shall say that Monrovia and Liberia may not yet, in their effects, be to Africa, what Plymouth and New England are to our own country?

We are now dealing merely with facts as they exist; we will not concern ourselves with any enthusiastic speculations, as to the practicability of transporting hence to Africa our whole colored population in a given space of time, nor with any thing of the kind; it will be long before that will be seriously thought of, and longer before it will be accomplished. We take things as we find them.

We find that in the last twenty-seven years, by some means or other, a republic has been raised in the midst of barbarous nations, and has steadily increased in power and stability, till it has taken its stand among the nations of the earth.

We find that through the whole of this territory, dotting 300 miles of sea-coast with its numerous villages, where once the groans of thousands of captives echoed through the gloomy recesses of the forest, there is now not a vestige remaining of the damning traffic in human blood; that inhabiting this territory, there is a nation with all the institutions of civilized life-a nation where justice, religion and law reign supreme, where the Sabbath is reverenced and observed, and the ordinances of religion obeyed; and if we found nothing more, this would be an abundant recompense for the labor and suffering which have been endured. But this is not all.

The present generation has not seen the end of this enterprise. The Republic of Liberia will be destroyed neither by violence nor decay. It is to be permanent-to increase in virtue, intelligence and prosperity, as other nations have increased before it. This unnoticed agency will, as it has already done, develop the resources of the vast and fertile continent in which it is placed; it will raise many rude barbarians from the depths of savage superstition in which they are immersed. Ethiopia shall stretch forth her hands unto God,' her valleys and hills shall teem with the growing crop, and through her deserted fields shall echo the harvest home' of the merry laborers, while from every village the taper spire shall point upward to the skies.

'We may not live to see the day,

But Earth shall glisten in the ray

Of the good time coming.'

The attempt to consider at any great length, the manifold advantages which may arise to Africa, from the enterprise under consideration, would not only transgress the limits we have marked out for ourselves, but would require a small volume.

We know, however, that there is on the coast of Africa a Christian nation, governed by Christian rulers, governed by liberal and Christian laws-a community whose public measures are all imbued with the spirit of progress and reform. They have Puritan ideas of religion, and of education. I need not remind you gentlemen,' says their governor, that knowledge is power, by whomsoever possessed, and

*

*Gov. Roberts' Annual Message to the Legislature of Liberia, 1846.

that no free government can be maintained except by an enlightened and virtuous people. * Education must ever be the grand safeguard of our liberties, the palladium of our political institutions-indeed of all our rights and privileges.' Happy will be the day when principles like these shall be prevalent throughout Africa; happy for Africa, for slaves groaning in bondage, for heathen who sit where the light of the truth never shone, happy for all nations rejoicing in the millenium of a regenerated world.

MUSIC IN A WOOD.

HIST! a rich strain of deep-toned music rings;
With silver sounds it wakes the sylvan shades,
And starts from out their cave quick echoings,
And rolls its waves mellifluous down the glades.
Wild whispers float among the grassy blades,
And weave tripping dance among the flow'rs,

The fair flowers dear to lovers and to maids,
While Memory plays among the vanished hours,
And Revery glides from out her legend-broidered bowers.

Again that strain, and softer, sweeter still,

The whispered note doth wanton with the leaves;
Celestial sounds the latticed roof do fill,

Where ancient elm with antique ivy weaves;

And Philomel her downy bosom heaves,

And pours her purest notes upon the air,

As for her parted Procne still she grieves,

While over all doth shine the Northern Bear,

And throws his glaring eye from out his seven-starred lair.

The soothing sound has ceased, the subtle soul

Of music's self melodious now is o'er;

Yet, as the final wave of song doth roll

Its feeble surge against the leafy shore,
The little twigs do quiver as before,
And tremble with a delicate delight;
And long the lay doth linger, loiter, more
Than ever loath to die. But, as at night

The tinted clouds before the moon, so fades it quite.

C. A. L. R.

A REMARKABLE AGE.

NOTHING is more common now-a-days than for writers and orators, who aspire to eloquence, to attract the attention of their readers and hearers by the exciting announcement that we live in a "most remarkable age." "Railroads and balloons," say they, "steamboats and steamguns, electric-telegraphs, daguerreotypes, chronotypes, and phonotypes; anti-spasmodic-safety-valve-non-conducting-low-pressure-sky

rocket-submarine-battery-thousand-horse-power engines of every kind and description are deluging this terrestrial orb with a flood of light and glory never before witnessed since the falls of Niagara. Verily and truly this is a great country. Hurra for the nineteenth century! We

live in a most remarkable age."

Now right in the face and eyes of so many credible and substantial witnesses, a man must be of an uncommonly skeptical turn of mind who could doubt anything whatever. Allowing, therefore, as we must perforce, that this is "a most remarkable age," we have been amusing ourselves by going back a little in the history of the world, and seeing whether this was the only instance of the kind on record, or whether there might not have been another "remarkable age" or two scattered along down somewhere among the multitude of ages that have happened since ages first came in fashion. And as it is always advisable to start fair, suppose we begin right at the beginning.

"Hurra!" said Adam senior, on the morning of the 6th day of January Anno Mundi 1, as he found himself standing six feet three without his shoes, in the south-east part of the Garden of Eden. "Most remarkable age this-quantity of cattle here."

This was no doubt the substance of the exclamation, or at any rate, of the thoughts of our great progenitor upon that eventful occasion; but if he had any doubts upon the subject, how entirely must they have been removed, when, a day or two after, he woke up and found Eve standing by his side? Truly there is not a man among us who can deny that this was a most remarkable age.

