MR. BROWNSON is a native of Windsor county | in Vermont. Except that he lost his father while he was an infant I know little of his early life. It is understood however that it was passed in scenes foreign to the pursuits of literature, and that he owes nothing to the culture of the schools. He was at one time a minister of the Presbyterian church, then a Universalist, then a Deist. The sermon preached by Dr. Channing at the ordination of Mr. Farley, in 1828, awakened in his mind a train of thought which led him again to believe himself a Christian, and resume his profession as a preacher. One Abner Kneeland, an infidel of the more vulgar description, had been for some time exciting considerable attention in Boston by harangues against the Christian religion, and Mr. Brownson, who had now outlived this sort of stuff, went to that city to oppose him, with his own experience and reason, and to gather about him such as were troubled with doubts and asking for more certain grounds of religious faith. It is a proof of his success, that the infidel organization was broken up, its press stopped, and its leader compelled to find a new home.

About this time Mr. Brownson became an admirer and a student of the contemporary French philosophers, and introduced himself to the public as a writer by a series of bold and eloquent articles in the Christian Examiner. In 1836 he published a small volume entitled New Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church. In the following year we find that he was minister of a "Society for Christian Union and Progress," some of his discourses before which were printed and had a wide circulation. In 1838 he commenced the Boston Quarterly Review, and in 1840 published Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted, a metaphysical novel, which was intended to be substantially the history of his own religious experience. He has since given to the press many discourses, letters, and other tracts, upon metaphysical, theological, and political subjects, but by far the largest portion of his writings has appeared in the Boston Quarterly

Review. This work he conducted almost single-handed for five years, with a freedom and an energy which gained him a wide reputation. At the close of the volume for 1842 he was induced to merge it in the Democratic Review, published in New York, "on condition of becoming a free and independent contributor to its pages for two years." The character of his articles proved unacceptable to a large portion of the subscribers to that work, and his connection with it ceased before the expiration of the time agreed upon. In the beginning of 1844 he revived his own periodical under the title of Brownson's Quarterly Review, and has ever since continued it, writing himself nearly all its contents. He had modified his politics, and philosophy, and changed his religion; and in the Roman Catholic church, with which he now united himself, he found a new audience, more numerous than any he had before addressed.

When our attention is first engaged by this ardent and earnest schemer, we are caught by the luxuriance of mental production with which his pages appear to be teeming. There is a profusion of speculative suggestion, a prodigality of bright hypothesis, and a seeming energy of logical analysis, which make us believe for the moment that we have met with an inexhaustible storehouse of thought. But when the perusal of one of his papers is ended, we are surprised to observe how little we have appropriated of that which we have read; how slightly our own faculties have been either enriched or strengthened by what they have gone through; to how small an extent the speculations of the author have become assimilated with our mental consciousness. The operations of Mr. Brownson's mind want a relation to definite and settled reason. They lack some pervading principle or quality by which they might be linked to the general sense of We desire to give them a fixity in the field of human interests by determining from what element of nature they take their origin, or in what results of life they propose to terminate. As it is, they seem to be lost in the

men.

infinitude of mental space. His reflective faculties are morbidly susceptible to every suggestion that comes upon the field of their action. He possesses an irritability of intelligence that reacts on every subject with an energy as quick as it is copious. But that common sense, which is the unison of the individual intellect with the general reason of life, the organizing influence which tends to ally particular speculations to the great body of human understanding,-the magnetism of mind by which thought is inclined always to move around the axis of truth—that great, rationalizing power is wanting. The mind of Mr. Brownson displays a preternatural activity. But its action is heated, and the play of the judgment sometimes a little irregular. It is not the energy of health, but the restlessness of fever; he is ever moving onward, because he has lost the ability to remain in repose.

He inquires, not to satisfy reason, but to stimulate speculation; and his processes contemplate, not the establishment of truth, but the generation of theories. He is acute, even to super-subtlety; but is wanting in comprehensiveness of view. He sees far along a narrow line of vision, but the capacity of seeing many different things at the same time, and of embracing in one expanded conception a great compass of considerations,-which is the royal faculty of Understanding, he does not possess. His faculties are intensely "vital in every part;" but want that calmness, that self-balanced composure, that spontaneous tendency to simple, permanent principles, which give to human intelligence an aspect of greatness.

