Parish, A.D. 1844, occasioned by the wild notions in respect to the rights of (what Mr. Wilbur, so far as concerned the reasoning faculty, always called) the unfairer part of creation, put forth by Miss Parthenia Almira Fitz, are too well known to need more than a passing allusion. It was during these heats, long since happily allayed, that Mr. Wilbur remarked that "the Church had more trouble in dealing with one sheresiarch than with twenty heresiarchs," and that the men's conscia recti, or certainty of being right, was nothing to the women's.

When I once asked his opinion of a poetical composition on which I had expended no little pains, he read it attentively, and then remarked, Unless one's thought pack more neatly in verse than in prose, it is wiser to refrain. Commonplace gains nothing by being translated into rhyme, for it is something which no hocus-pocus can transubstantiate with the real presence of living thought. You entitle your piece, 'My Mother's Grave, and expend four pages of useful paper in detailing your emotions there. But, my dear sir, watering does not improve the quality of ink, even though you should do it with tears. To publish a sorrow to Tom, Dick, and Harry is in some sort to advertise its unreality, for I have observed in my intercourse with the afflicted that the deepest grief instinctively hides its face with its hands and is silent. If your piece were printed, I have no doubt it would be popular, for people like to fancy that they feel inuch better than the trouble of feeling. I would put all poets on oath whether they have striven to say everything they possibly could think of, or to leave out all they could not help saying. In your own case, my worthy young friend, what you have written is merely a deliberate exercise, the gymnastic of sentiment. For your excellent

maternal relative is still alive, and
is to take tea with me this evening,
D. V. Beware of simulated feel-
ing; it is hypocrisy's first cousin ;
it is especially dangerous to a
preacher; for he who says one
day, 'Go to, let me seem to be
pathetic,' may be nearer than he
thinks to saying, 'Go to, let me
seem to be virtuous, or earnest, or
under sorrow for sin.' Depend upon
it, Sappho loved her verses more sin-
cerely than she did Phaon, and Pe-
trarch his sonnets better than
Laura, who was indeed but his
poetical stalking-horse. After you
shall have once heard that muffled
rattle of the clods on the coffin-lid
of an irreparable loss, you will grow
acquainted with a pathos that will
make all elegies hateful. When I
was of your age, I also for a time
mistook my desire to write verses
for an authentic call of my nature in
that direction. But one day as I
was going forth for a walk, with my
head full of an Elegy on the
Death of Flirtilla,' and vainly
groping after a rhyme for lily that
should not be silly or chilly, I saw
my eldest boy Homer busy over
the rain-water hogshead, in that
childish experiment at partheno-
genesis, the changing a horse-hair
into a water-snake. An immersion
of six weeks showed no change in
the obstinate filament. Here was
a stroke of unintended sarcasm.
Had I not been doing in my study
precisely what my boy was doing
out of doors? Had my thoughts
any more chance of coming to life
by being submerged in rhyme than
his hair by soaking in water? I
burned my elegy and took a course
of Edwards on the Will. People
do not make poetry; it is made out
of them by a process for which I do
not find myself fitted. Neverthe-
less, the writing of verses is a good
rhetorical exercitation, as teaching
us what to shun most carefully in
prose. For prose bewitched is like
window-glass with bubbles in it,
distorting what it should show
with pellucid veracity."

It is unwise to insist on doctrinal of a note of hand. It is the adpoints as vital to religion. The vantage of fame that it is always Bread of Life is wholesome and privileged to take the world by the sufficing in itself, but gulped down button, and a thing is weightier with these kick-shaws cooked up for Shakespeare's uttering it by by theologians, it is apt to produce the whole amount of his personality. an indigestion, nay, even at last an incurable dyspepsia of scepticism.

One of the most inexcusable weaknesses of Americans is in signing their names to what are called credentials. But for my interposition, a person who shall be nameless would have taken from this town a recommendation for an office of trust subscribed by the selectmen and all the voters of both parties, ascribing to him as many good qualities as if it had been his tombstone. The excuse was that it would be well for the town to be rid of him, as it would erelong be obliged to maintain him. I would not refuse my name to modest merit, but I would be as cautious as in signing a bond. [I trust I shall be subjected to no imputation of unbecoming vanity, if I mention the fact that Mr. W. indorse my own qualifications_as teacher of the high-school at Pequash Junction. J. H.] When I see a certificate of character with everybody's name to it, I regard it as a letter of introduction from the Devil. Never give a man your name unless you are willing to trust him with your reputation.

There seem nowadays to be two sources of literary inspiration,fulness of mind and emptiness of pocket.

It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient with overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury, while the other may be their ruin.

People are apt to confound mere alertness of mind with attention. The one is but the flying abroad of all the faculties to the open doors and windows at every passing rumour; the other is the concentration of every one of them in a single focus, as in the alchemist over his alembic at the moment of expected projection. Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.

Do not look for the Millennium as imminent. One generation is apt to get all the wear it can out of the cast clothes of the last, and is always sure to use up every paling of the old fence that will hold a nail in building the new.

You suspect a kind of vanity in my genealogical enthusiasm. Perhaps you are right; but it is a universal foible. Where it does not show itself in a personal and private way, it becomes public and gregarious. We flatter ourselves in the Pilgrim Fathers, and the Virginian offshoot of a transported convict swells with the fancy of a I am often struck, especially in cavalier ancestry. Pride of birth, reading Montaigne, with the ob- I have noticed, takes two forms. viousness and familiarity of a great One complacently traces himself writer's thoughts, and the fresh-up to a coronet; another, defiantly, ness they gain because said by him. to a lapstone. The sentiment is The truth is, we mix their greatness precisely the same in both cases, with all they say and give it our only that one is the positive and best attention. Johannes Faber the other the negative pole of it. sic cogitavit, would be no enticing preface to a book, but an accredited Seeing a goat the other day name gives credit like the signature | kneeling in order to graze with less

Thet knows wut's comin', gall or Idees you hev to shove an' haul

An' yit my brains jes' go buzz, buzz, | But I can't hark to wut they're Like bumblebees agin a winder; 'Fore these times come, in all airth's row,

O' love gone heavenward in its | Or up the slippery knob I strain shimmer. An' see a hundred hills like

An' thet world seems so fur from TO THE EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC