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feasts, and shades to his meditations. He is snatched away, and has left his designs and his labours to others.

As men please themselves with felicities to be enjoyed in the days of leisure and retreat; so, among these felicities, it is not uncommon to design a reformation of life, and a course of piety. Among the more enlightened and judicious part of mankind, there are many who live in a continual disapprobation of their own conduct, who know, that they do every day what they ought to leave undone, and every day leave undone what they ought to do; and who therefore consider themselves as living under the divine displeasure, in a state in which it would be very dangerous to die. Such men answer the reproaches of conscience with sincerity and intention of performance, but which they consider as debts to be discharged at some remote time. They neither sin with stupid negligence, nor with impious defiance of the divine laws; they fear the punishments denounced against sin, but pacify their anxiety with possibilities of repentance, and with a plan of life to be led according to the strict precepts of religion, and to be closed at last by a death softened by holy consolations.

Projects

of future piety are perhaps not less common than of future pleasure, and are, as there is reason to fear, not less commonly interrupted; with this dreadful difference, that he who misses his intended pleasure, escapes a disappointment; but he who is cut off before the season of repentance, is exposed to the vengeance of an angry God.

JOHNSON.

REFLECTIONS

ON EVENING AND ON AUTUMN.

THERE is an eventide in the day,-an hour when the sun retires, and the shadows fall, and when nature assumes the appearance of soberness and silence. It is an hour from which every where the thoughtless fly, as peopled only in their imagination with images of gloom;-it is the hour, on the other hand, which, in every age, the wise have loved, as bringing with it sentiments and affections more valuable than all the splendours of the day.

Its first impression is to still all the turbulence of thought or passion which the day may have brought forth. We follow, with our eye, the descending sun, we listen to the decaying sounds of labour and of toil,—and, when all the fields are silent around us, we feel a kindred stillness to breathe upon our souls, and to calm them from the agitations of society. From this first impression, there is a second which naturally follows it;-in the day we are with living men,-in the evening we begin to live with nature,-we see the world withdrawn from us, the shades of night darken over the habitations of men, and we feel ourselves alone. It is an hour fitted, as it would seem, by Him who made us, to still, but with gentle hand, the throb of every unruly passion, and the ardour of every impure desire; and, while it veils for a time the world that misleads us, to awaken in our hearts those legitimate

affections which the heat of the day may have dissolved. There is yet a farther scene it presents to us:-While the world withdraws from us, and while the shades of the evening darken upon our dwellings, the splendours of the firmament come forward to our view. In the moments when earth is overshadowed, Heaven opens to our eyes the radiance of a sublimer being; our hearts follow the successive splendours of the scene; and while we forget, for a time, the obscurity of earthly concerns, we feel that there are "yet greater things than these," and that we "have a Father who dwelleth in the heavens, and who yet deigneth to consider the things that are upon earth."

Such is the train of thought which the eventide of the day is fitted to excite ;-thoughts serious, doubtless, but inviting; which lead us daily, as it were, to the noblest conceptions of our being; and which seem destined to return us to the world with understandings elevated, and with hearts made better.

There is, in the second place, an "eventide" of the year, a season, as we now witness, when the sun withdraws his propitious light,-when the winds arise, and the leaves fall, and nature around us seems to sink into decay. It is said, in general, to be the season of melancholy; and if, by this word, be meant that it is the time of solemn and serious thought, it is undoubtedly the season of melancholy; yet, it is a melancholy so soothing, so gentle in its approach, and so prophetic in its influence, that they who have known it feel, as instinctively, that it is the

doing of God, and that the heart of man is not thus finely touched, but to fine issues.

It is a season, in the first place, which tends to wean us from the passions of the world. Every passion, however base or unworthy, is yet eloquent. It speaks to us of present enjoyment; it tells us of what men have done, and what men may do, and it supports us every where by the example of many around us. When we go out into the fields in the evening of the year, a different voice approaches us. We regard, even in spite of ourselves, the still but steady advances of time. A few days ago, and the summer of the year was grateful, and every element was filled with life, and the sun of heaven seemed to glory in his ascendant. He is now enfeebled in his power; the desert no more "blossoms like the rose;" the song of joy is no more heard among the branches; and the earth is strewed with that foliage which once bespoke the magnificence of summer. Whatever may be the passions which society has awakened, we pause amid this apparent desolation of nature. We sit down in the lodge "of the wayfaring man in the wilderness," and we feel that all we witness is the emblem of our own fate. Such also, in a few years, will be our own condition. The blossoms of our spring, the pride of our summer, will also fade into decay; and the pulse that now beats high with virtuous or with vicious desire, will gradually sink, and then must stop for ever. We rise from our meditations with hearts softened and subdued, and we return into life as into a shadowy scene, where we have "disquieted ourselves in

vain." Such is the first impression which the present scene of nature is fitted to make upon us. It is this first impression which intimidates the thoughtless and the gay; and, indeed, if there were no other reflections that followed, I know not that it would be the business of wisdom to recommend such meditations. It is the consequences, however, of such previous thoughts which are chiefly valuable; and among these there are two which may well deserve our consideration.

It is the peculiar character of the melancholy which such seasons excite, that it is general. It is not an individual remonstrance;—it is not the harsh language of human wisdom, which too often insults, while it instructs us. When the winds of autumn sigh around us, their voice speaks not to us only, but to our kind; and the lesson they teach us is not that we alone decay, but that such also is the fate of all the generations of man."They are the green leaves of the tree of the desert, which perish, and are renewed." In such a sentiment there is a kind of sublimity mingled with its melancholy ;-our tears fall, but they fall not for ourselves;—and, although the train of our thoughts may have begun with the selfishness of our own concerns, we feel that, by the ministry of some mysterious power, they end in awakening our concern for every being that lives.-Yet a few years, we think, and all that now bless, or all that now convulse humanity, will also have perished. The mightiest pageantry of life will pass, the loudest notes of triumph or of conquest will be silent in the grave;-the wicked, wherever active," will cease from troubling," and the

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