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HYMN TO INTELLECTUAL BEAUTY. THE awful shadow of some unseen Power

Floats, though unseen, among us; visiting This various world with as inconstant wing As summer winds that creep from flower to flower; Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower, It visits with inconstant glance

Each human heart and countenance;

Like hues and harmonies of evening,

Like clouds in starlight widely spread,
Like memory of music fled,

Like aught that for its grace may be
Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.

Spirit of Beauty! that dost consecrate

With thine own hues all thou dost shine upon
Of human thought or form, where art thou gone?
Why dost thou pass away and leave our state,
This dim vast vale of tears, vacant and desolate?
Ask why the sunlight not for ever

Weaves rainbows o'er yon mountain river;
Why aught should fail and fade that once is shown;
Why fear and dream and death and birth
Cast on the daylight of this earth

Such gloom, why man has such a scope

For love and hate, despondency and hope?
No voice from some sublimer world hath ever
To sage or poet these responses given:

Therefore the names of Demon, Ghost, and Heaven, Remain the records of their vain endeavour:

Frail spells, whose utter'd charm might not avail to sever From all we hear and all we see,

Doubt, chance, and mutability.

Thy light alone, like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night-wind sent

Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream,

Gives grace and truth to life's unquiet dream.
Love, Hope, and Self-esteem, like clouds, depart
And come, for some uncertain moments lent.
Man were immortal, and omnipotent,
Didst thou, unknown and awful as thou art,
Keep with thy glorious train firm state within his heart.
Thou messenger of sympathies

That wax and wane in lovers' eyes;

Thou, that to human thought art nourishment,
Like darkness to a dying flame!

Depart not, as thy shadow came;
Depart not, lest the

grave

Like life and fear, a dark reality.

should be,

While yet a boy, I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing

Hopes of high talk with the departed dead:

I call'd on poisonous names with which our youth is fed: I was not heard; I saw them not.

When musing deeply on the lot

Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me:

I shriek'd and clasp'd my hands in ecstacy!

I vow'd that I would dedicate my powers

To thee and thine: have I not kept the vow?

With beating heart and streaming eyes, even now
I call the phantoms of a thousand hours

Each from his voiceless grave: they have in vision'd bowers
Of studious zeal or love's delight

Outwatch'd with me the envious night:
They know that never joy illumed my brow,
Unlink'd with hope that thou would'st free
This world from its dark slavery,

That thou, O awful Loveliness,

Would'st give whate'er these words cannot express.
The day becomes more solemn and serene
When noon is past: there is a harmony
In autumn, and a lustre in its sky,

Which through the summer is not heard or seen,
As if it could not be, as if it had not been!
Thus let thy power, which like the truth
Of nature on my passive youth

Descended, to my onward life supply

Its calm, to one who worships thee,
And every form containing thee,

Whom, SPIRIT fair, thy spells did bind
To fear himself, and love all human kind.

Shelley.

CRITICAL NOTICES.

Moral Physiology; or, a Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question. By Robert Dale Owen. Watson, London.

The name of Owen is sufficient guarantee that this is no Poor-Law scheme for sacrificing the industrious at the shrine of indolent and selfish "respectability." Were an equal distribution of property established, still would the question here discussed-Whether it is desirable that men should possess the power of limiting at will the number of their offspring, without mortification of their natural desires, or injury to the health or moral feelings of themselves or their companions?-be a most momentous one; independently, too, of all fear of overpeopling the world, an evil, we think, not demanding any immediate measures of prevention. If it is not notorious that many men and women become parents without any prospect for their children, but want and misery; that many men cannot be parents without entailing disease, mental and physical, upon their offspring; that many women are so constituted that they cannot give birth to healthy children, some not to living children: or if, being notorious, such practices, poisoning the health of nations, are but of little consequence-then indeed the fastidiousness of "decent society" may be justified in refusing all inquiry for a remedy, out of regard to a foul-mindedness that would be thought delicate. But if it is immoral wantonly to cause unnecessary evil; if it is immoral to commit "murder;" and yet more immoral to murder a whole life, to murder the intellect, to deprave the character; if selfishness and brutality are immoral; or if the dissemination of disease, to the deterioration of the human race, is an evil-then it behoves every man to seek, and that earnestly, how such crimes and evils may be

