the same time, to keep the native characteristics of one's life intact-here was an incongruous enterprise indeed for the meridian of Wall-street, and a 'fancy' which its stolid bulls and bears would fail to see the value of.

If men must labor, thought I, how much better to labor at that which developed their moral and intellectual capacities, and which, at the same time, brought with it the necessaries of life. It appeared a feasible plan, and indeed a duty, for some at least, thus to make the support of existence subsidiary to its end. Let some men, for instance, devote themselves to Science, others to Art, others to Literature, others to Philosophy, for what is strongly congenial with a man is the Call of Nature to him, and, therefore, most literally his proper vocation.

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But yet I knew of a grander direction still which a mind might take; for in it flowed the uses and fascination of all these, and infinitely more besides. It was grand, moreover, because it called into being the purest energies of the soul, and therefore drew sublimely near the great original Vocation of the whole human race. be sure it may be said of all men that they are required to follow it, and to sympathize earnestly with its modes of unfolding their inmost being; but, strictly speaking, it is an occupation only to that favored few who would devote to it exclusively every faculty of their nature.

Of all pursuits this was to me the most glorious, and, while standing down among those dingy haunts of traffic, it seemed as if I beheld religion afar off, opening wide her everlasting gates as into an Elysium of Thought; and I knew that within its meditative walks, winding into mysteries deeper than any labyrinth, the clangor and tumult of the mercenaries around me were never heard. For religion then, as now, appeared to me not as the exponent only of a single fervor of the heart, but of that broad, rich conception of life, and that lofty recognition of its supernatural circumstances, without which no man has a true manhood nor even common sense. But it is not my object now to advocate this idea. Suffice it, that had only literature and philosophy been the enchanted garden for me, I should have left Wall-street just as I did.

Some will call it religion that drew the graphic contrast of the natural and the artificial before my mind-some will call it philosophy. Be that as it may, religion, in its largest sense, has always appeared to me the divinest philosophy, and philosophy, carried out, but the synonym of re

ligion. They both call upon man to maintain his manhood by giving simplicity, earnestness, and mental dignity to his nature. They both require the clearest vision of the true state of things on earth, and demand a course of action in accordance with it. I will not, even at the risk of digressing too far, omit this mention of the sublime authority to which I was indebted for a wisdom that is sometimes greater in children than in men.

Thus with new purposes did I prepare to launch again upon the sea of life—well knowing it to be not altogether a commercial sea-and I therefore unworshipped the gilded machinery of finance, and started upon the voyage of endeavor without a curse as a propeller; and although perhaps progressive Young Theology, built after the spirit of the age, may run the risk of being blown about by every wind of doctrine, yet I rely, without much fear, upon that inspiration which, while it bloweth where it listeth, one cannot tell whence it cometh, nor whither it goeth.

But my metaphor of the sea has carried me all abroad. Not six years ago I bade farewell to Wall-street, and saw its gates, not very heavenly, and yet "on golden hinges turning," close upon me with a most bounding sense of relief. I was out of prison. What a field of effort was before me! Youth must be spared its ecstasies, and be pardoned for them too.

How liberal was to be the occupation of my future life! To acquire knowledge instead of wealth, to speculate philosophically, and not financially, to spend my time in the pursuit of the Good, the Beautiful and the True, and not in dealing with Shylock, depreciating "fancies." and detecting counterfeits. I really must be excused if I grow enthusiastic over the glory of my expectations, and estimate as beyond all money and all price, the property in which I have invested my little all of head and heart. Yet, although I will not, cannot, put it up to desecration by offering it for sale, most gladly will I "share and share alike" with any free and natural spirit, all the first fruits of its discovery and possession. First fruits-for these, as yet, are all that I have garnered-but to have garnered even these, let me say, confers a greater title to this Real Estate than all preliminary talk and chaffering with time and opportunity.

Real Estate did I call it? Yes, well worthy is it of the name. Real and ideal, all in one-no less than the broad domain of the landlord of the universe

offered in fief for ever to the tenure of the intellect. Estate, real as the sun which shines upon it; real as the vital influences which ascend from earth's centre to beautify it. Estate, real in its loveliness, real in its truth, real in its excellence. An estate limitless as the universe, and in perpetual bloom with its opening secrets; of whose abundance are the ideal glories of nature; and whose returns are of knowledge, a good measure, pressed down and running over.

I have often been at a loss for some illustration, so vividly descriptive that I might convey at once my whole impression of life in Wall-street, as compared with the life above it, and I was so fortunate as to have one occur to me the other day, during my accidental visit. The illustration was so striking, and all the circumstances of finding it so full of what I might call mental incident, that I shall always look back upon that contemplative stroll with peculiar pleasure.

