NATURE IN AMERICA.

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of the tall cedars, an hundred feet high. No description is rich enough to answer to what I saw on the Ohio-its slopes and clumps and groves. At the foot of these hills runs the river, broad and full-busy with the commerce of the wide West.

*

It is an absorbing thing to watch the progress of world-making-both the formation of the natural and conventional world. I witnessed both in America. I saw something of the process of creating the natural globe in the depths of one of the largest caves in the world. In its depths-in this noiseless workshop, was Nature employed with her blind and dumb agents, fashioning mysteries which the earthquake of a thousand years hence may bring to light, to give man a new sense of the shortness of this life. I saw something of the process of world-making behind the fall of Niagara, in the thunder cavern, when the rocks that have stood forever, tremble to their fall, amidst the war of the unexhausted floods. I stood where soon human foot shall stand no more. Foothold after foothold is destined to be thrown down, till, after more ages than the world has yet known, the last rocky barrier shall be overpowered. Niagara itself, is but one of the shifting scenes of life, like all of the outward that we hold most permanent. Niagara itself, like the systems of the sky, is one of the hands of Nature's clock, moving though too slowly to be perceived by the unheeding still moving to mark the lapse of time. While I stood in the wet whirlwind, with the crystal roof above me, the thundering floor beneath me, and the foaming whirlpool and rushing flood before me,-I saw those quiet studious hours of the future world, when this cataract shall have become a tra dition.

HARRIET MARTINEAU.

The Leaf.

FROM A TREE STANDING NEAR SIR ISAAC NEWTON'S DWELLING.

LEAF of the green and shadowy tree,

That guards the window, where the eye

Of Newton once looked forth to see
The glorious host arrayed on high:
Thy root holds fast the distant sod,
That gave his foot a resting place,
Untiring, while his spirit trod

Ethereal heights the spheres to trace.

Thou art to me a beaming page,

Aye, volume! and in radiant lines
The story of a deathless sage

On thy fair verdant surface shines.
While I peruse thee as a tome,

To fancy's eye, bright visions rise :
She hovers round his earthly home,
She soars where he surveyed the skies.

I bend in homage to his worth,

The power, the beauty of his mind,
That shows wherein it moved on earth
By brilliant tracery left behind;
And he to whom a falling fruit

Mysterious Nature's problem solved,
Unerring, up through space could shoot,
And span the spheres as they revolved.

As through the solar world he moved,
Among its beaming mechanism,

THE LEAF.

His lucid thoughts at will he proved
To have the power of lens or prism:
And measuring those proud realms afar,
With angel speed and prophet sight,
He set his foot from star to star,

His waymarks were the orbs of light.

Yet not alone for earth and time,
Did that aspiring spirit rise-
But for the science more sublime,

To bear the palm beyond the skies.
His soul with love of truth inspired,
No love in baser rest could find,
Till that vast mind, divinely fired,

Broke forth with light for all mankind.

He sought her, studying Nature's laws,

And these harmonious proved for menHe traced her to her Great First Cause, By Prophet's voice and Gospel pen: And she then made so strong and clear, The crystal of his telescope,

It brought unearthly wealth so near,

"T was seen by Faith and grasped by Hope.

Newton! to thee where truth unveils

Her lovely image to thy view,

Are not the philosophic scales

Thou here hast used, proved just and true?

Did not her clear sweet accents tell,
While she bestowed this diadem,

That when that earthly apple fell,
It was her angel snapped the stem ?
That when she saw thy soul ascend,
To seek her from the blushing fruit,

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She bade that holy servant bend
His pinion for thy parachute!
To that fair attribute of heaven,

That daughter of the King Most High,
When thy young heart so soon was given,
She gave to thee thy seer's eye.

How many a bright celestial hue,
She to thy vision made appear,
Which others ne'er discover, through
Earth's dust and vapoury atmosphere.
She taught the fair analysis

Of rays, which made thy spirit mount,
Seeking a truer mould than this,-

Of life's pure streams to find the fount.

And thus thy high discoveries made,
The science thus attained by thee,
Have made thy memory ne'er to fade,―
Thy glory for eternity.

'Tis from the freshness of the one,

My leaf hath verdure not its own,

While from the other, as a sun,

This radiance o'er the green is thrown.

H. F. GOULD.

THE good man goes not upon enmity, but rewards with kindness the very being who injures him. So the sandal-wood while it is felling, imparts to the edge of the axe its aromatic flavour. HINDOO EPIGRAM.

James Layler.

JAMES NAYLER was born in the parish of Ardesley, in Yorkshire, 1616. His father was a substantial farmer of good repute and competent estate; and he, in consequence, received a good education. At the age of twenty-two, he married and removed to Wakefield parish, which has since been made classic ground by the pen of Goldsmith. Here, an honest, religious farmer, he tilled his soil, and alternated between cattle-markets and Independent conventicles. In 1641, he obeyed the summons of "my Lord Fairfax" and the Parliament, and joined a troop of horse composed of sturdy Independents, doing such signal service. against "the man of Belial, Charles Stuart," that he was promoted to the rank of quarter-master, in which capacity he served under General Lambert, in his Scottish campaign. Disabled at length by sickness, he was honorably dismissed from the service, and returned to his family in 1649.

For three or four years, he continued to attend the meetings of the Independents, as a zealous and devout member. But it so fell out, that in the winter of 1651, George Fox, who had just been released from a cruel imprisonment in Derby jail, felt a call to set his face towards Yorkshire. "So travelling," says Fox, in his journal, "through the countries, to several places, preaching Repentance and the Word of Life, I came into the parts about Wakefield where James Nayler lived." The worn and weary soldier, covered with the scars of outward battle, received, as he believed, in the cause of God and his people, against Anti-Christ and oppression, welcomed with thankfulness the veteran of another warfare; who, in conflict with "principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places," had made his name a familiar one in every English hamlet. "He and Thomas Goodyear," says Fox, "came to me, and were both convinced, and received the truth." He soon after joined the