avoided. The pamphlet before us shows how they may be avoided, easily and surely avoided. The protection is within the reach of all men: and no honest man is he, who, feeling it is even possible he may be involved in such offences, hesitates to acquire the knowledge that may keep him innocent. Strange is it that a subject of such vital importance should be so universally shunned, and even deemed unfit for mention; strange that our medical men are either not sufficiently honest, or too cowardly, or too "modest" (perhaps owing to the peculiar tendency of their practice as medical students), to prescribe a remedy, with which they must be acquainted, since it is commonly applied on the continent, and of the urgent necessity of which they must be fully aware; stranger and sadder than all is the legal provision for such mischiefs-the marriage law which constitutes man the master of his wife's person; a power so frequently abused. He, who makes a woman a mother against her will, is a beast with whom every woman and every honourable man should refuse to associate (else they countenance him); He who begets children without being prepared, not only to support them, but to render them happy and useful, is guilty of an offence against society, in extenuation of which he can only plead ignorance, or about the lowest species of selfishness. Our Law condemns murder: but there is no condemnation of him who murders a woman by forcing her to become a mother; who slowly murders her by compelling her, till she is worn out, to bring forth children, children who perhaps must inherit disease of mind and body, and be in their turn murderers and propagators of evil. With what name shall we brand the man who, demanding public justice, is guilty of such gross injustice at home; who, prating of liberty in public, thus brutally tyrannizes over one whom he most loves? Is such an one a patriot? ay, if dishonesty is patriotism; Is such an one a Christian? ay, if selfishness is Christianity; Is he a man? he may be, if brutality can qualify him. They who think any thing of the happiness of those "dearest" to them, they who value their conscienciousness at a higher rate than sixpence, will immediately buy this little book, wherein the important subject of the Regulation of the Reproductive Instinct is most ably discussed, in its political, social, and moral bearings. The tone of the pamphlet is philosophical; its language inoffensive to a pure mind; and it is throughout pervaded by a spirit of gentleness and earnest loving-kindness, as beautiful and persuasive as its arguments are clear and convincing. It ought to be in the hands, in the heart, of every man and woman in the empire.

The Words of a Believer. From the French of the Abbé de la Mennais. Cousins, London: 1834.

The Book of the People. By F. la Mennais: Translated, with notes, by J. H. Lorymer. Hetherington, and Lorymer, London: 1838.

The words of a Believer are ever worthy of attention. And no common believer is the Abbé: but one whose spirit has beheld the face of the far future, and who has drawn therefrom a faith not only to inspire high thoughts and fearless expression, but evidenced in his actions, as one of the staunchest of the French Republicans. Let our extracts speak for the general tenor of his words.

"When you see a man led to prison or to punishment, be not hasty within yourselves to say, such an one is a wicked man, who is guilty of crime against his brethren:

"For peradventure he is a good man, who has endeavoured to serve his brethren, and who is punished for it by their oppressors."-Words of a Believer.

"The law of God is a law of love; and love vaunts not itself above others, but sacrifices itself for others."-Ib.

"All are born equal: no one, in coming into the world, brings with him a right to command.

"And I saw a child in a cradle, crying and slabbering; and around him

were old men, who called him Lord, and who, kneeling, worshipped him. And then I understood the misery of man."-Ib.

"They, who profit by the slavery of their brethren, will use every art to prolong it. For that end they will employ falsehood and force.—

"They will let loose upon you their myrmidons; they will build innumerable prisons to incarcerate you in; and they will pursue you with fire and sword: they will torment you, and will shed abroad your blood like the water of the springs.

"If, then, you are not resolved stedfastly to combat, to bear every thing without bending, never to weary, never to yield; keep then your chains, and renounce a liberty of which you are unworthy."-Ib.

"That which produces disorders and dissensions, that which creates those law-suits so scandalous to good men and so ruinous to families, is chiefly sordid interest, the insatiable passion to acquire and to possess.—

66 Another cause of endless dissensions, is evil laws.

"Now there are scarcely any but evil laws in the world."—Ib.

"You have need of much patience, and of a courage that is never wearied; for you will not conquer in a day. Liberty is the bread that the nations must earn by the sweat of their brow.

"Should your hopes be even deceived, not seven times, but seventy times seven, never lose hope.

"The righteous cause always triumphs when we put our faith in it.— "He, who asks himself of what worth is justice, profanes justice in his heart; and he who calculates the cost of liberty, has already renounced liberty in his heart.

"If there be upon this earth anything great, it is the stern resolve of a nation walking beneath the eye of God, without for one instant wearying, to the conquest of the right that it holds from him; which counts neither wounds, nor days of toil, nor sleepless nights; and which says, What is all this? Justice and liberty are worthy of much greater sacrifices.

"It may experience misfortunes, reverses, treasons, and be sold by some Judas. But let nothing discourage it.

"For verily I say unto you, should it descend as Christ into the tomb, as Christ it would rise again on the third day, having triumphed over death, and over the prince of this world, and over the ministers of the prince of this world."-Ib.

