MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE.

RECOLLECTIONS OF A PARSONAGE.

A CLERGYMAN'S CONFESSIONS.

uniformly operated upon the whole congregation, either as an infection, or in the light of a joke. In both of which views it was equally fatal, even to the most laboured and best reasoned passages in my sermon. However elevated my flight, or animated my action, no fowl. ing-piece ever told with more certain effect on flight and life, than this unerring and deadly yawn did upon me. To add to my mortification and disconcertion, I was compelled to perceive that it was emitted by one of my own elders, a person of singular good sense and good feeling, on religious subjects in particular.

IT has often occurred to me, in reflecting upon the experience of my past life, that it might contribute in some measure to the promotion of a mighty object, were clergymen to give to the world a sketch of their clerical labours,-detailing faithfully such errors and mistakes As my original stock of sermons had been composed as have been corrected by experience, with the methods on what is called the moral plan, and according to those which have proved most effectual in furthering the great rules and that practice which colleges and halls are object of all preaching-the spiritual improvement and calculated to enforce and exhibit, and as their general comforting of the people under their ministry. There aspect was argument and reasoning-a kind of gladiatorare many aged and experienced clergymen, who, from ship in which the triumph and victory was sure to revarious causes, would wish to avoid, and do conse- main with him who not only originated, but modified quently avoid, the publicity of a regular and separate the combat-I bethought me now of changing my plan, publication, who might, notwithstanding, be induced, and, instead of the argumentative, introducing the pain a respectable periodical, to present to young preach-thetic into my discourses. The whole book of Job, ers in particular, those results to which the weekly and with the Lamentations of Jeremiah, was laid under conregular discharge of clerical duty has conducted them. tribution for pathetic texts, and high and glowing picAnd as no one better qualified has hitherto come for- tures were drawn on all sorts of subjects which admitward, I shall dedicate a few paragraphs to the subject, ted of feeling appeals. The imagination was enlisted rather by way of a provocative to others, than as any in this warfare with the feelings, and instances of misery thing like a fair specimen. and suffering were dragged from every-day life, to witness to the truth and the power of Scriptural intimations. But all would not do; though the congregation manifestly increased in number, the dreadful, uncontrollable" yawn" continued as regular as the sun's ascension to his one-o'clock station in the heavens. What was now to be done? Vanity, self-conceit, besides all the more legitimate sisterhood of duty, honour, usefulness, and popularity, urged an onward movement another effort to accomplish that upon which my happiness as a man, as well as my respectability as a Christian, depended.

At the time of my ordination, I was possessed of some eighteen or twenty sermons, which, at the rate of two discourses per Sabbath, was provision for nine or ten weeks. These sermons I read as distinctly and emphatically as I could; but after the novelty had subsided, I observed, with a degree of disappointment, which pride taught me to disguise, that my congregation was neither so numerous nor so attentive as I could have wished. I endeavoured to soothe my real disappointment, in the studied praises of a few personal friends, and in the insinuations, that my congregation were by no means a proper jury upon the merits of a well-writ Shall I undergo the imputation of "religiosum neten sermon,-forgetful, as I was at the time, and fear-fas "of fanaticism !-if I here state, that on my knees, fully so, that the great mass of the people, in order to and beneath the outspreading of an ancient oak, on a be instructed, must first be pleased, and that the praise Sabbath afternoon, I first received the impression that of the more lettered minority on such occasions is real there was something wrong-if not in the doctrines and merited censure. Oh! how often do we preach at which I preached, at least in my method of stating and the front seat in the gallery, and over the heads of nine-enforcing them. I preached against every vice,-I en. tenths of the people below, whilst the more learned or forced every virtue, I steeped my exhortations in all intellectual individual, at whose praise we are aiming, the oil of feeling,-arrayed them in all the sparkle of is in no sensible measure influenced, or capable of be- simile, in all the force of argument,-yet still they were ing influenced, by any preaching whatever. How long comparatively inefficient. I read over my Bible anew, I might have continued this disgraceful practice, I and, in particular, the Epistles of Paul; the scales seemcannot even guess, had not laziness, the mother of in- ed to fall from my eyes. I had all along been putting, vention, (vide steam!) together with shame, the parent inadvertently, the cart before the horse. I had been at times of virtue and reformation, come in to my aid. exhorting the blind to see, the dead to feel,—the lame My stock of written, and, as I deemed, well-composed to run, the deaf to hear, and my exhortations had tersermons, came at last to a close, in the course of the minated in-nothing. In looking around me, I saw that delivery of which I had contrived to conjure up, from the labours of many ministers, whose talents and acquirethe depths of apathy and listlessness around me, a most ments were by no means of a superior cast, were not only reproachful and regularly returning "yawn." To this acceptable, but highly useful, that their churches were "yawn," however, with the circumstance before alluded well filled, and their hearers delighted with their ministo, I owe my future usefulness as a preacher of the Gos- try. In looking inwards, I could not but feel, that to pel. Such are the means by which good is extracted exhort to obedience, without pointing to the means, from evil, and God's wisdom is manifested even by the was little less than an insult, or an absurdity. I imperversities of our nature. Had this inanifestation of mediately threw aside my pen, my papers, my arguweariness and inattention been one of those silent with- ments, my pathetic addresses; and, with the Bible docdrawings of the under from the upper jaw-accompa- trine of "DIVINE AID" to be sought and to be imnied, as in the instance of a dog, with a half-suppressed parted, ere one movement can be made advantageously guttural note I believe that it might have failed of its in the Christian travel, I reached at once the source of effect; or had it even been one of those ordinary drawls, the evil,-arrested attention,-clothed my pulpit stairs which are immediately succeeded by a snuff, and an with red mantles and grey hairs,-filled the church effort to shake the soul into attention, I might have im- from door to door,-and, as an experimentum crucis, puted it to the weakness of our common nature; but it almost immediately silenced my yawning auditors. was such a yawn as one might be supposed to give, if condemned to wear out a sixty years' imprisonment in a dungeon, so long, so loud, and so rounded off, with a dying cadence of a woe verging on despair," that it

