, I was a mighty hunter before the Lord.

At the time I speak of, all that was to be seen was of the handy work of nature, except the little settlement, over which presided the patriarch Veeder. We were the advance guard of civilization, and a few steps beyond us was the region of primeval forests, composed of elms and maples, and oaks and pines, that seemed as if their seeds had been sown at the time of the deluge, and that they harl been growing ever since. I have still a distinct recollec. tion, I might almost say perception, of the gloom and damps which pervaded these chilling shades, where the summer sun never penetrated, and in whose recesses the very light was of a greenish hue. Here, especially along the little streams, many of which are now dried up by the opening of the earth to the sun-beams, every rock and piece of mould

ering wood was wrapped in a carpet of green moss, fostered into more than velvet luxuriance by the everlasting damps, that, unlike the dews of heaven, fell all the day as well as all the night. Here and there a flower reared its pale head among the rankness of the sunless vegetation of unsightly fungus, but it was without fragrance, and almost without life, for it withered as soon as plucked from the stem. I do not remember ever to have heard a singing bird in these forests, except just on the outer skirts, fronting the south, where occasionally a robin chirped, or a thrush sung his evening chant. These tiny choristers seem almost actuated by the vanity of human beings; for I have observed they appear to take peculiar delight in the neighbourhood of the habitations of men, where they have listeners to their music. They do not love to sing where there is no one to hear them. The very insects of the wing seemed almost to have abandoned the gloomy solitude, to sport in the sunshine among the flowers. Neither butterfly nor grasshopper abided there, and the honey-bee never came to equip himself in his yellow breeches. He is the companion of the white man, and seems content to be his slave, to toil for him all the summer, only that he may be allowed the enjoyment of the refuse of his own labours in the winter. To plunge into the recesses of these woods, was like descending into a cave under ground. There was the coolness, the dampness, and the obscurity of twilight. Yet custom made me love these solitudes, and many are the days I have spent among them, with my dog and gun, and no other guide but the sun in heaven and the moss on the north side of the trees.

Influence of Christianity in elevating the female
Character.-J. G. CARTER.

THERE is one topic, intimately connected with the introduction and decline of Christianity, and subsequently with Its revival in Europe, which the occasion strongly suggests, and which I cannot forbear briefly to touch upon. I allude to the new and more interesting character assumed by wo

man since those events. In the heathen world, and under the Jewish dispensation, she was the slave of man. Christianity constituted her his companion. But, as our religion gradually lost its power in the dark ages, she sunk down again to her deep moral degradation. She was the first to fall in the garden of Eden, and perhaps it was a judgment upon her, that, when the whole human race was now low, she sunk the lowest, and was the last to rise again to her original consequence in the scale of being. The age of chivalry, indeed, exalted her to be an object of adoration. But it was a profane adoration, not founded upon the respect due to a being of immortal hopes and destinies as well as man. This high character has been conceded to her at a later period, as she has slowly attained the rank ordained for her by Heaven. Although this change in the relation of woman to man and to society is both an evidence and a consequence of an improvement in the human condition, yet now her character is a cause operating to produce a still greater improvement. And if there be any one cause, to which we may look with more confidence than to others, for hastening the approach of a more perfect state of society, that cause is the elevated character of woman as displayed in the full developement of all her moral and intellectual powers. The conjugal confession of Eve to Adam,

"God is thy law, thou mine; to know no more
Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise,"

has grown to be obsolete. The influence of the female character is now felt and acknowledged in all the relations of her life. I speak not now of those distinguished women, who instruct their age through the public press; nor of those whose devout strains we take upon our lips when we worship; but of a much larger class; of those whose influence is felt in the relations of neighbour, fiiend, daughter, wife, mother. Who waits at the couch of the sick to administer tender charities while life lingers, or to perform the last acts of kindness when death comes? Where shall we look for those examples of friendship, that most adorn our nature; those abiding friendships, which trust even when betrayed, and survive all changes of fortune? Where shall we find the brightest illustrations of filial piety'