As I again stood there and looked around me, I felt the same influence upon my imagination which I had felt years ago, when I surveyed the magnitude, almost majesty of its interests, so fitly represented by those ornate and massive structures erected, if not exactly like the tower of Babel to reach heaven, certainly to overreach earth. And here too were the builders thereof, symbolizing a diversity of operations by a confusion of tongues, breaking in rudely upon the amenities of life, bearlike, trampling down its best affections, and, bull-like, tossing up its baser tendencies. Yes, here I saw the builders thereof, "mighty men, and men of renown," who, taking too anxious thought for the morrow, were rearing high upon this modern Shinar a refuge of immeasurable folly, and stirring up, with the infatuation, the dialects of the whole earth.

But, one step out of Wall-street, and I stood at the base of a tower, which, unlike that upon the banks of the Euphrates, held aloft the golden sceptre of the Messiah, and pointed to an asylum that was unattainable by human effort alone. I went up its spiral stairway, and in a few moments stood upon this pinnacle of the temple, and what a change was here! What a new aspect had every thing assumed! All around me I beheld the unintercepted dip of the horizon. The infinite was above my head, and the sun blazed out from its blue depths upon river and bay. Four cities lay clustered together beneath me, and their rich circumference of hill and dale seemed to shrink VOL. IV.-3

from before their hot and dingy contact.

Wall-street lay stretched out from my very feet like a stony defile to the river, and there I stood fifty times taller than my fellow-men within it. To all intents and purposes I was a Colossus. Had my form been in the proportion of my vision, like the image at Rhodes, I could have crossed the Narrows at a stride, and had whole navies ride between my feet. As I looked down upon the place which I had but just quitted, I seemned to allegorize the conflicting states my mind had been in a few years before. Just now, as then, I had been overshadowed by its stupendous reality, and nearly overcome by its magnificent appeal to the popular notion of glory and importance. Just now, as then, I had begun to doubt whether I could be right in the theory of life I cherished, when I saw thousands of better judgment than I, putting to the most practical test a theory which I deemed altogether counterfeit and worthless. Where I now stood I could repeat the saying, with absolute conviction of its truth, "What shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue,"-but, while down there the granite Exchange, despite of me, would loom out the most substantial shadow I ever saw; the Custom-house of these United States would not imitate its model, the ancient Parthenon, so far as to crumble into ruins; the heavy rows of Institutions, corporate and rock-ribbed, refused to shake and tumble before their time; nor would the glistening fortunes of the rich, like the golden coins in the Arabian tale, appal their owners by turning into leaves.

So it was. I really found it difficult to summon impudence enough to face out my own matured convictions, before such an array of logic in its corporate and architectural cogency, and, at the same time, keep the peace with myself for not being a modest man. But up there in the spire of Trinity, the aspect of it all was altered, and I now stood upon my vantageground, and could gain the senses round to my side of the argument. As I looked upon those cities lying below in the dim distance, like models of wood made strangely accurate, how every thing in heaven and earth seemed to assume their relative consequence! How dwindled to nothing were edifices and men in the foreshortening perspective of a vertical glance !

I had around me the natural and the artificial; but just beneath me the natural had been sepulchred by the arti

ficial. Not a "green thing" was to be seen; all was entombed beneath slabs of stone, and the weight of vaulted structures. But over that level floor, and clustering around those piles of masonry, were "creeping things innumerable," yea, shoals of human beings scarcely more than a span long, blackening the pavement like ants in the sunshine, running in and out among the openings of that stonework, and swarming like bees at the corners thereof.

There it all was: the miniature of houses and the abbreviature of men. The puny dray-horse dragged along painfully his tiny load; the toy carriage rolled in Liliputian stateliness for its puffed-up pigmy owner; the noisy little stage trundled with its "twelve inside" over a pavement as smooth as an oil-cloth; and, dotting all o'er this " gray and melancholy waste," were crowds of busy men, and boys, that busy undergrowth, creeping swiftly from the tables of the moneychangers to the seats of them who sold stocks. It was a curious sight to behold -the Wall-street of Liliput, and more still for me, when probably with something of the same feeling as Gulliver after he was let loose, I marvelled greatly how I could really have been tied down there by any complication of interests so slender, and how the very hairs of my head should have been numbered, and confined by no weightier matters than dollars and cents.

But think not that it was only a whimsical conceit that made me a Gulliver, standing up there and confounding my personality with two hundred and eighty feet of Gothic architecture. My physical altitude was all factitious I'll admit; but I will never cease to assert the moral proportion to the scene below, of which . I, or any one else, might have stood the representative. On an allegory, therefore, did I base all my pretensions to the colossal. Beneath the outlines of that sacred tower I found it easy to fill out the mental and moral stature of a man; and, in the belittled shapes of fussy life below, to symbolize the comparative magnitude of operations, only apparently large.

I did no more than this, then. I tried to imagine myself in some sort of proportion with the gigantic theory upon which man was formed by his Creator, and after the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christian common sense, to look out upon life in its greatness, and in its little

ness.

