Low at the altar's foot I kneeled,

Pierced through with awe and dread,
For, traced upon the vaulted roof,

Were heavenly glories spread :
Yet when I raised my eyes once more,

The vaulted roof was gone;
Wide open was heaven's

lofty door,
And every veil withdrawn.
What wondrous visions I beheld,

What sounds were in the air,
Sweet as the wind-harp's thrilling tone,

Loud as the trumpet's blare -
These mortal tongue may never tell ;

Let him who fain would prove,
Pause when he hears that pealing bell,

In yonder twilight grove.

B. HW.

In the early ages of Christianity, when the mild doctrines of Jesus, and his pure and upright morality, shed a light over the world, unknown before, and softened the hardened heart of reason to the holy voice of truth; in that fair dawn of virtue and of peace, when the powers of evil trembled, and shrank cowering into the shades below; their great commander, the arch-enemy of man, summoned them around his ebon throne, and thus bespoke them :

•Friends and fellow-laborers ! faithful coadjutors in the cause of evil !- our power on earth is on the wane. A fatal star has arisen in the east, which tells of peace and fellowship, and all the good and perfect things that descend to man from heaven, in the train of true religion. And ye have forsaken the pleasant paths of earth; have fled abashed to hide your unsightly forms in this my grim domain. Yet dream not that here ye shall abide in idleness ; that while there are souls for the winning, yon fair orb shall hold them unmolested, till heaven's wide portals open to receive their own. No, no! — not so shall the great fight be abandoned. Rouse yourselves, powers of evil ! Fly forth at night, and hang on the wings of the morning, and even at noon-day defy the holy messengers who, in their Master's name, are laboring to secure fallen man from my legitimate sway. Ye answer not! Ye hang your wan visages, and roll your distorted eyes in helpless infamy. Oh! that I could make you look less hideous!— but I am fallen, fallen !' sighed the archangel ruined, and your master's fate is on you;' and strange to say, tears, scalding tears,frolled heavily, like molten lead, over his cheeks, and left deep furrows there--everlasting traces of his grief, when the Redeemer came. And there was grief among his followers, and mad excitement. Murder · bared her arm ;' Revenge gnashed his teeth; and Discord tore her hair; but Lucifer shook his head, and bade them be quiet. He knew full well that against Christianity, in its original beauty and purity, violence was of no avail. • Warily, warily must we resume our efforts,' said he ; and as he spoke, VOL. XIV.

57

glaring his blood-shot eyes over the unseemly throng, two imps stepped forward, and kneeling at his footstool, vowed thenceforward to devote themselves to his service, and do his bidding, provided he gave them permission to disguise themselves as they pleased, and make their permanent dwelling on the earth.

Satan knew them well. They had done him great service already, and he looked upon them as such powerful enemies of Christianity, his mortal foe, that he hesitated not to acquiesce in their wishes, and promised moreover to admit them from that time forward to his coun. sels and his friendship. Yet when they turned their backs and stole away, he could not forbear reviling them as mean, double-faced villains, and shouted after them that they never need enter his domi. nions in their base disguises.

• It is very well,' murmured he, to some of his more brazen, thorough-going courtiers, it is very well to make use of such beings; but the wretches would never have knelt at my footstool, if they could have maintained their standing upon earth without my counte. nance. However, the bargain is made, and we are friends, and I leave it to your discretion to aid them as far as is consistent with your less artful natures.'

While Lucifer and his prime ministers remained assembled in gloomy debate, the two evil spirits glided from the infernals, and appeared upon earth in the disguise they had planned; one putiing on the mask of religion, the other of virtue.

Alas! for religion and virtue!- they have suffered ever since, for they have been confounded with these arch-deceivers, who are abroad in the great thoroughfares of life, in such goodly seeming. Intole, rance, superstition, ignorance, and deceit, mark their footsteps; and blinded and sorrowing humanity endeavors in vain to distinguish between the false and the real; between the blessed messengers sent to guide them to heaven, and the dark ministers bound to mislead their steps.

Ages after this compact was made between Satan and bis creatures, when, except for its fruits, the affair might have been forgotten, three evil spirits met upon earth — the two imps and he they had engaged to serve. Men called them Bigotry and Hypocrisy; but Satan knew them not in their disguise, and marvelled at finding bimself in such company, at such an hour.

They stood beneath a clump of gloomy cypress trees, in the corner of a grave-yard, under the shadow of night. They had been hovering there to see the remains of one of their victims deposited beneath the sward, as the sun went down. She, the new occupant of this last asylum of the wretched, had been favored with the best gifts of earth, and in the midst of worldly joys, bethought her of heaven; but mistaking the false for the true religion, her brain became entangled, till wild imaginings usurped the place of reason, and vague, unholy dread the room of faith. She was a maniac, when the kind tomb opened to receive her. Many a dark tale circulated touching the fair fame of those by whom she had been surrounded; of those who had been thought to stand high in the ranks of religion and virtue ; and the evil spirits rejoiced when they saw faith decline, and good fellowship decay, as they had often done at their approach,

you not.