With regard to Mr. Brownson's merits as a cultivator of that philosophy of society which he professes, a candid estimate would probably determine that his own contributions to it amount to nothing: we cannot discover any one element of opinion, any one definite view, any single principle of arrangement or detail, which a future historian will refer to his name as connected with its first appearance in the science. It is indeed a little difficult for minds of that extreme susceptibility which we have noted in Mr. Brownson ever to be original: they are so impressible to the force of others, that they rarely can develope forms from their own reason against surrounding things; they multiply the suggestions of others into a thousand variations, but they do

not invent. Accordingly, through life, he has played the part of a parasite mind, which passes on from system to system, clasping each in succession as a part of itself. Arranged in the order of time, his writings now constitute a sort of Philosophical Almanac, with a new scheme of truth for every day in the year but the explanation is to be found in that absence of genuineness which I have just referred to. It would be impossible to link his former opinions with his present ones, by any connexion, either logical or psychological. No method of reasoning could derive one from the other; and no process of mental experience can be conceived of by which an understanding adapted to originate the former class of views could be matured into a capacity to originate the later class. But in fact neither in one case nor in the other was Mr. Brownson writing his own opinions. He once wrote La Mennais; he afterward wrote Jouffroy; and now he writes Comte. The development of the last phase of his views is more creditable to his judgment than to his candour; for I do not recollect that he has once mentioned the name of an author from whom he has rather compiled than borrowed. Those who are familiar with one of the greatest productions which the intellect of Europe has evolved since the Novum Organon, will not fail to recognise in Mr. Brownson's theories of the organic unity of the human race, the progressive development of society, and its subordination to inherent laws, the necessity of government, the fallacy of obedience to the will of the majority, and many other similar positions, imperfect and confused renderings of those great views that appear in a power so irresistible, an order so majestic, and a precision and certainty so absolute, in the Cours de Philosophie Positive. But in the papers of Mr. Brownson the beautiful conceptions of M. Comte are depraved by the metaphysical propension of a mind incapable of apprehending truth in a purely positive form; in the reproduction, for example, of the French writer's views, in the article on The Community System, the scientific conception of the social unity of the race degenerates into the chimera of Platonic ideas. That method, of which the philosophical character was defined by Bacon, which was first applied to social phenomena by the prophetical sagacity of Vico, and which is illustrated with system

atic extension in the comprehensive expositions of Comte, undoubtedly is the scheme upon which in future times truth will be developed and society arranged: it is to be regretted that its discoveries in politics first became known to American readers in this fragmentary and imperfect manner, curtailed of their fair proportions, marred and defeatured by the confusing dimness of the medium in which they are reflected. Mr. Brownson's mind is essentially an imitative one, and in all its displays shows the stamp of a secondary character.

The style of Mr. Brownson has some good qualities. It is commonplace, without purity, and destitute of any characteristic brilliancy or elegance; but it is natural, direct, and plain. It is that simple and unaffected manner which has the appearance of being formed, not upon any plan, but merely by practice and use. Occasionally his better taste is overcome by the faults of Carlyle, or some other favourite of the hour; but when he uses his own style, it would be difficult to name an author who renders abstruse subjects so familiar, or conducts the most arduous discussions with greater ease.

IMMORTALITY.

FROM CHARLES ELWOOD.

I PASS over several months in which nothing I can bring myself to relate, of much importance occurred. Elizabeth and I met a few times after the interview I have mentioned. She was ever the same pure-minded, affectionate girl; but the view which she had taken of her duty to God, and the struggle which thence ensued between religion and love, surrounded as she was by pious friends, whose zeal for the soul hereafter far outran their knowledge of what would constitute its real wellbeing here, preyed upon her health, and threatened the worst results. From those results I raise not the veil.

One tie alone was left me, one alone bound me to my race and to virtue. My mother, bowed with years and afflictions, still lived, though in a distant part of the country. A letter from a distant relative with whom she resided, informed me that she was very ill, and demanded my presence, as she could not survive many days. I need not say this letter afflicted me. I had not seen my mother for several years; not because I wanted filial affection, but I had rarely been able to do as I would. Poverty is a stern master, and when combined with talent and ambition, often compels us to seem wanting in most of the better and more amiable affections of our nature. I had always loved and reverenced my mother; but her image rose before me now as it never had before. It looked mournfully upon me, and in the eloquence of mute sorrow seemed to upbraid me with neglect, and to tell me that I had failed to prove myself a good son.

I lost no time in complying with my mother's request. I found her still living, but evidently near her last She recognised me, brightened up a moment, thanked me for coming to see her, thanked her God that he had permitted her to look once more upor. the face of her son, her only child, and to God, the God in whom she believed, who had protected her through life, and in whom she had found solace and support under all her trials and sorrows, she commended me, with all the fervour of undoubting piety and the warmth of maternal

love, for time and eternity. The effort exhausted her; she sunk into a sort of lethargy, which in a few hours proved to be the sleep of death.

