It is a trite remark, that a man was not made for himself alone; and this, with the qualification, is true, but not otherwise. It is unquestionably true, that man was made to enjoy himself. Considered in himself, and in relation to himself, and to his fellows, we may say, indeed, that this is the supreme end of his being. We do not forget, we never forget, that all things are for the Great First Cause, in whom we live, and move, and have our being. But this is another aspect of the case. The moving principle of that Infinite One is goodness, and when his awful voice sounds through the untenanted void and says, "Let there be," where there was not before, it is that he may enliven the solitude with beings capable of happiness, break the dread silence of chaos by the sounds of communicated joy, and dissipate the darkness of night by the light of his love. Man was made to be happy-happy in himself and for himself—and if it has been wisely ordained that he shall labor for the happiness of others also, it is only because that he thus more effectually and fully enjoys his own being. The general happiness, indeed, depends upon, and is in fact made up of, that of the individuals; and therefore, look at it in any way we can, it is evident that each one has a right, an inalienable and an indefeasible right, to be happy; yea, that it is his supreme duty to be happy. But what is happiness? With whom does it dwell? Where is it to be found on earth?

"O happiness! our being's end and aim!

Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! whate'er thy name :
That something still which prompts th' eternal sigh,

For which we bear to live, or dare to die;
Which still so near us, yet beyond us lies,
O'erlook'd, seen double, by the fool and wise;
Plant of celestial seed! if dropp'd below,

Say, in what mortal soil thou deign'st to grow."

The question is important, and not a few have attempted to answer it. Happiness, say some philosophers, is agreeable sensation; but this is too gross a definition-too restricted in its comprehension. Is there no pleasure in memory, in imagination, in hope? None in devotion, in the high and lofty contemplation of the cultivated intellect? And are these sensations? No. The idea is too material and gross, and we mnst reject it. Happiness," says Dr. Johnson, "is the multiplication of agreeable consciousness," and though we do not see the exact propriety of the term multiplication, which is merely a word of number, we like the definition better, and shall adopt it as suited to my present argument. Still, if any one would look more profoundly into this question, and desires to hear a greater than these, we refer him to that unequalled dissertation on the chief good, by the Hebrew sage, where he can "learn the end of the whole matter."

Meantime, we shall adopt the definition of Johnson, and proceed to inquire by what means we may attain to this multiplication of agreeable consciousness, which he declares to be happiness. Let us premise, however, that consciousness, considered as a faculty or power, is that essential quality of the mind by which it is able to know its own sensations and actions; or, considered in its manifestations, it is the knowledge of our sensations and mental actions. This definition, therefore, comprehends all that is included in the sensational theory, and also those pleasures of the mind which are either original with itself or the reviviscence of its past experience. The world without, then, and the world within, may both subserve this great and desirable end; but to reap the full harvest of

enjoyment which either may afford, we must sharpen the instrument with which we are to operate. This instrument is the mind itself, and we are thus led to the conculsion, that our happiness is dependent on mental culture.

The health of the mind, important as it is-yea, absolutely essential as it is to the enjoyment of life-is, notwithstanding, almost altogether overlooked in the great and arduous struggles with which mankind are so eagerly and restlessly pursuing the objects of their desire. Like the unfortunate woman, who had spent all her substance upon the doctors, we will make any sacrifice for the health of our bodies; in our fond anxiety to be healed, we will swallow down tbe nostrums of any, even the most visionary or knavish compounder-allopathy, homeopathy, and hydropathy-no matter what, much or little, wet or dry, hot or cold; the greater the extreme, and more marvellous the theory, so much the better. The virtue of faith is in the inverse ratio of the evidence upon which it rests, and directly as the absurdity of the thing believed! And so it happens that even men, wise in other matters, will betake themselves to a wet sheet or a sitz bath for every malady; while others, equally wise, place equal if not greater confidence in the tenth or twentieth solution of the homeopathist, when a little arithmetic would teach them that all the water which flows down the Ohio in a life time, would not suffice to dissolve and equally dilute a single grain of the specific. Such is the anxiety which men manifest for the health of their bodies: yet it is not for me to say a word against the importance of physical health, that I thus advert to the follies of this quack-loving age. Far from it. Health of the body is essential to the full enjoyment of one's self. Among the many solutions given by the ancients to the question about the summum bonum, not among the least popular declared it to consist in the mens sana in sano corpore; and so intimately connected are these two, body and soul, that it is difficult to secure the health of either without consulting that of both. Let us take care, good care, of our bodies; but let us remember, at the same time, to take care of quackery also. Did I conceive it necessary, so highly do I value the importance of bodily health, that I would pause a moment to enforce the great truth, that we cannot act up to the full measure of duty to ourselves and to society, without a most especial regard to our bodily comforts. But it is not necessary. The body, in this respect, is its own sufficient advocate. It cries out, with a complaint that cannot be disregarded, whenever it feels a want. But it must appeal to the mind for relief. It does not itself suggest nor choose the remedy. This is the province and duty of the mind.

