and that way, too, the road happens actually to lead. You cross the Potomac above its junction, pass along its side through the base of the mountain for three miles, its terrible precipices hanging in fragments over you, and within about twenty miles reach Fredericktown, and the fine country round that This scene is worth a voyage across the Atlantic. Yet here, as in the neighbourhood of the Natural Bridge, are people who have passed their lives within half a dozen miles, and have never been to survey these monuments of a war between rivers and mountains, which must have shaken the earth itself to its centre.

PARTY SPIRIT AND GOOD GOVERNMENT.

FROM HIS FIRST INAUGURAL ADDRESS.

DURING the contest of opinion through which we have passed, the animation of discussion and of exertions has sometimes worn an aspect which might impose on strangers unused to think freely and to speak and to write what they think; but this being now decided by the voice of the nation, announced according to the rules of the constitution, all will of course arrange themselves under the will of the law, and unite in common efforts for the common good. All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal laws must protect, and to violate which would be oppression. Let us, then, fellow citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things. And let us reflect that having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered, we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions. During the throes and convulsions of the ancient world, during the agonizing spasms of infuriated man, seeking through blood and slaughter his long lost liberty, it was not wonderful that the agitation of the billows should reach even this distant and peaceful shore; that this should be more felt and feared by some and less by others; that this should divide opinions as to measures of safety. But every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle. We have called by different names brethren of the same principle. We are all republicans-

we are all federalists. If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it. I know indeed that some honest men fear that a republican government cannot be strong; that this government is not strong enough. But would the honest patriot, in the full tide of successful experiment, abandon a government which has so far kept us free and firm, on the theoretic and visionary fear that this government, the world's best hope, may by possibility want energy to preserve itself? I trust not. I believe this, on the contrary, the strongest government on earth. I believe it the only one where every man, at the call of the laws, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern. Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? history answer this question.

Let

Let us, then, with courage and confidence pursue our own federal and republican principles, our attachment to our union and representative government. Kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe; too high-minded to endure the degradations of the others; possessing a chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the hundreth and thousandth generation; entertaining a due sense of our equal right to the use of our own faculties, to the acquisitions of our industry, to honour and confidence from our fellow citizens, resulting not from birth but from our actions and their sense of them; enlightened by a benign religion, professed, indeed, and practised in various forms, yet all of them including honesty, truth, temperance, gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling Providence, which by all its dispensations proves that it delights in the happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter; with all these blessings, what more is necessary to make us a happy and prosperous people? Still one thing more, fellow citizens,-a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain man from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labour the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

MR. MADISON was born on the sixteenth of March, 1751, in the county of Orange, in Virginia. He was educated at the college of Princeton, in New Jersey, where he received the degree of Bachelor of Arts, from Dr. Witherspoon, in 1771. He appears to have led an inactive life during the early part of the Revolution, or at least to have taken no part in public affairs. In 1776 he was elected to the Virginia Assembly, but was superseded in the following year. The House of Delegates, however, which was more capable of judging of his merits than his constituents had been, chose him to be a member of the Executive Council, in which he continued until transferred to the old Congress, in which he made his first appearance on the twentieth of March, 1780. From this period his name is one of the most prominent in the political history of the country. His writings on the Constitution and other subjects were second only to those of Hamilton in ability and influence; and his extensive information, sound judgment, skill as a logician, and unvarying courtesy, secured him the highest consideration in the congresses of which he was a member, the National Convention that formed the Constitution, the Virginia Convention to which it was submitted for approval, and the legislature of his state whenever he held a seat in that body. Upon the accession of Mr. Jefferson to the presidency, Mr. Madison was made Secretary of State, and he succeeded Mr. Jefferson as President. At the end of his second term, in 1817, he retired from the public service, and he held no other office except for a short period in 1829, in which he was a member of the Virginia Constitutional Convention. He passed the remainder of his life in dignified retirement at Montpelier, where he died on the twentyeighth of June, 1836, in the eighty-fifth year of his age.

This great statesman and philosopher was the confidential personal and political friend of Jefferson, but in almost every respect their characters were essentially different. Mr.

Madison's intellect was of a far higher order, and its ascendency over his passions was nearly perfect. His triumphs were those of pure reason. His public and private life were above reproach.