I watched by the lifeless body; I followed it to its resting-place in the earth; went at twilight and stood by the grave which had closed over it. Do you ask what were my thoughts and feelings?

I was a disbeliever, but I was a man, and had a heart; and not the less a heart because few shared its affections. But the feelings with which professed believers and unbelievers meet death, either for themselves or for others, are very nearly similar. When death comes into the circle of our friends and sunders the cords of affection, it is backward we look, not forward, and we are with the departed as he lives in our memories, not as he may be in our hopes. The hopes nurtured by religion are very consoling when grief exists only in anticipation, or after time has hallowed it; but they have little power in the moment when it actually breaks in upon the soul, and pierces the heart. Besides, there are few people who know how to use their immortality. Death to the great mass of believers as well as of unbelievers comes as the king of terrors, in the shape of a Total Extinction of being. The immortality of the soul is assented to rather than believed, believed rather than lived. And withal it is something so far in the distant future, that till long after the spirit has left the body, we think and speak of the loved ones as no more. Rarely does the believer find that relief in the doctrine of immortality, which he insists on with so much eloquence in his controversy with unbelievers. He might find it, he ought to find it, and one day will; but not till he learns that man is immortal, and not merely is to be immortal.

I lingered several weeks around the grave of my mother, and in the neighbourhood where she had lived. It was the place where I had passed my own childhood and youth. It was the scene of those early associations which become the dearer to us as we leave them the farther behind. I stood where I had sported in the freedom of early childhood; but I stood alone, for no one was there with whom I could speak of its frolics. One feels singularly desolate when he sees only strange faces,

and hears only strange voices in what was the home of his early life.

I returned to the village where I resided when I first introduced myself to my readers. But what was that spot to me now? Nature had done much for it, but nature herself is very much what we make her. There must be beauty in our souls, or we shall see no loveliness in her face; and beauty had died out of my soul. She who might have recalled it to life, and thrown its hues over all the world was but of that I will not speak.

It was now that I really needed the hope of immortality. The world was to me one vast desert, and life was without end or aim. The hope of immortality is not needed to enable us to bear grief, to meet great calamities. These can be, as they have been, met by the atheist with a serene brow and a tranquil pulse. We need not the hope of immortality in order to meet death with composure. The manner in which we meet death depends altogether more on the state of our nerves than the nature of our hopes. But we want it when earth has lost its gloss of novelty, when our hopes have been blasted, our affections withered, and the shortness of life and the vanity of all human pursuits have come home to us, and made us exclaim, "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity;" we want then the hope of immortality to give to life an end, an aim.

We all of us at times feel this want. The infidel feels it early in life. He learns all too soon, what to him is a withering fact, that man does not complete his destiny on earth. Man never completes any thing here. What then shall he do if there be no hereafter? With what courage can I betake myself to my task? I may begin-but the grave lies between me and the completion. Death will come to interrupt my work, and compel me to leave it unfinished. This is more terrible to me than the thought of ceasing to be. I could almost, at least, I think I could-consent to be no more, after I had finished my work, achieved my destiny; but to die before my work is completed, while that destiny is but begun,-this is the death which comes to me indeed as a "King of Terrors."

The hope of another life to be the complement of this, steps in to save us from this death, to give us the courage and the hope to begin. The rough sketch shall hereafter become the finished picture, the artist shall give it the last touch at his easel; the science we had just begun shall be completed, and the incipient destiny shall be achieved. Fear not to begin, thou hast eternity before thee in which to end.

I wanted, at the time of which I speak, this hope. I had no future. I was shut up in this narrow life as in a cage. All for whom I could have lived, laboured, and died, were gone, or worse than gone. I had no end, no aim. My affections were driven back to stagnate and become putrid in my own breast. I had no one to care for. The world was to me as if it were not; and yet a strange restless

ness came over me. I could be still nowhere. I roved listlessly from object to object, my body was carried from place to place, I knew not why, and asked not myself wherefore. And yet change of object, change of scene wrought no change within me. I existed, but did not live. He who has no future, has no life.

THE BIBLE.

FROM THE BOSTON QUARTERLY REVIEW.

