voice will pronounce it forever undone. These considerations may apologise for many defects in the following pages, arising from hasty preparation or the pressure of weighty avocations. It is very possible that many things in this volume may be obnoxious to a fastidious criticism which would rather contemplate a man's apparel than the heart which a mean attire may embosom. But to such criticism I have only to plead a purity of motive which 'smiles at the' critic's dagger and defies its point'while it would be almost a shame to make a book so perfect that those whose trade is fault-finding should have no exercise for their vocation.

Not to the haughty spirit, lifted far above the level of a fellow humanity-not to those who are too proud to use the powers which their Maker has entrusted them with for the furtherance of human happiness-not to those who would scorn to learn, even from a child, the simplest

element of knowledge, does the author dedicate this book. It belongs rather to the humble christian who may yet have a pure and classic mind, redolent with the aspirations of poetry as well as devotion. To those who seek for glory and immortality-to those who would pluck the most fragrant flowers of earth to weave a chaplet for the brows of their Redeemer-this book is most respectfully and affectionately dedicated.

New York, March, 1832.

THE DELUGE.

THIS may be classed with no other event. It stands alone. The recorded transactions of men, the desolating power of the elements, the cracks, tremors and eruptions of the crazy earth, may be graduated by some scale of comparative sublimity, force or terror. With occurrences of the one kind there are similar records to compare, and the mind enjoys a secret pleasure in balancing the recent evil with the kindred one more remote. This satisfaction arises in part from the grateful conviction forced upon the mind that there is a demonstration of method in the recurrence of calamity-that the event, however distressing, has a parallel-and, as the earth, on which the hopes of men are resting, survived the antecedent dispensation, so, even now, when the thunders have done uttering their voices, or the spirit of the storm has passed by, or the spasms of organic matter have quieted themselves, the interrupted order of nature will revert to its own place. It will soon be over, is the uppermost thought in danger-and then,

calculations may be made, projects entered upon, the future bent into the circle of the present, and man, once more, seem to himself the lord of the creation.

But in a new, untried calamity, appalling circumstances astound us; the courage of the bravest cowers under the approaches of a foe, uniting tremendous strength with unknown rules of action-and unearthly terrors gather themselves, like a cloud of fearfulness, over a scene of undefined, measureless ruin. Such was the deluge. It was poured out from the windows of heaven, it gushed up from the boiling fountains of the great deep without measure, parallel, antecedent, or genealogy. This is the event of one name; its genus one; its species one; its fashioning after its own fearful image, casting its shadows forward in the revelations of Noah's prophetic spirit.

All nations own this occurrence as indisputable; and a thousand venerable traditions testify of the deluge of waters along with the water marks which are abundantly found in the highest mountains, and may be identified in the geological structure of the continents and the islands. No element, perhaps, excepting that of fire, could have wrought such changes-for, when the shoreless waters subsided, the fragments of the broken up world were tossing to and fro and rounding themselves into a dry orb, under far other than antediluvian features and combinations, the retiring waves sported with the ancient mountain tops as with pebbles, and surge after surge laid up on high the immense ridges

of new modelled hills with deep and lengthened vales between.

There is one peculiar circumstance connected with antediluvian remains not a little astonishing;-it is, that human skeletons have never been found, nor the ruins of a single edifice or monument, evidently belonging to the world before the flood. Man and his works perished. At intervals, indeed, the naturalist finds imbedded in the secondary formations of rock the gigantic bones of the Tapir and other animals of the old world whose species seem to have become extinct in the deluge; but the bare fleshless skeleton of a man who proudly rejected the spirit warnings of prophecy and lifted up his haughty looks towards the first black drops of the predicted storm, has probably never been revealed by the sunlight of heaven. The new world, drenched, reorganized, purified, was as if man had never been upon its vivifying bosom. The blood of ancient violence had been washed away. The proud cry of millions had subsided to the feeble supplications of eight individuals, who stood alone in a strange, voiceless, unpeopled land, by the side of a rude altar, from whence the curling smoke of sacrifice went up, answered by the beautiful Iris, God's bow of promise in the cloud.

An event of such severe application, as might have been expected, has taken a deep hold on human sympathy, terror or curiosity; and almost every being, who has become an inhabitant of earth since that time, has had his thoughts, to some extent, busied in exploring the