These observations lead us to the importance of studying our animal constitution, and of informing ourselves with respect to the laws of our physical being the economy and means of bodily health. Every one should, to a certain extent, make himself acquainted with the general laws of physiology, and so far study the science of medicine as to enable him to guard against the impostures of patented quackery. By knowing the laws of his system, he may often avoid those disagreeable, and sometimes fatal consequences, which result from their violation; and by an easily attainable general knowledge of therapeutics, he will be admonished against those mysterious mixtures of modern days, which profess a kind of medicinal omnipotence, and which come knocking at the door of every diseased stomach with a frequency and importunity that scarcely a healthy one can resist. Let the body be clean, neatly attired, moderately and judiciously fed, and trained into the graces of a courteous and civil politeness. Slovenly and intemperate habits injure the mind, destroy the susceptibility of our souls for the more refined and pure enjoyments, and beget a feeling of rudeness and self-abasement unfavorable to the noble manifestations of humanity. At the same time, a disregard for the refining courtesies of civilized life is engendered. The man becomes a brute-his feelings and sentiments are grovelling and low-his language is vulgar and coarse, and his whole bearing, in keeping with his personal filthiness, is offensive and disgusting. Not only do loathsome diseases creep forth under the encouragement of such personal neglect, but the mind, by a natural sympathy, partakes of the pollution, and the creature made for high ends, for pure enjoyment, and endowed with ennobling powers, becomes lower than the reptile under his feet; more foul than the slime which he smears

over his track, and as dead to all the elevating motives which society and religion hold out to the virtuous and the good, as the merest animal, ungifted with the god-like attribute of a moral nature.

Let it not be supposed, however, that I advocate any thing like foppery, fantastic fashion, or gaudy dress-the tripping step or the primped bow of the fashionable drawing-room-that I would have young men or old, to spend more time on their hair than their hearts, on their wiskers than their understandings, or wish to see them going forth anointed with hog's lard, or redolent with perfumes borrowed from the stores of the musk. This is another extreme, equally unfavorable to the proper culture and development of the mind, and, therefore, equally to be deprecated. The proper medium is attainable, and it is it which I would recommend. Sobriety without ascetic abstinence-neatness without extravagance-politeness without affectation—and gentility without pride. These all are within the reach of all, and constitute a man, apart from wealth or station, the true gentleman.