From such a height I saw life in its greatness, stretching away, like some vast scenery, till its background was lost be

hind the stars. I could hear the deep melodies of that immensity rolling heavily along its mystic distances, and throbbing upon the very air I breathed. The whole atmosphere appeared changed with a mighty response to an invisible existence beyond. The very planet itself, as if instinct with a consciousness of infinite emotion, seemed to career beneath me like a steed. I saw immortals, born of mystery, move on mysteriously, and ascend to greater mystery still. I saw every plunge of a new life into the world to be the signal for eternal relations to form, and circle away from each man, like rippling zones upon an illimitable sea.

And when I drew nearer, and looked within this august life, its glory swelled out even its minutiae into magnificence. I saw affections, which, developed, would have girdled the globe with a millennium. I saw powers to which only an outraged law and not the Almighty had said"Thus far shalt thou go, and no farther." I saw no less than the tides of the eternal deep surging unperceived beneath every soul, as the ocean roars, unheard, along the undiscovered archways of the earth. Thus did I behold a divinity stirring through, and energizing all things; and subtle, sccret and sacred agencies pervading the whole sphere of human existence. Such was its scenery.

I glanced from this upon the plateau of Wall-street, and estimated in its turn that little struggle and pigmy endeavor. The crowds ebbed and flowed with the fluctuations of the market. In the dwarfish pursuit one man looked like every other man. At that distance I saw not the wrinkle of care, nor the exulting mien of triumphant recklessness. I detected not the cheat in his nefarious attempt, nor appreciated the honesty that would not lend upon usury. All was monotonous similarity, and suggestive of but one idea, that there the better nature of man had but a stinted growth, raising its bloomless head amid the sterile influences of the market-place; where the light of Divinity could no more awaken its grander sympathies, than the pattering rain, or the blessed sun could fertilize the earth whilst those ponderous buildings did crowd upon it. There I saw man a defaulter to his nobler impulses and desires; actuated by no more than the instinct of the bee or the ant to hoard up additions to his substance; and, like the little dweller of the molehill, blind to the greatness of any thing which transcended the minor interests of his state.

So did I see illustrated one of the most

melancholy facts of our condition. The necessity of man compels him to labor, and then its fruits become the only sources of his happiness. Thus does his nature, swathed in infancy by the bandages of an habitual routine, grow not into the natural stature of a man-belittled by being given to little things-strong only in the ratio of its petty obstacles, and dwarfishly content with the cramped felicities of a moneyed life.

Rush on then, thou moral Liliput! Whirl on with puny violence, thou microcosm of abbreviated men! and let the little eddying of gains and losses agitate your dwindled hearts as if it were a whirlpool of annihilation. Live, act, suffer, die, under the contractility of your selfish emotions-only hope for as shrunken a destiny hereafter, as the preparation for it has been scantling. A fell spirit has you in his power; and Mammon, like a wizard, has waved his wand over you, and doomed you alike to littleness and inconsequence!

In reading what I have now written, some one may say that I have confounded the good with the evil in this unqualified denunciation; and that unlike my prototype, Quinbus Flestrin, the man-mountain. I have not in my perambulations over this moral Liliput, taken any precaution about my skirts; and therefore, with many a frail absurdity which I may have indirectly knocked in pieces, and many a humbug which my unwary gait has crushed, I have also passed too sweepingly over Labor itself, and so tarnished the glory of commerce, and shaken the real magnificence of its results. Good friend! any amount of moral altitude will never lessen the nobility of labor, when it is the agent of progress, and the right hand of beneficence. It is only individuals, and the tendency in each individual to contract himself to one idea, that I have sought to satirize.

And yet I am far from being unaware

that there are very many doing business in Wall-street, who, in their inmost hearts feel a contempt for its sordid dreams, and lament that dire necessity drives them into bondage. Honor be to them all! But, nevertheless, let them not inordinately magnify themselves, because their hearts are lifted higher than their heads. Every one knows that to succeed at all in any pursuit, an attention must be paid to it which is exclusive of every thing else for the time being. And so down there, all higher considerations must suffer an eclipse during the transit of the bank hours. It matters not then how a man feels before and after these moments of a circumscribed consciousness, it is a fact very plainly discernible, that the temporary inconvenience of having this liliputian soul must be submitted to, before he can thread his way with any dexterity among the low-arched intricacies of trade.

It is a fanciful idea that occurs to me; but as it seems altogether orthodox, I will suggest it by way of obviating all difficulties of this double dealing with one's self. To a man, urged by need and not by greed, into the commercial districts, I say: "Go to now. Take upon thyself this small degree by a sort of voluntary metamorphosis. Anticipate the kindly offices of the Devil, by calling upon thy better genius only, to change thee for the nouce into the epitome of thy former self. Having by this procedure 'dwindled by degrees and grown beautifully less,' devote to thy business all that is left of thee, viz.-an insignificance, only factitiously concealed. But when the friendly enchantment hath ended with the going down of the sun, step thee out of the magic circle and wend thy way homeward, dilating majestically out of thy metempsychosis into the rarer atmosphere of thy more natural humanity. Then mayest thou rejoice as a giant to run thy course."