So far my experience goes; and with a word or two of inference, I shall conclude.

The doctrines of the Cross, taken in their broadest and most evangelical sense, are the only doctrines which,

being suited to the exigencies of our nature, will, or can be useful. You may reason, but the people sleepor, if awake, the argument is either misapprehended or soon forgotten. You may make moving appeals to the feelings; but the iron taken from the furnace does not, with greater certainty, harden into steel, than does the natural heart under such temporary and evanescent excitement. You may give new meanings to old words, and discover great critical talent and taste in your disquisitions, but the hard-wrought artizan will not appreciate your labours. Whenever, however, you take up the doctrine of exposition, and hold up to his view a picture of himself, such as he is compelled to recognise, in all his native incapability and deformity, you have a hold of his attention, and through that grasp you may drag him, or, more probably, draw him, from darkness unto light from the power and dominion of sin, to the power and the privileges and the freedom of the sons of God.

There is an advantage, too, in country congregations in particular, in extempore language. The speaker thus, and thus only, identifies himself with his hearers. In proportion as he acts upon them, they act upon him in return. In the act and the attitude of one who is counselling from the heart the hearts around him, the speaker feels an expansiveness of soul, and a facility, a richness, a warmth, and even an elevation of expression, which, in the solitude of his closet, he would never have attained. He feels that he is placed at the helm, and that whilst the ship advances under his control, he himself is borne along in the very act of directing. Extempore language is, of all others, the best suited to a country congregation; its very redundancies and inaccuracies render it so much the fitter vehicle for conveying a lasting impression. The great error of written sermons is, their accuracy and freedom from redundancies and repetitions. "Gutta cavat lapidem." When the same idea is repeated again and again, under various and shifting aspects, as is generally the case in extempore addresses, the hearer's attention is not only arrested, but fired, upon the subject of discussion. In approaching to the edifice, he has various peeps from various openings in the winding avenue. Now the frontway bursts upon his view from the left-now upon the right-now it moves away, and seems to lose itself amidst the trees on the one hand, and now amidst the gardens and the shrubberies on the other, and long ere the visitor has alighted at the portal, his imagination has compassed, and his memory has stored up, the various aspects which the edifice presents. It is no longer to him the naked and unassociated outline of a simple building, but has so mixed and mingled itself with situation and sunshine -with light and shade-with tree, garden, park, and shrubbery, that any one of these associations will instantly recall the whole.

popular addresses, is infinitely more compatible with extempore than with preconceived language. To what does Dr Chalmers owe nine-tenths of his popularity, but to his furious and overwhelming earnestness, to the swelling features, the hoarse intonations,-the convulsive graspings, the onward, upward, sidelong, graceless movements, the all that indicates to every child in the passage, and every gazer in the doorway, that the speaker is completely in earnest,-that, as with the combatants at Thrasymene, even an earthquake would pass under him unnoticed, whilst he is grasping and throttling his subject? But if Chalmers, all powerful as he is, even under the disadvantage of close and pertinacious reading, were to disengage himself from the Bible and the cushion, and to stand forward in the pulpit as he does in public meetings and assemblies, how much would be added to his gigantic stature, and how irresistible would be that earnestness, which was cramped and hampered by no reference to pre-expressed similes and pre-traced characters!