A full and logical discussion of my subject would require an analysis of the powers of the mind; but this we have not time to enter into, nor does it seem fitting, on such an occasion. We can do no more than point out the importance, and suggest some means of improving certain powers, which appear to be most largely and constantly employed in the science of our daily experience, and the proper culture of which, therefore, seems of indispensable necessity to our happiness. I must, however, digress a moment, to say that I repudiate, with my whole soul, those gross doctrines of materialism which make man, whether professedly or under the disguise of a false but plausible philosophy, nothing more than the passive tool of external forces-a bundle of nerves, or organs, or susceptibilities, with no life or quickening power from within, but the sport and instrument of material influences, operating through the five senses, and producing effects of their own, with as fixed a necessity as that which governs the motions of a steam-engine or a spinning-jenny. Nor does it help the theory, that it can be presented and illustrated by more pleasing and poetic comparisons. The philosophy of the doctrine is the same, and the illustration is equally applicable, whether it be drawn from the heavy and cumbrous motions of a road waggon, moving whithersoever it is dragged by the forces applied to it, or from the soft and mellifluous strains of the Eolean harp, breathing respsonsive to the kissing breeze, or swelling its wild monotony under the ruder stroke of the angry storm spirit. In the latter case, the imagination is fascinated by a pleasing analogy, and under its charm the judgment is led captive by the invisible nature of the agent, so as to make us feel for a moment that this instrument was self-moved, giving forth its wild and impulsive strains at its own pleasure, and like the swan or the nightingale, but expressing its own emotions, melancholy or sad, for its own enjoyment or relief. But when we shake off this delusive charm, and apply the critic of the pure reason, how soon do we discover the gross materialism which lies at the bottom of the analogy-material strings and material air, a chord of cat-gut vibrating mechanically under the fingers of the breeze, and capable of being reduced, in all its mysterious motions and harmonies, to the fixed and most rigid laws of mathematical analysis and determination. And is such the human mind? Are the laws of that sublimer part which we deem immortal, and which we fondly believe shall survive all changes of organization and decay, to be reduced to the cold formulæ of mathematics; and our refined distinctions between virtue and vice, religion and infidelity, to be nothing more than questions of plus or minus—the necessary results of certain brain motions, executed by the pressure of some outward material upon the nervous extensions of that tabernacle of thought? Are all the lofty inspirations of genius, the wonderful creations of the imagination, and the holy affections of religion, not the work of the mind operating under the self-determining and the controling will, but simply the accidental products of an external agent-which is itself, in fact, no agenthaving neither life nor intelligence, volition nor power of locomotion? Has it been the cunning management of change, working upon our nerves, that has prompted us, without any will of our own, to meet here upon this present occasion; and are these observations which I am now making against this theory,

really produced in accordance with it, and all that I am saying, and you are thinking, but motions, or extensions, or degrees of velocity in the nervous system, produced by the fingers of the breeze, the fluctuations of temperature, or the varying intensity of the luminefous ether? Strangely narrow, indeed, is the doctrine of this school.

"The metaphysics but a puppet motion

That goes with screws, the notion of a notion;
The copy of a copy, and lame draught
Unnaturally taken from a thought:
That counterfeits all pantomimic tricks,
And turns the eyes like an old crucifix;
That counter changes whatsoe'er it calls
B' another name, and makes it true or false;
Turns truth to falsehood, falsehood into truth,

By virtue of the Babylonian's tocth."

But I fear, despite my intention, my subject is leading me into the mazes of metaphysics, and we shall not, therefore, prosecute the discussion further than to say, that we regard all moral responsibility, as well as all hope of intellectual or moral improvement, as resting for its ground truth upon the great proposition that man is gifted by his Creator with an independent and self-determining power of control, by which he can command, direct, suspend, or intensify his mental, as well as his bodily action, and thus choose, for good or for evil, the path of his own destiny.

Assuming, then, that we have this power, allow me to fix your attention for a short time upon the importance and utility of cultivating some of the more general faculties with which we have been so highly gifted. Our more immediate enjoyments may spring from social intercourse, the holy communion of conjugal hearts-from contemplating the beauties of nature-from studying and unfolding the laws of the universe about us-from perusing the productions of the great and gifted minds of the present and the past-from meditation and reflectionand last, though not least, from the consciousness of having contributed to the happiness and perfection of others, either individually or socially. These enjoyments have, of course, their appropriate faculties, but it would be out of place to attempt their analysis here; and we shall, therefore, treat of them rather in the concrete than the abstract, and look at them rather through their modes of combined action than otherwise.

The social feeling lies at the foundation of society or political organization, though it may be well doubted whether any thing more than the patriarchal form of government can have sprung immediately from it, as the sphere of its influence is necessarily restricted to the circle of personal acquaintance and intercourse. Large political organizations arise, doubtless, from the operation of other influences, which we shall not now discuss. But as a source of personal and individual enjoyment, the social feelings must be ranked among the most fruitful of our faculties for happiness. No one can long enjoy himself alone. His soul hungers for communion. If it is not found, it grows sick and withers under the shadows of a misanthropic gloom. Its powers, moral and intellectual, lie dormant, like the germ on which the rains and the sunshine never fall, and a corroding mildew settles on it, in its loneliness, and blights it for ever. It is, in the very nature of our constitution, impossible that we can either be happy or grow better, isolated from our fellows; and nothing can be more cruel or philosophically unwise, than those systems of reforming criminals by subjecting them to the horrors of solitary confinement. Tears of regret must be mingled with the sunshine of hope, before the heart can be made to melt with true repentance; but when you shut a bad heart up by itself, with no good example before it, with no voice of affection encouraging it to hope, and no better friend to lend his strength to help him out of his fall, what can we expect but recklessness or despair? Dark and stormy passions, pent up in solitude, vent themselves upon the bosom in which they are nursed, and their miserable existence is not unfrequently terminated by the dreadful alternative of self-murder!