"THERE IS NOTHING WHICH THEY MAY NOT DO WHO ARE UNITED, EITHER FOR GOOD OR EVIL. THE DAY, THEN, IN WHICH YOU SHALL BE UNITED, WILL BE THE DAY OF YOUR DELIVERANCE."-Ib.

"There was a law in the beginning. This law was forgotten, violated."At the present time it lies under the ruins of duties and rights; and this is why, bent and sorrowful, you wander at random, in darkness.”—Book of the People.

"If, hitherto, you have derived so little fruit from your efforts, how can we be astonished at it? You had in your hands that which overthrows; YOU Sometimes you have

HAD NOT IN YOUR HEARTS THAT WHICH FOUNDS.

been wanting in justice, in charity always.”—Ib.

"Do you wish to succeed? Do good by good means.”—Ib.

"This is your task. It is great. You have to form THE UNIVERSAL FAMILY."-Ib.

"Right and duty are like two palm-trees, which bear no fruit, unless they grow by the side of each other."-Ib.

"Every Law in which the People has not concurred, which emanates not from it, is null.”—Ib.

"When you shall have reconquered your right, if you use it wisely, the face of the world will be changed; there will be less tears, and they will be less bitter. Gradually the contrast between extreme opulence and extreme indigence will cease to afflict humanity.

"Sad and haggard hunger will no longer sit down at your hearth. All will have food for the body and the mind.

"Divided, as they ought to be among brethren, the blessings that Providence has distributed will be multiplied even by distribution.”—Ib.

66

Respect the life, the liberty, and the property of others.

Help others to preserve and develope their lives, liberty and property. "These two precepts contain, in substance, the. duties of justice and charity. Details would be infinite; for they embrace all the thoughts and actions of man; and a single precept resumes them all—the divine precept of Love. Love, and do what you will; for you would wish to do only that which is just and good. Love, says the sovereign Master, and you will perfectly accomplish the law."-Ib.

Are not these indeed Books for the People? Rather too much of mysticism is there in them; rather too much also of a Creed as little as ever worthy of being called Catholic. But let that pass! The true Catholicism-Love-is manifest in every page; and little did the Book of the People need certain Notes of the Translator, reprehending the Abbé's sectarianism, yet themselves couched, or rather rampant, in most painfully violent language, in their intolerance displaying a spirit far more sectarian. We desire for these books as extensive a sale in this country, as they have had in France. They are most worthy of their titles. What more can we say?

NOTES OF THE MONTH.

What

A GENERAL Penny Postage is at length to be allowed: not from any idea of justice toward the industrious poor, but as an accommodation to the dishonest gathering of Wealth.-The National Petition has been presented, and (says the "Radical" Press) "very well received:" it was only laughed at. tame beasts are our periodical “Champions of a People's Rights"! But what matters whether it was received or rejected? Is not the Ballot again denied? Why, there are but eighty-one members of the House of Usurpers, who have sufficient sense of justice to tolerate an extension of the franchise to £10 householders in counties. Even some of these comparatively liberal "representatives" (Is a man honest who wears a name to which he knows he has no right?) may possibly object to any further liberality; disclaiming Chartism, because a few "chartists are disposed to theft and homicide." With as much reason they decline Christianity, because some christians are bishops. Meanwhile, our liberal Prime Minister compliments the Czar, the murderer of Poland: heartily, we should think, if Canada may speak for him. Murders are still allowed to be perpetrated in that abused colony, by the subalterns of a Government that may yet find English villages as combustible as Canadian. Will not noble seats, and warehouses, burn as well? Much fuss has been made about a certain government plan of education-a mole-hill in labour. The talk has terribly disturbed a number of "bible-and-unicorn" bigots, who patronize processions of charity-children, and destroy corn lest bread should be too cheap for the famishing. This is in perfect accordance with the Law for reducing the poor to a poorer diet. But we hear that all these evils are speedily to be abolished. An Anti-poor-law association is forming "for the purpose of petitioning" the Honourable House to rescind or, at least, amend the Poor-Law. Are the getters up of this Association knaves or fools? Is it a respectable plot to prevent Universal Suffrage? or, are they serious in their hope of melting the golden hearts of landlords and sinecurists? Petition to the Rural Police appointed to enforce the most unchristian and inhuman outrage, misnamed law, that cold-blooded tyranny ever devised! Petition to the granary walls! Pray for a restitution of the three thousand quarters of corn destroyed to keep up the price of bread! Petition, indeed!-We have petitioned for Universal Suffrage. Nothing less will satisfy us; for nothing less will give us power to remedy our many wrongs and we cannot wait for the wrong-doers' repentance.

Let us

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