Let every young preacher, then, be an evangelical preacher; and, should his lot be in the country, let him carefully study his text, attune his whole soul to the spirit and importance of his subject, and then, in the faith that utterance will be given, let him utter boldly, earnestly-and he will thus utter successfully the message of God to man. T. G.

THE ENGLISH LADY.
A FRAGMENT.

I HAD gone one evening with my old friend, the Minister of Glenfinnan, to visit some of his parishioners. It was a summer evening, and the breeze swept past, balmy with the odours of the birch trees and the mountain heather. In the midst of that romantic solitude stood a cottage, the tasteful simplicity of which corresponded well with the wild and interesting scenery.

"That cottage," said my friend," was once the residence of no common men. It was in the winter of 17that two brothers came to dwell in it; their names, their rank, were alike a mystery. They called themselves Fitz Clare; but it was understood that such was not their real designation, and the rustic dwellers of the glen knew too little of names or heraldry to have felt interested in the matter. I, however, felt a deep and searching interest; for the bearing of these two brothers was noble and commanding. They wore the Highland dress-they were inseparable-shunned all social intercourse, and sought only the society of each other. When they walked together in our lonely glens, with their black plumes mingling with their blacker hair, they looked as though they had been born to sceptres.

"There came with them a fair and dying girl. The If this illustration apply to extempore addresses in tie which bound her to their fortunes was, like all congeneral, it is peculiarly appropriate in evangelical preach- nected with them, mysterious and unknown. A wife ing. There is a richness and a latitude in gospel she was not; and even though the name of the English doctrine, and gospel imagery, and gospel feeling, pecu- maiden had not differed from that of the brothers, her liarly adapted to amplification and illustration. The southern accents would have told she was the native of naked and definite virtues and vices present to the eye another land, whilst the Fitz Clares were evidently of of the orator a sharp and a distinct outline. There is Scottish birth. And yet the breath of censure could not no blending or shading-no hovering indistinctness on have lighted on the pure and gentle creature; and when she the confines of each; but the Mount and the Temple wandered among our woods, in her melancholy beauty, of Zion are softened and sublimed on the eye, by the the rustic turned aside from his path that he might not descending radiance of unseen divinity. It is impossible disturb the English lady. Every Sabbath she came, to contemplate them without feeling that all the sur-leaning on the arm of the elder Fitz Clare, and humbly rounding landscape is hallowed by their presence, and that the points from which they may be viewed, and the lights under which they may be seen, are numerous, varied, and striking. It is not possible to touch a string in the mighty harp of Revelation which does not awaken another and another-till the whole instrument be attuned into harmony and corroborative intonation. Earnestness, too, that first, second, and third thing in all

seated herself in the house of God. I never shall forget her, as she sat there in her pale loveliness, with her calm eyes raised to the heaven to which she was hastening. Sometimes I thought, when I saw her of a Sab. bath morning, that a healthier bloom was beginning to glow upon her cheek. Alas! that bloom was but the fearful brightness of disease. Summer passed away, and autumn came; and not so fast did the yellow leaves

fade upon the branches, as faded the face of the fair Eng. lish girl.

"At last, I was one evening called hurriedly to the cottage of the strangers, and I was led to the chamber of the lady. She lay upon a couch, supported by pillows; and it was evident that the hand of death was heavy upon her. The elder of the brothers leaned against the bed; his face was hidden by his hands, and by the dark masses of his black and disordered hair; but the convulsive groans that shook his giant strength betrayed the agony of his sorrow. The younger brother, too, was in the room, but his grief was quieter and more composed. 'You must now leave me,' said the dying sufferer, extending to each of the young men a fair pale hand. The younger pressed his lips often and fondly on that little hand, but the elder threw himself passionately upon You the couch, and flooded her face with his tears. must go, my beloved,' she softly whispered, else time will not be allowed me to reveal'.

"Yes! yes!' interrupted the young man, it must be so indeed;' and imprinting one more frantic kiss upon her pale brow, he rushed from the apartment.

"The lady turned her eyes after him with a long and eager gaze; then, with a strong effort, raised herself upon the pillow, and looked wistfully upon my face, as though she would fain have made me the hearer of some melan

With eyes raining tears, in my boyhood I parted
From friends now no more.