How important, then, is society-not that public, promiscuous intercourse which we have with the throngs of human beings that jostle us in the streets and thoroughfares of the world, but that intimate, close, unreserved interchange of heart with hearts congenial, which the Latins called amacitia, and which we translate amity or friendship. In the language of the renowned Cicero, "Life would be utterly lifeless,' as old Ennius expresses it, without a friend on whose kindness and fidelity one might confidently repose. Can there be a more real complacency, indeed, than to lay open to another the most secret thoughts of one's heart, with the same confidence and security as if they were still concealed in his own? Would not the fruits of prosperity lose much of their relish, were there none who equally rejoiced with the possessor in the satisfaction he received from them? And how difficult must it prove to bear up under the pressure of misfortune, unsupported by a generous associate, who more than equally divides their load?" (Cic. de Am.) It is, therefore, a source of happiness which every young man should cultivate, and every old man cherish. But how shall this be done? Many persons seem to think, that to enjoy the blessings of friendship, it is only necessary to frequent the places where men do congregate, to stand upon the street corners and salute the passers-by, or gossip with the idle. Sad mistake! True friendship is that strong affection which takes hold of the person, and interests itself in all his fortunes; which rejoices in his prosperity, mourns over his misfortunes, sympathizes with and soothes his afflictions, mitigates all his sorrows, and brightens every joy. In the moment of triumph and success, it is by to swell the note of praise and to rebuke

"That malignant envy which grows pale

And sickens, even if a friend prevail."

And when the dark clouds of affliction or adversity gather over, it is then most ready to lend its grateful offices, and interpose a shelter from the storm. And what more admirable spectacle can humanity present, than such an exhibition of pure friendship? We are told that when the play of Pacuvius was first presented upon the Roman theatre, there was a general burst of acclamation, and oft repeated, at that scene in which the friendship of Pylades and Orestes is exhibited. The King had determined to put Orestes to death, but was ignorant of his person. When summoned before the tribunal for sentence, his friend Pylades accompanied him, and there "each insists, in order to save the life of his associate, that he himself is the person in question." "The general effect produced on this occasion clearly shows how deeply nature hath impressed on the human heart a sense of moral beauty; since a whole audience thus unanimously conspired in admiring an instance of sublime generosity in another's conduct, which not one of them, perhaps, was capable of exhibiting in his own." (Cic. de Am.)

An affection so noble as this, can only subsist between noble and honorable minds, and the first step, therefore, in the cultivation of friendship, is to make our own hearts lovely. Virtue and honor can alone secure the lasting attachment of which we are speaking, and he who complains that his friends forsake him in the hour of his need, should rather say that he never had, and perhaps never deserved a friend. It was not himself they loved, but the accidents of fortune, and when these left him, their friendship departed with them. If we would enjoy true friendship, we must seek it among the good—the vicious are incapable of its exercise. Hence, we cannot fail to draw another general inference, and that has respect to the selection of our company. As we cannot ourselves merit or secure the friendship of others, without manifesting that beauty of moral nature which alone can excite so virtuous an affection, so neither can others feel for us and cherish this affection, unless their own hearts are trained to the noble exercise of virtue and honor. Trust not your social happiness, then, to any unworthy hands; but as you desire to cultivate virtue and honor in your own heart, take care that they shall rebound in the hearts of your companions. You will thus not only escape the evil influences of bad example, and the sorrow of bitter disappointment from recreant friends, but, at the same time, be secure in the enjoyment of one of the sweetest pleasures that belongs to this earthly life.