In his correspondence with John Adams Mr. Jefferson had given the first intimation which found its way before the public that Mr. Madison had made a full report of the debates in the Federal Convention. After his death, this manuscript and his reports of debates in the Congress of the Confederation, with a selection from his letters written between 1780 and 1784, were purchased by the government, and in 1840 were published, in three octavo volumes, under the superintendence of Mr. Henry D. Gilpin. They constitute a work of extraordinary value to students in history and political philosophy.

Mr. Madison was the author of a considerable and important portion of the Federalist, written by Mr. Hamilton, Mr. Jay and himself, to secure the adoption of the Constitution, and by his speeches in the Virginia Convention he contributed with equal ability and efficiency to the same object. Upon the appearance of the Proclamation of Neutrality, in 1793, he and Mr. Hamilton were opposed to each other in a debate upon the distribution of the excutive and legislative powers incident to war, and he replied to the Letters of Pacificus, by Mr. Hamilton, in five essays signed Helvidius, in which a degree of asperity scarcely congenial with his nature showed that his more intimate associates had succeeded in lessening his confidence in Mr. Hamilton's attachment to republican principles.

The writings of Mr. Madison would make about fifteen octavo volumes, each of six hundred pages, similar to those already mentioned as published under the authority of the government. They are chiefly on constitutional, political and historical subjects, but among them are some relating to eminent persons, and of a miscellaneous character which will be more generally interesting. His style is clear, exact and justly modulated.

VAGUENESS OF PHILOSOPHICAL

DISTINCTIONS.

FROM THE THIRTY-SEVENTH NUMBER OF THE FEDERALIST.

THE faculties of the mind itself have never yet been distinguished and defined, with satisfactory precision, by all the efforts of the most acute and metaphysical philosophers. Sense, perception, judgment, desire, volition, memory, imagination, are found to be separated by such delicate shades and minute gradations, that their boundaries have eluded the most subtle investigations, and remain a pregnant source of ingenious disquisition and controversy. The boundaries between the great kingdoms of nature, and, still more, between the various provinces and lesser portions into which they are subdivided, afford another illustration of the same important truth. The most sagacious and laborious naturalists have never yet succeeded in tracing with certainty the line which separates the district of vegetable life from the neighbouring region of unorganized matter, or which marks the termination of the former and the com

mencement of the animal empire. A still greater obscurity lies in the distinctive characters by which the objects in each of these great departments of nature have been arranged and assorted.

When we pass from the works of nature, in which all the delineations are perfectly accurate, and appear to be otherwise only from the imperfection of the eye which surveys them, to the institutions of man, in which the obscurity arises as well from the object itself, as from the organ by which it is contemplated; we must perceive the necessity of moderating still further our expectations and hopes from the efforts of human sagacity. Experience has instructed us, that no skill in the science of government has yet been able to discriminate and define, with sufficient certainty, its three great provinces, the legislative, executive, and judiciary; or even the privileges and powers of the different legislative branches. Questions daily occur in the course of practice, which prove the obscurity which reigns in these subjects, and which puzzle the greatest adepts in political science.

The experience of ages, with the continued and combined labours of the most enlightened legislators and jurists, have been equally unsuccessful in delineating the several objects and limits of different codes of laws and different tribunals of justice. The precise extent of the common law, the statute law, the maritime law, the ecclesiastical law, the law of corporations, and other local laws and customs, remains still to be clearly and finally established in Great Britain, where accuracy in such subjects has been more industriously pursued than in any other part of the world. The jurisdiction of her several courts, general and local, of law, of equity, of admiralty, &c., is not less a source of frequent and intricate discussions, sufficiently denoting the indeterminate limits by which they are respectively circumscribed. All new laws, though penned with the greatest technical skill, and passed on the fullest and most ma

ture deliberation, are considered as more or less obscure and equivocal, until their meaning be liquidated and ascertained by a series of particular discussions and adjudications. Besides the obscurity arising from the complexity of objects, and the imperfection of the human faculties, the medium through which the conceptions of men are conveyed to each other adds a fresh embarrassment. The use of words is to express ideas. Perspicuity therefore requires, not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriated to them. But no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many, equivocally denoting different ideas. Hence it must happen, that however accurately objects may be discriminated in themselves, and however accurately the discrimination may be conceived, the definition of them may be rendered inaccurate, by the inaccuracy of the terms in which it is delivered. And this unavoidable inaccuracy must be greater or less, according to the complexity and novelty of the objects defined. When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it must be, is rendered dim and doubtful, by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF OUR COUN. TRY TO MANKIND.