I REMEMBER Well the time when the Bible was to me a revolting book, when I could find no meaning in it, and when I could not believe that religious people could honestly regard it as they professed to regard it. Its very style and language were offensive, and if I was called upon to write upon religious topics, I took good care to avoid, as much as possible, the use of its phraseology. But it is not so with me now. Life has developed within me wants which no other book can satisfy. Say nothing now of the divine origin of the Bible; take it merely as an ancient writing which has come down to us, and it is to me a truly wonderful production. I take up the writings of the most admired geniuses of ancient or modern times; I read them, and relish them; and yet there is a depth in my experience they do not fathom. This is much, I say; but I have lived more than is here; I have wants this does not meet; it records only a moiety of my experience. But with the Bible it is not so. Whatever my state, its authors seem to have anticipated it. Whatever anomaly in my experience I note, they seem to have recorded it. What experience these men had, if indeed they spoke from experience! It is well called the Book, for it is the book in which seems to be registered all that the individual or the race ever has lived, or ever can live. It is all here. If I would bow down with sorrow for sin, and pour out my soul in deep contrition for my wanderings, here are the very words I want, and words terribly expressive. If I would break forth in thanksgiving for release from the bonds of iniquity, and shout in exulting strains my forgiveness, here is the hymn already composed, which exactly meets the temper of my mind. Then, again, even the language of our common English version, ridiculed as it often has been, is after all the only language in which I can utter the spiritual facts which are developed within me. I seek to vary the expression, to select what I may regard as an equivalent but more elegant term, and some how or other the soul of the passage escapes, and I find remaining nothing but a lifeless form of words. It does not therefore seem strange to me now, though it once did, the attachment the Christian world has to this venerable Book, nor the tenacity with which they, who speak the English tongue, hold on to our common version, in spite of the defects which criticism justly points out.

LYDIA MARIA FRANCIS, now Mrs. DAVID LEE CHILD, Commenced her literary life with Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times, published in 1824. She had resided several years in Maine, far removed from all literary associations, but was then on a visit to her brother, the Reverend Conyers Francis, minister of the Unitarian church in Watertown, and now of Harvard University. One Sunday noon, soon after her arrival there, she took up a number of the North American Review, and read Doctor Palfrey's article on Yamoyden, in which he eloquently describes the adaptation of early New England history to the purposes of fiction. She had never written a word for the press,never had dreamed of turning author, but the spell was on her, and seizing a pen, before the bell rung for the afternoon meeting she had composed the first chapter of the novel, just as it is printed. When it was shown to her brother, her young ambition was flattered by the exclamation, "But, Maria, did you really write this? do you mean what you say, that it is entirely your own?" The excellent doctor little knew the effect of his words. Her fate was fixed: in six weeks Hobomok was finished. It is a story of the Pilgrim times, and the scene is chiefly in Salem and Plymouth. Among the characters are Lady Arabella Johnson, Governor Endicott, and others known in history. They are very well drawn, and the sketches of manners and scenery are truthful and spirited. But the plot is unnatural, and is not very skilfully managed. There were then, however, very few American books of this sort; Cooper had just begun his brilliant career, and Miss Sedgwick's first novel had been out but two or three weeks; and Hobomok therefore attracted much attention. It was followed, in the next year, by The Rebels, a Tale of the Revolution, which has about the same kind and degree of merit. It is worth mentioning, that the speech of James Otis, in this novel, which is often quoted in school books, and has found its way into histories, as authentic, as well as Whitfield's celebrated sermon, in the same work, was coined entirely by Mrs. Child.

In 1831 she published The Mother's Book, and in 1832 The Girl's Book, two volumes designed to exhibit the reciprocal duties of parent and child, in their several relations to each other, which had a large and well deserved

success.

About the same time, for the Ladies' Family Library, published in Boston, of which she was editor, she wrote Lives of Madame de Staël and Roland, in one volume; Lives of Lady Russel and Madame Guyon, in one volume; Biographies of Good Wives, in one volume; and The History and Condition of Women, in two volumes. These are all interesting and valuable books, exhibiting taste and judgment, but marked by little of the individuality which distinguishes her more original productions.

In 1833 Mrs. Child published The Coronal, a collection of miscellaneous pieces in prose and verse, many of which had before been printed, in the literary annuals; and in the same year her Appeal for that Class of Americans called Africans, which was the first work that appeared in this country in favour of the immediate emancipation of the slaves. It was earnest and able, and was read with deep interest both at home and in Europe. A copy of it falling into the hands of Doctor Channing, who had not before been acquainted with her, he walked from Boston to Roxbury to introduce himself and to thank her for writing it.

In 1835 appeared the most beautiful of her works, Philothea, a romance of Greece in the days of Pericles. It had been four or five years in its progress, "for the practical tendencies of the age, and particularly of the country in which I lived," she says in her preface, "have so continually forced me into the actual, that my mind has seldom obtained freedom to rise into the ideal." She had made a strong effort to throw herself into the spirit of the times, "which is prone to neglect beautiful and fragrant flowers, unless their roots will answer for vegetables, and their leaves for herbs." But there were seasons when her soul felt restless in this bondage; in these she