Their seats are all empty-it were vain to deplore them;

Yet I wish that dark fate for one hour would restore them,

Until from his lips whom those kind ones loved dearly, They heard his heart's grief that he ever severely Their fond bosoms pain'd. choly tale. The struggle was vain-no sound passed That wish is opposed by the justice of Heaven ;forth from her dying lips-the darkness of death was al-Tis right man should suffer before he's forgiven; ready on her brow, and her sweet eye had become glazed And O! never dagger cut keener or deeper, and heavy. Once I thought I heard her murmur, My babe-my fair darling.' But I know not; for the sounds Than useless regret o'er the poor silent sleeper were low and broken. I bent more closely over her; but We've injured and loved ! it was too late, her lips moved no longer, and ere II see through the lattice the stars dimly gleamingcould leave her side, she was a corpse. Blest beacons of hope o'er a troubled sea beamingI turn from their light to the being that made them, And pray that the beauty in which he array'd them May one day be mine!

"When I told the melancholy event to the two brothers, the younger bent his head, and said, It is the

will of God;' but the elder fell down in a fit, like a weak woman, at my side. We placed him on a couch, and I opened a vein,and then left him to his brother's care. "When I next saw the strangers, it was at the burial of the fair creature they had lost. The brow of the elder brother had assumed an air of stern and hopeless desolation; and when he heard the earth rattle on the coffin, the blood gushed from his mouth and nostrils. On the following morning they had left the glen; and now, the only remembrance of those mysterious people is the green grave of the English lady.' GENEVIEVE.

ORIGINAL POETRY.

THOUGHTS AT MIDNIGHT.

66

By William Kennedy, Author of " Fitful Fancies," &c.
Arthis hour, while the toil-worn husbandman sleepeth-
While Guilt wildly revels, and Woe darkly weepeth-
In my pale midnight watch would I humbly address
thee,

Beseech thy forgiveness, and fervidly bless thee,
My father!-My God!

My years are not many-my sins without number
I have walk'd in a dream, now I wake from my slumber,
And look on the part in the past which I've borne,
As a travel-soil'd garment in weariness worn,
And thrown off at eve.

How happy are they who can find, in reflection,
No thought that cries, Shame! no abhorr'd recollection;
Whose days shed the light of tranquillity round them,
To cheer and support when the world has bound them
With soul-galling chains.

never

Thou know'st-O unknown!—whom to name can we
Who art what thou art-hast been still-shalt be ever-
Thou know'st that thy creature, now humbled before thee,
With his weak human sense doth sincerely adore thee-
Then hear him!-O hear!

O hear him!-now hear him, while the fire of his spirit
Is undimm'd by the curse all are born to inherit!
And grant that, unmoved by life's joy or life's sorrow,
Man's smile or man's frown, he may act on the morrow
The thoughts of to-night.

I ask not for riches-for power I care not-
To win them as most mortals win them, I dare not-
And the fame that I covet, I'll never here know it-
I may not deserve it-you cannot bestow it,
Blind brothers of clay!

But guide me, O God! in a course still improving!
As this orb round the sun, in thy light always moving;
And let nought unholy arise to conceal thee
From him who, whenever he ceases to feel thee,
Contentment hath none.

May my life-time glide on as these night-sands are going,
O my soul, be thy waters still pure as they now are!
To eternity's ocean, a quiet stream flowing;
Still bless'd-lest they wander-O Lord! with thy
power

To turn them to thee!

Then I'll grasp thy cold hand, mystic Death! as the hoary
High-priest of a temple with clouds on its glory;
And though in the portal the pilgrim may falter,
He'll forward with joy when he thinks of the altar
Bright burning within!

Mr Sheridan Knowles' "Alfred" is still in the hands of the Com-spirit and feeling of Old England. Our national poetry, too, is mittee of Drury Lane, who paid him, some time ago, three hundred guineas for the MS., which the present lessee refuses to give The Management of Covent Garden have expressed their willingness to pay the sum; but this offer the Drury Lane Committee have declined.

MURRAY'S CONCERT.-We were glad to perceive that Mr Murray's Concert-room, on Tuesday evening last, was filled to overflowing. As a violinist, Mr Murray is not more distinguished for delicacy and expression, than for fire and force of execution. Compositions which seem to have been intended to baffle all human fiddle-sticks are to him a mere pastime, and Mayseder or Bal-houses.-Kean has been performing in Cork. We do wonder liot present to him no greater difficulties than he would find in a Scotch strathspey or Irish jig. We mentioned last Saturday that Miss Inverarity was to sing for the first time in public at this concert. We were much pleased with her debut; she has a rich and powerful voice, with which, after a little more cultivation and study, she may accomplish great things.

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