FROM AN ADDRESS TO THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES.

LET it be remembered, that it has ever been the pride and boast of America, that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature. By the blessing of the Author of these rights on the means exerted for their defence, they have prevailed over all opposition..... No instance has heretofore occurred, nor can any instance be expected hereafter to occur, in which the unadulterated forms of republican government can pretend to so fair an opportunity of justifying themselves by their fruits. In this view the citizens of the United States are responsible for the greatest trust ever confided to a political society. If justice, good faith, honour, gratitude, and all the other qualities which ennoble the character of a nation, and fulfil the ends of government, be the fruits of our establishments, the cause of Liberty will acquire a dignity and lustre which it has never yet enjoyed; and an example will be set which cannot but have the most favourable influence on the rights of mankind. If, on the other side, our governments should be unfortunately blotted with the reverse of these cardinal and essential virtues, the great cause which we have engaged to vindicate will be dishonoured and betrayed; the last and fairest experiment in favour of the rights of human nature will be turned against them; and their patrons and friends exposed to be insulted and silenced by the votaries of tyranny and usurpation.

HAVING given the personal history of Dr. Dwight in the Poets and Poetry of America, I shall here only present a chronological statement of its principal incidents. His father was a merchant, and his mother was a daughter of the great Jonathan Edwards. They resided in Northampton, Massachusetts, where our author was born on the fourteenth of May, 1752. He was graduated at Yale College in 1769; was chosen a tutor in that institution in 1771, and held the office six years; was licensed to preach in the Congregational church in 1777, and in the same year entered the army as a chaplain; on the death of his father in 1778 resigned his commission and returned to Northampton, where he acted in various capacities until 1782; was installed pastor of the Congregational Church in Greenfield, Connecticut, in 1783; was elected president of Yale College and removed to New Haven in 1795; and died in 1817.

Whether Dr. Dwight has in this country had an equal as a college instructor and president is questionable, but it may be safely said that he has had no superior. The cause of sound learning was in many ways very largely indebted to him. He was also an eloquent and successful preacher, and an accomplished and most agreeable gentle

man.

His first literary works were in verse. His Conquest of Canaan, an epic poem, was finished when he was but twenty-two years of age; and he subsequently published several other volumes of poetry, in all of which were passages of considerable beauty, but none of which were of so elevated and sustained a character as to be altogether creditable to a man of his distinguished reputation for talents, scholarship and taste. His fame as an author must therefore rest principally upon his prose writings, and these are of such excellence that no fears need be entertained that it will not be honourable and permanent. The most important works of Dr. Dwight have been published since his death. Besides

his poems, however, he permitted the appearance during his life of many of the discourses which he delivered on public occasions, and he contributed numerous papers to religious periodicals and the memoirs of scientific societies. An anonymous volume entitled Remarks on the Review of Inchiquin's Letters in the Quarterly Review, addressed to the Rt. Hon. George Canning, is likewise attributed to him, though he never publicly acknowledged it.

His Theology Explained and Defended consists of nearly two hundred sermons preached before the classes of Yale College during his presidency. His views as here exhibited are moderately Calvinistic, and are maintained with great ability, dignity and eloquence. Probably no work of the sort in the English language was ever so widely and generally popular.

His Travels in New England and New York are in four octavo volumes. In the college vacations of nearly every year from the commencement of his administration he made excursions in various directions through the northern states, and by personal inquiry and observation collected an extraordinary amount of historical, topographical and statistical information, which will always be interesting and valuable; and no other work presents a view so particular and authentic of American society and manners in the beginning of the present century.

Several works which he left in readiness for the press are still unpublished. The largest and most elaborate of these is on the Character and Writings of St. Paul. Another is called The Friend, and comprises a series of essays commenced during his residence in Greenfield and concluded near the close of his life.

The style of Dr. Dwight is fluent, graceful, picturesque and glowing; but diffuse. The erasure of redundances would render it much more vigorous and attractive. He presented the most abstruse propositions in metaphysics

with clearness, and was successful in descriptions of external nature; but hardly a discourse, or essay or letter can be pointed to in all his works the effect of which is

not injured by superfluous epithets. Yet for his wisdom, earnestness, and courtesy, greater faults could be easily forgiven and forgotten.

