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bulking danger-and it was his all but last act to set the trumpet to his mouth, and blow an alarm to the Christian world. Would it had been more widely echoed and obeyed! Such a tender, general, and enlightened attention to the doubting Thomases of the day, would produce numerous good consequences. It would show religion in her most amiable aspect having compassion upon the ignorant, and upon those that are out of the way. It would arrest the doubts of many, ere they were hardened into a fierce and aggressive infidelity. It would change every church into a refuge for those who are tossed with tempest, and not comforted a true "Church of the Saviour;" and it would proclaim to those officious "flatterers," who would rid men of their burdens elsewhere than at the Cross and the Sepulchre, that their occupation was gone. We are not, however, at all sanguine of such results as near. Our wretched divisions and partyisms-the bigoted battle we are still disposed to do for the smallest minutiæ of our different creeds, while its main pillars are so powerfully assailed our general deadness and coldness, seem to augur that some mighty regenerating process is needed by all churches ere they can fully meet wants which are yearly becoming more and more imperious. "Good religious people," writes to us one of the most eminent evangelical ministers in a sister country, "have a great deal to learn, and some of them will never learn any thing. They are unconscious of the new world in which they live. They do not know what a different thing the pulpit is, and how different the preacher ought to be, since the new and mighty preacher in the form of the Press has risen up, and occupied so much of the preacher's old ground. The Press and the Pulpit might, and ought to understand each other better than they do." Coinciding in such views, we do not, however, expect that Mr. Dawson's pulpit will do much to promote the reconciliation of those two rival powers. He is verily not a preacher, but a man preaching magazine articles sprinkled with Scripture texts. He belongs to an amphibious order of beings neither in nor out of the church. We cannot conceive himself long to remain at ease in such an ambiguous position, nor that the public can continue to place much confidence in him as a clergyIt is whispered already that he is sinking as rapidly

man.

as he rose. We are not afraid that he will ever be totally overlooked. He is young, ready, fluent, ambitious, with much power of mental assimilation, a fertile, teeming brain, and a tongue and pair of lungs perfectly first rate. Such

qualities in bustling times can never fail of their reward, although we should imagine that the lecture-room, instead of the chapel, will by and by become the favorite field for their exhibition.

We venture to conclude this from the perusal of his sermon-the opening one of his new chapel-entitled, "The Demands of the Age upon the Church." If this be an average specimen of Mr. Dawson's writing or preaching powers, we must warn the public that they are not to expect him to become a Hall in the pulpit, or a Foster at the desk. As a composition, it is loose, careless, even vulgar. Think of an expression like this, occurring in a discourse on such a solemn occasion: "We do not unite on the sly." The style is an odd compound of Carlylisms and Pickwickisms. The bond of union it proposes is no bond at all. A union of common doubts and disbeliefs may form a vast moral infirmary, but not a church. We forewarn him, that it is difficult now as of old to make bricks without straw, and build a house without cement. That the doubters deserve special tending, he proves satisfactorily. He does not prove the adaptation of his chapel to their case. The spirit of Christianity he would divorce from its eternal principles and facts-an attempt as hopeless as to separate the life of a tree from its leaves, branches, and trunk. The only part of the discourse at all valuable is its statement of the admitted fact, that vital religion is at a low ebb; but even this he exaggerates, and his notion, that it has passed over to the free-thinkers, is simply not true. We would just beg the public to compare this specimen of the new style of preaching with some of Dr. Croly's recently published sermons, where they will find vast and varied erudition, burning genius, an eloquent severe, classical and grand, Scriptural sentiment all the qualities, in short, which Dawson's writing has not-in order to learn what exchange they are required to make, and to be convinced that although his church be called the Church of the Saviour, he is not destined to be the saviour of the Church.

We know full well that such a frank expression of our

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sentiments will, as did our strictures on Macaulay and Burns, create against us a number of opponents. We are perfectly indifferent. Whenever the trigger of the gun, Truth, is drawn, by however feeble a hand, and a report follows, multitudes of timorous or stupid creatures are sure to rise up alarmed or enraged, and to rend the air with their screams. It will be said that we are actuated by some animus against Mr. Dawson, just as a few blockheads accused us of hating a man who had been dead for half a century, and whose genius we had taken fifty opportunities of lauding in terms little short of downright idolatry. We must simply disown any such feeling. We gave Mr. Dawson constant attendance and earnest attention. We were occasionally delighted, and testified it by no feeble or niggardly applause. We saw much about him in private that was pleasing. But a sense of duty, coupled, we grant, with a certain feeling of indignation at the undue prominence which is partly given him, and which in part he assumes, and to which no man possessed merely of mechanical gifts, however extraordinary, is entitled, has urged us to write as we have written. "It is intolerable," said one, "to think of the literary coteries of London being over-crowed in the accent of an Ecclefechan carter." This may be, and is, and ought to be borne, when that accent stirs, warbles, and inflames, under the words of genius. But it is intolerable, that a glib and flowing tongue, conveying borrowed sentiments, in the language of the Pickwick papers, should be listened to as if behind it were flashing the eye of a Burns, or towering the brow of a Shakspeare. And it is still more intolerable, that a man without depth, learning, originality, or enthusiasm, should be swaying opinion, or shaking the faith of any in the great inspirations of the past.

If Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel are to be blotted out, let the blank be filled up with names of a somewhat higher calibre-and mighty to start a nobler spirit—than that of George Dawson.

Our faith in popular lecturing has never been great, and has been lessened by the experiences of several past winters. In the course of them, we have heard five or six of the most distinguished of the class, and have not only listened carefully to them, but have watched the effects of their prelec

tions on their audiences. So far as the lecturers are concerned, our expectations have been exceeded rather than the reverse All, in different styles, were excellent. All, through very different avenues, found their way to the attention and to the applause of their hearers. One, by a rich anecdotage, and the clear and copious detail of facts, nailed the ears of his audience to his lips. Another gathered them around him, talking though he was in an unknown tongue, through the cloudy grandeur of his speculation. Another took them captive by the enthusiasm which shone in his face and quivered on his lips. Another passed across them, like a rapid snow-drift, showering on their passive spirits a thick succession of clear, cold sentences. All exerted power; all gave a certain amount of pleasure. Did any much more? Was any permanent elevation given, or lasting effect produced? Had Scotland, England, and America, been ransacked for their choicest spirits, only to produce a certain tickling gratification, at most amounting to a high intellectual treat? We do not wish to speak dogmatically on the point, but it is our distinct impression that in a spiritual, not in a pecuniary sense, the cost outwent the profit. The great ends of teaching were not, and in the space, and in the circumstances, could hardly have been answered. Multitudes, unprepared by previous reading and training, were brought out by curiosity, or in some cases by a better principle, to hear some of the first men of the age; listened with most exemplary attention, were thrilled or tickled, but we fear not fed. We are convinced that steady attendance upon one plain single month's course on geology, or modern history, would have done more good than whole years spent in hearing such brilliant birds of passage.

ALFRED TENNYSON.

THE subject of the following sketch seems a signal example of the intimate relation which sometimes exists between original genius, and a shrinking, sensitive, and morbid

nature. We see in all his writings the struggle of a strong intellect to "turn and wind the fiery Pegasus" of a most capricious, volatile, and dream-driven imagination. Tennyson is a curious combination of impulse, strength, and delicacy approaching to weakness. Could we conceive, not an Eolian harp, but a grand piano, played on by the swift fingers of the blast, it would give us some image of the sweet, subtle, tender, powerful, and changeful movements of his verse, in which are wedded artificial elegance, artistic skill, and wild, impetuous impulse. It is the voice and lute of Ariel; but heard not in a solitary and enchanted island, but in a modern drawing-room, with beautiful women bending round, and moss-roses breathing, in their faint fragrance, through the half-opened windows. Here, indeed, lies the paradox of our author's genius. He is haunted, on the one hand, by images of ideal and colossal grandeur, coming upon him from the isle of the Syrens, the caves of the Kraken, the heights of Ida, the solemn cycles of Cathay, the riches of the Arabian heaven; but, on the other hand, his fancy loves, better than is manly or beseeming, the tricksy elegancies of artificial life-the "white sofas" of his study-the trim walks of his garden--the luxuries of female dress-and all the tiny comforts and beauties which nestle round an English parlor. From the sublime to the snug, and vice versa, is with him but a single step. This moment toying on the carpet with his cat, he is the next soaring with a roc over the valley of diamonds. We may liken him to the sea-shell which, sitting complacently and undistinguished amid the commonplace ornaments of the mantelpiece, has only to be lifted to give forth from its smooth ear the far-rugged boom of the ocean breakers. In this union of feminine feebleness and imaginative strength, he much resembles John Keats, who at one time could hew out the vast figure of the dethroned Saturn, "quiet as a stone," with the force of a Michael Angelo, and, again, with all the gusto of a milliner, describe the undressing of his heroine in the "Eve of St. Agnes." Indeed, although we have ascribed, and we think justly, original genius to Tennyson, there is much in his mind, too, of the imitative and the composite. He adds the occasional languor, the luxury of descriptive beauty, the feminine tone, the tender melancholy, the grand aspirations, perpetually checked

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