And now they met apart, and Satan said, “Ye are mine, ye are mine! and yet I know

Oh! adınirable counterfeits ! throw off your disguises, and face to face let me acknowledge you as my friends !' — when Bigotry and Hypocrisy unmasked, and in all their native deformity, stood confronting the Prince of Evil. Satan glared on them in astonishment, which kindled into rage, as he thought of their littleness, and remembered how often they had deceived even him; but they then averted his wrath by a stroke of humor, which was pardonable under the circumstances. Bigotry resumed his disguise, and under the mask of Religion, called to Hypocrisy, in a severe voice to bid the Evil One avaunt, while Hypocrisy, in a canting tone, begged him to turn from his evil ways, and repent, ere it was too late. This was too much for the gravity of Lucifer. loud, shrill laugh, that, sounding from under the cypress, and echoing among the tombs, made the villagers tremble, and whisper that the screech-owl was singing poor Susan's requiem; and some declared that it was the very sound of one of her insane peals of laughter.

Meanwhile these enemies of man shook hands and parted, after renewing the compact which bound them to coöperate for evil — over the fairest portions of the earth to scatter poison - through the brightest circles of society to send distrust and disunion.

He gave a The sacred flame that in your bosoms burned,

Dissolved the chains that human thought confined, Illuming, as each old abuse it spurned,

New world of matter with new light of mind.

Man cannot be a slave in such a land;

He looks on nature, and his fetters fall;
Her mountains their own eagles would command,

To lend him wings to burst oppression's thrall;

And Mississippi's far, resistless flow,

Would teach his soul to know its power to soar, And breasts with lofty purposes that glow,

Would dare more nobly mid Niagara's roar!

Else why should Liberty, on weary wing,

Bearing the olive leaf, for ever roam, Rejected in her cheerless wandering,

Till your bright country gave her rest and home!

Else why the Senate, that your valor led,

Dared Tyranny upon his icy throne,
And pledged life, fortune, honor, while they spread

Their flag of stars round Freedom like a zone ;

And with unblenching eye, and thought sublime,

Their fate upon their glorious charter cast, While the grim monster, hoar with ancient crime,

Shrank back upon his sinking throne aghast !

What though no pomp around your burial shone,

And but an humble stone marks where ye lie; Ye gained far more than Norman conquerors won,

For Freedom is your children's legacy!

Oh foulest stain in fratricidal war!

Ye fell the victims of a traitor's ire ;
His own good sword surrendered could not spare
The gallant LEDYARD in the conflict dire !

Ye lay in ghastly masses, in your blood,

Most foully murdered by a treacherous foe; But the free soil that drank the crimson flood,

Spurns both the traitor and the tyrant too!

The dark reluctant Thames, at dead of night,

Your mangled forms with sullen moan receives ; Its wounded bosom, in the moon's pale light,

Gapes darkly red, and closing, sadly heaves.

The hoarse north wind, that to these Vineland plains,

From Greenland once the bold free Northmen bore, Howls your sad dirge in wild indignant strains,

With clouds from rude, unconquered Labrador !

But from your funeral pyre a spirit springs,

On wings of hght, and bears men's souls away; Thenceforth their thoughts dwell on sublimer things,

And thrones and sceptres lose their magic sway.

First o'er the vales of sunny France it scours,

And frowning Bastiles crumble to the dust; And feudal barons' moss-grown, falling towers,

Shield them no longer from the world's disgust.

What though, when dungeons cease to hamper thought,

And millions seize its wildly flashing torch,
That with the new delight to frenzy wrought,

Their brands should threaten Virtue's hallowed porch?
Still shall this spirit hold its high career,

Softening its rigor, as it feels its power,
Till serfs from Russian steppes shall disappear,

And Ganges' flood shall whelm no victims more!
Before its march, the anarchs of the North,

That from their frosty hive of nations sent
The Goth and Vandal, Hun and Norman forth,

To enslave and desolate where'er they went;

BY THE AUTHOR OF 'EASTERN LANDS,' 'COBBLER OF BAGDAD,' ETC.

There is an extremely novel proverb extant, that 'tall oaks from little acorns grow.' Never was this sage apothegm more fully exemplified, than in the rise and progress of Little Dingleton, an ancient and celebrated emporium of New England. The curious will search in vain, in any published map, to find its exact latitude and longitude. It never was put down on map or chart. Years ago, its inhabitants, by some means or other, so affronted the geography and chart-makers, that they, with one accord, entered into a league to banish it for ever from their professional returns. But I will supply the desideratum. Little Dingleton, then, is a thriving specimen of a New-England village. The inhabitants, generally speaking, are an aristocratical set. Not content with the plain name of Dingletown, bestowed upon it by its founders, the family of the venerable Jeremiah Dingle, they sent in petition after petition to the General Court for leave to change it to Great Dingleton; until that honorable body, wearied with continual solicitations, finally granted them leave to assume the title of Dingleton, justly considering the addition of Great' as altogether superfluous. The story got wind; and in a short time the inhabitants of the neighboring towns and villages prefixed the adjective of • little,' in derision, until at last the high-feeling town's-people, who had been secretly congratulating themselves that they would soon be allowed to date iheir epistles and proceedings from Great Dingleton, found, to their great dismay, that they had overshot the mark, and fallen into the opposite extreme.