APPROACH OF EVENING ON LAKE GEORGE.

FROM TRAVELS IN NEW ENGLAND AND NEW YORK.

THE whole scenery of this lake is greatly enhanced in beauty and splendour by the progressive change which the traveller, sailing on its bosom, perpetually finds in his position, and by the unceasing variegations of light and shade which attend his progress. The gradual and the sudden openings of scoops and basins, of islands and points, of promontories and summits; the continual change of their forms, and their equally gradual or sudden disappearance; impart to every object a brilliancy, life and motion..... An opening lay before us between the mountains on the West, and those on the East, gilded by the departing sunbeams. The lake, alternately glassy and gently rippled, of a light and exquisite sapphire, gay and brilliant with the tremulous lustre floating upon its surface, stretched in prospect to a vast distance, through a great variety of larger and smaller apertures. In the chasm formed by the mountains lay a multitude of islands, differing in size, shape and umbrage, and clothed in deeply shaded green. Beyond them, and often partly hidden behind the tall and variously figured trees with which they were tufted, rose a long range of distant mountains, tinged with a deep misty azure, and crowned with an immense succession of lofty pines. Above the mountains, and above each other, were extended in great numbers long streaming clouds, of the happiest forms, and painted with red and orange light in all their diversities of tincture. Between them the sky was illumined with a vivid yellow lustre. The tall trees on the western mountains lifted their heads in the crimson glory, and on this background displayed their diversified forms with a distinctness and beauty never surpassed. On a high and semi-circular summit, the trees, ascending far without limbs, united their crowns above, and thus formed a majestic and extensive arch in the sky, dark, defined, and corresponding with the arch of the summit below. Between this crown and the mountain the vivid orange light, shining through the grove, formed a third arch, equally extended, and striped with black by the stems of the trees.

Directly over the gap which I have mentioned, and through which this combination of beauty was presented to us, the moon, far southward, in her handsomest crescent, sat on the eastern, and the evening star, on the western, side of the opening, at equal distances from the bordering mountains, and, shining from a sky perfectly pure and Ferene, finished the prospect.

The crimson lustre however soon faded; the mountains lost their gilding, and the clouds, changing their fine glow into a dull, leaden-coloured hue, speedily vanished. The lake, though still brilliant, became misty and dim. The splendour of the moon and of Hesper increased, and treinbled on its surface until they both retired behind the western mountains, and just as we reached the shore, left the world to the darkness of night.

SCENE ON THE KAATSKILL MOUN

TAINS.

FROM THE SAME.

WE entered the forest on the South; and, after penetrating it about a mile, came to a scene which amply repaid us for our toil. On the rear of the great ridge, stretched out before us two spurs of a vast height. Between them sunk a ravine, several miles in length, and in different places from a thousand to fifteen hundred feet in depth. The mountains on either side were steep, wild and shaggy, covered almost everywhere with a dark forest, the lofty trees of which approached nearer and nearer to each other as the eye wandered toward the bottom. In some places their branches became united; in others, separated by a small distance, they left a line of absolute darkness, resembling in its dimensions a winding rivulet, here somewhat wider, there narrower, and appearing as if it were a solitary by-path to the nether world. All beneath seemed to be midnight, although the day was uncommonly bright and beautiful; and all above a dreary solitude, secluded from the world, and destined never to be wandered over by the feet of man. At the head of this valley stood a precipice; here descending perpendicularly, there overhanging with a stupendous and awful grandeur. Over a bed of stone beside our feet ran a stream, which discharged the waters of the lakes, and from the brow of the precipice rushed in a perpendicular torrent perfectly white and glittering nearly three hundred feet in length. This magnificent current, after dashing upon a shelf, falls over a second precipice of one hundred feet; when it vanishes in the midnight beneath, and rolls over a succession of precipices until it finally escapes from the mountains, and empties its waters into the river Kaaterskill. A cloud of vapour, raised by the dashing of this stream on the successive shelves in its bed, rises above the forests which shroud the bottom of the valley, and winds beautifully away from the sight until it finally vanishes in the bewildered course of this immense chasm. On the