Adam had a great-great-grandson, or somewhere thereabout, a seafaring man, or a ship-carpenter, by the name of Noah. He was an uncommonly honest man in his dealings; he never gave wrong change nor kept it when it was in his favor, nor tried to get the half cents all on his side, as some of his descendants do. And the world having come to a pretty strange pass, so bad in fact that the less I say about it the better it will look in print, Noah had special orders to warn them, not only of the iniquity of their doings, but of the fact that they all stood a right smart chance of getting drowned if they did'nt, as he told them "bout ship at once and behave themselves in a little more respectable manner."

"This," said Noah, as he stood on the keel of the Ark one morning, with his neighbors gathered about him, "this, my friends and fellow citizens, is a most remarkable age, and things ain't a going on much

longer as they have been for two or three hundred years past, I can tell you. Oh! it's dreadful to think how times have altered since I was a boy. Why, there is Grandfather Methusaleh (he'll be eight hundred and fifty if he lives till August,) he was quite an old gentleman as long ago as I can remember, and yet he no more thought of drinking anything except in haying-time than nothing in the world: and I never heard him swear a word in my life, and now there ain't a man among you but that drinks and swears too, in a most horrible manner; besides you are ruining your children, you are bringing 'em forward in the world too fast, you are making men of 'em too soon. Oh, this is a most remarkable age in that respect.. Why, when I was a boy we did'nt wear jackets and trowsers till we were fifty, and never got married till we were a hundred and twenty-five, but now-a-days it is'nt uncommon to put a boy into jackets and trowsers by the time he is five-and-twenty, and to have him married before he is eighty. Oh, you'll ruin yourselves, I know you will. I've told you so, yet I'm afraid my talking won't do any good; but I've done my duty. Hand me up that auger, Japhet.” And the good old man wiped his eyes and went on with his work, sighing to himself, "Oh! this is a most remarkable age."

Finally the time came when Noah's neighbors began to be of the same opinion. The ark was done, and when for the last few days they saw all the animals of the earth, two and two, as they appear in the illustrated edition of the Primer, of their own accord, taking up their line of march for this ponderous affair, they began to feel rather nervous, and all agreed that it was a most remarkable age. Not less so, when the floods rose, and the rains descended, and they were in for a regular equinoctial; and as the miserable, drowning wretches were driven from hill to hill, until the mountain-tops became so few and so far asunder, that their dying screams could scarce be heard from height to height, over the roaring of that waste of waters, the last shrieks of those drowning men must have proclaimed, in their wildest notes, that it was a "remarkable age"-the most remarkable age the world ever saw. And when, at the end of a year's voyage, the waters fell, and Noah with his motley crew disembarked, the glorious arch which spanned the heavens proclaimed a surely remarkable age.

When were the Pyramids built? A question easier asked than answered. But whenever it was, it was a most remarkable age. Not all the skill of modern architects, nor all the power of modern machinery, could even temper the brass to cut, or devise the means to place, the huge blocks which compose those wonderful and curious structures. Who knows but that one of these was the commencement of that great tower of Babel, reared as a protection from a second flood; or likelier still, that all the group were the mere cornerstones the foundation work of that heaven-daring structure? It is at least a passable supposition; and then we could easily account for those curiously crooked hieroglyphics which set "Champollion" at defiance, by supposing they were the work of some carving genius, just about undergoing the process of the confusion of tongues. We can easily conceive something, though probably but little, of the trouble

1

which those poor fellows were in when this change began first to take effect. We can imagine the brick-layers bawling from the top of the tower, in Chinese, to the mason-tenders below, and receiving no very civil answer, perhaps, in High-Dutch, for speaking such an unintelligible tongue. With what a quizzical expression they must have stared into each other's faces, as they received in turn for their customary morning salutation a strange compound of sounds, perfectly unintelligible? Did you ever ask a respectable looking man a question, and get an answer in Chaldee, or Cherokee, or Hindoo? Perhaps then, conceiving him to be your own brother, you can form some faint idea of the trouble they were in. They must have thought it was a remarkable age, but where was the use of saying anything about it, when no one could understand them? The probability is, then, that they did not make the remark.

But enough of history. It's a good while now since the tower of Babel was built. The children of Israel have been through the Red Sea since then. Solomon has built his temple, and Jerusalem has fallen. Still man has kept on. Still the world has kept on. Wonders have not ceased; and the echo of Adam's first cry, still ringing among us, has never been suffered to die away. We still say as he did, "We live in a remarkable age." We are right. The world is made up of remarkable ages; it is a remarkable world. The lamp of experience, lighted by the past, illumes the present, and gathers fresh lustre to shed its rays upon the future. Onward," is man's motto "progress," Nature's law. But we must remember, that we are only "an," and not " the age ;" and when we feel disposed to talk about human perfectibility, and to boast of the distance which intervenes between us and our predecessors of the last century, and to flatter ourselves that our successors cannot thus far outstrip us, perhaps we would do well to look back a few thousand years, and remember that not now alone, but then, too, it was a remarkable age."

MY OPEN WINDOW.

A LA MRS.

"When twilight steals along the ground,
And all the bells are ringing round,

One, two, three, four, and five;

I at my study-window sit,

And, wrapp'd in many a musing fit,

To bliss am all alive."-WHITE.

MANY is the hour I while away by my open window. There, when overtasked with toil, or weary of the cheerless world, I sit me down to unburden the peopled chambers of my heart. Moments hasten up the steep of time, and disappear beyond-still I am there.