he urged the claim of millions of American black men to liberty? No, never! any more than a famished man confounds painted confectionery with the savory soup, that will send warmth and life to every nerve and organ of his perishing body. So sincerity is above all things in place upon the platform. It gives singleness of aim, with directness of speech, and precludes every low and selfish purpose. A soul may be sincere and narrow; but a soul can hardly be sincere and mean.

But we want there something more than earnestness and honesty; these keep up the right tone, but may be lacking in scope. Give us with all, ideas that have been caught from the breezy heights of progress; from reverent daring, and profound investigation; from actual experience, and with the individual motive laid bare to the innermost consciousness-before taking expression as fact or opinion in the public place. For the hungry will seize eagerly whatever is thrown in their way. We who have seen the advent of this new era of spiritual development have had sad and abundant proof of the eager hunger of humanity for something positive concerning the future, and are often taunted with the charge that our Platform has not given anything adequate to the needs of men, but has dealt from it only the flesh of goats, and the broth of abominable things, and we, in reply, say only this:

That the rapid influx of the whole kingdom of unrest to the vortex of this new opening, proves where the hollowness existed, and what the common want has been. If shallow souls have not escaped that want, and have enacted folly in their haste to be wise-and self-inflated souls have essayed to offer their own foolishness as wisdom, to the disgust of the wise, and the disgrace of the weak-charge it not on us, nor on our faith! Too eager, because too needy, they have grasped the dross with the gold, the husks with the bountiful wisdom, and counted both alike precious—all sacred which bore the mark of mystery on its forehead. Charge it

not on us, I say, but on the dry fountains that have given them no water-the old shepherds that have famished their souls with sapless husks; for, Mr. Chairman, we know that a well-fed flock will not hurry into poorer pasture, and that a starved flock will hardly be select in any.

Among all sects there are glib tongues, whose opinions have not a deep root in their souls; because they never question an experience, never analyze a thought, never chase home an emotion to the heart. At the announcement of any subject, they open their lips to instruct the wise-and their smooth words run like water from the mouths of those horrid Gargoyles, carved at the corners of old feudal castles, and the eager hearer strains every faculty to get a meaning from their words. They seem full as a fountain in Spring, but give out only what should be claimed by the waste-pipe. There is also a class of brains that seem to act automatically, and if one could know what they had last heard upon a given subject, he could at once determine what they would next utter upon it. These children of volubility belong on the benches, and must let their thought take root, before any amount of inspiration will make them teachers of an intelligent public. And, friends of the Platform, have we not wrung this lesson from our twenty-six years of experiencethat our Platform must nourish the brain and soul of intelligent people, or drop from beneath our feet? But while we keep steadily before us our first noble purpose-good-will to humanity, and a better hope for all-we shall escape many of the worst abuses of the popular platform, and have only to be patient with some earnest oddities, tolerant with some sincere platitudinarians, and the crudities of half-development-and of these we can well be tolerant-while the great Platform movement, as a unit, sets steadily on to the end that is Highest, and so, at last, must come by the way that is Purest!

A LESSON OF LIFE.

J. ELFRETH WATKINS.

`EACH not the young to think of death with fear,

TEA

With awful dread to contemplate the hour,

When soul, no longer linked to mortal clay,

Shall rise, triumphant, to the realms of love

Immortal as its great primeval Font;

The source of all that's just, and pure, and good

Amid the mystic music of the Spheres

To dwell for aye; 'mong all the sages wise,

And warriors great, who've walked this mundane Sphere,

E'er since from chaos it was first redeemed.

The same great law, that rules in simple things
Controls the lives of all. For all on Earth
Must die-must die to live again. The rose,
Chilled to its heart by Winter's blast, seems dead,
But gentle Spring, with genial warmth, calls forth
Its fragrant blossoms to new life. Renewed

In strength it rises from its grave, to fill

Its place in God's all-wise design. And so

Shall we, the mightiest creatures of His hand,

Rise from the dust-made pure and more refined—
To bud and blossom on the flowery hills
That mark the boundary of the Angel-land.
E'en as a Rose, transplanted to good soil,
And cared for with a gentle hand, each day
Gives forth a sweeter perfume from its buds—
So we transplanted to the sunnier shores,
Where Angel-gardeners nurse and cherish each
Outgrowth of soul-will grow more pure and sweet,
And bloom and shed our fragrance on the shore
Where first in wildness we took root.

1

"S

SWEDENBORG.

BY GEORGE SEXTON, M.D., LLD.

In deep trance-slumbers, when the world, asleep,
Lay in the arms of Night, and wept or smiled,
His liberated soul raised from its dust.

We led him far beyond the veils, and floods,

And labyrinths of sleep; the clouds of death
And all the shadowed dwellers in the world

Were far beneath him. Through his consciousness,
Streamed the celestial sunrise.

Cities and temples of celestial space

Were mirrored in his mind."

T. L. HARRIS.

WEDENBORG; or, The Mystic," so Emerson heads his essay on this extraordinary man. But what is a mystic? It may mean a person who suffers from an aberration of intellect, and who, under the influence of a species of insanity, writes that which no rational being can understand, and which, in truth, is meaningless, to him from whose brain it springs. On the other hand, the term may be used to describe one who has a deeper insight into nature than his fellows, and whose powers so far transcend those of ordinary mortals that his whole soul lives in a region only familiar to a favored few, and whose language is not comprehended by the mass of mankind, simply because the ideas that he endeavors to express are such as they can neither comprehend nor appreciate. Swedenborg belonged essentially to this latter class. He rides down the ages like a mighty Colossus, in the presence of whom even great men look like pigmies. Seldom indeed, in the history of the world, has such a man appeared; and perhaps it is better for humanity that it should be so, since the light of more than

one sun in the firmament at the same time would dazzle to excess, and perhaps injure thereby. He stood alone in his generation, and no one since has in any way approached him in point of greatness.

He was an isolated specimen of humanity. One foot of his he planted in this world and the other he rested firmly in the celestial region. Half his time he was a practical student of Nature in her most material domain, though always discovering a spirituality in her laws which other men failed to see; and the remaining half he dwelt in spirit-land, holding converse with beings, real or imaginary, which it was not given to other eyes to perceive. His notion of the two worlds was that they were curiously intermingled the one with the other, and that, consequently, it was possible to live, to some extent, in both-a doctrine which modern Spiritualism has done much to make popular since that time. He was not only a great thinker, but a most practical man and a voluminous writer. When one looks at the numerous books that sprang from his mighty brain and ever-active pen, to say that astonishment must be the result is to use too mild a term. And when it is remembered that these are upon the most varied topics, such as Decimal Coinage, Tides, the Construction of Docks, Sluices, Algebra, Physiology, Natural Philosophy and Mineralogy, on the one hand; and "Heaven and Hell," "The Wisdom and Love of God," "Angelic Wisdom," "The New Jerusalem and its Heavenly Doctrine” on the other, it will be seen at once that few very few-human beings could have been competent to the task of their production. In all his books he displayed not merely the inspiration of a genius, but the insight of a seer. He looked through the external coatings of Nature and saw the secret springs by which she was moved. "We enjoy in Nature," says Jean Paul Richter, "not barely what we see (for were it so the woodsman and the poet would feel only the same pleasure), but we enjoy that which we impute to what we see, and our feeling for