COLLECTANEA.

TRANSCENDENTALISM.-"If you wish to know the origin of the word transcendentalism I will explain it, briefly and simply, as I understand it. All who know anything of the different schools of metaphysics are aware that the philosophy of John Locke was based on the proposition that all knowledge is received into the soul through the medium of the senses; and thence passes to be judged of and analysed by the understanding. The German school of metaphysics, with the celebrated Kant at its head, rejects this proposition as false; it denies that all knowledge is received through the senses, and maintains that the highest, and therefore most universal truths, are revealed within the soul, to a faculty transcending the understanding. This faculty they call pure reason; it being peculiar to them to use that word in contradistinction to the understanding. To this pure reason, which some of their writers call "the God within," they believe that all perceptions of the good, the true, and the beautiful, are revealed, in its unconscious quietude; and that the province of the understanding, with its five hand-maids, the senses, is confined merely to external things, such as facts, scientific laws, &c." WHAT MAKES A GENTLEMAN ?- More than one correspondent asks us, "what makes a gentleman?" We cannot answer the enquiry in a word. A gentleman is sooner and more easily known than described. Nature must do something for him, education-we do not mean mere book learning-does all the rest. Many rich men are styled gentlemen by courtesy, and many poor men are denied the title, because they cannot afford to support it "after a fashion." Both, however, are, in the main, correctly estimated. The money of the one commands insincere servility-that is limited; the character of the other insures consideration and respect-those are general. Gentility means honour and refinement. It is ungentlemanly not to pay a tailor's bill as it is to repudiate a gambling debt "of honour"-in fact it is ungentlemanly to do anything that does not become an honest citizen and a Christian. The age of chivalry was an age of gentlemen-in the rough; the spirit of chivalry was purely gentlemanly; it professed all that is good, and gracious, brave, charitable, and pious. There is peculiar to a gentleman, a blending of delicacy and daring, modesty and manliness, truth and trustworthiness, candour and prudence, proper pride and becoming condescension, which belongs to no other individual: a blending of opposite qualities, which makes the perfect and harmonious whole. He learns to command himself, and is fit to control others. His self-respect is not so great as to blind him to the merits of his acquaintances. His acquired and occasional reserve agrees with his natural affability and condescension. It took Lord Chesterfield many pages to find out what is gentlemanly-nobody wants to be told what is not so. The greatest affront that can be offered to an Englishman, is, to be told that he is "no gentleman." By such an accusation you wound him on every moral point, and he fires at the thought. The veriest "snob" quails beneath the charge-his self-love cannot withstand it. The vulgar railer against gentility, in its proper sense, is a hopeless outcast-the reviler of all that elevates human nature. There is a mawkish, spurious, and unwholesome state termed genteel; but in reality it is most contemptible. Whether it be exhibited in such individuals as Hotspur's "certain lord," who, "but for vile guns would have been a soldier;" or whether it shows itself in would-be fine people, it matters not; the fastidiousness

of one and the pretension of the other are equally ridiculous. True gentility cannot be "exclusive,” any more than virtue. The needy man may aspire to become a gentleman-at least in mind and feeling. A king cannot be more he may be less. Certain worldly advantages, which some are born to, others inherit, and many acquire, may, and in most cases do materially help to form and maintain the title and character of an English gentleman. Money has helped to make many men good and happy, others wicked and miserable: the want of it has been known to do the same. Neither of these consequences is certain. In the former case, a man fills his station, and disgraces or adorns ' it; in the latter, he merely fills his station, or rises above it. Personal distinctions are not as they were. Gentility is not Rank and Title, although it should always belong to both. Morality and intellectuality bring all men to their proper bearings, and all worthy men to a level. There is no legal standard for a gentleman, any more than for superiority in works of art. Fine clothes, and fine words, and even fine ideas, make, as it were, the gilt frame to a picture-setting off the whole, but apart from the intrinsic merit of the production. How many 66 mere copies" and wretched "originals" are elaborately framed and highly varnished? A man may claim his right to the title of Duke, or Lord or Baronet, or even Esquire, he may insist upon being called a gentleman, but by what means does he compel people to regard him as such?" DE FOE AND HIS CREDITORS." They consented to compound his liabilities for five thousand pounds, and to take his personal security for the payment. In what way he discharged this claim, and what reward they had who trusted him, an anecdote of thirteen years later date (set down in the book of an enemy) will tell. While the coffee-houses raged against him at the opening of the reign of Anne, a knot of intemperate assailants in one of them were suddenly interrupted by a person who sat at a table apart from theirs. "Come, gentlemen," he said, "let us do justice. I know this De Foe as well as any of you. I was one of his creditors; compounded with him, and discharged him fully. Years afterwards he sent for me; and though he was clearly discharged, he paid me all the remainder of his debt voluntarily, and of his own accord; and he told me, that, so far as God should enable him, he meant to do so with every body." The man added, that he had placed his signature to a paper of acknowledgment, after a long list of other names. Of many witnesses to the same effect, only one other need be cited. Four years later, when the House of Lords was the scene of a libel worse than that of the coffee-house disputants, but with no one to interrupt it, De Foe himself made an unpretending public statement, to the effect that the suns he had at that time discharged of his own mere motion, without obligation," with a numerous family, and no help but his own industry," amounted to upwards of twelve thousand pounds. Not as a matter of pride did he state this, but to intimate that he had not failed in duty. The discharge of law could not discharge the conscience. "The obligation of an honest mind can never die."

EXPEDIENT TO ESCAPE SLAVERY.-" On the 8th of June, a box labelled, "This side up, with care," marked, "To J. Bennett, Louisville, Kentucky," and, in another place "crockery-ware," was brought up to the wharf, at Memphis, preparatory to shipping. Soon after the box was landed on the wharf-boat, a strange noise was heard within, and upon its being opened, a live negro was taken from it. He had been almost suffocated in his confinement: hence the alarm. It seems that

this negro, who was a slave belonging to a gentleman in the vicinity of Memphis, had paid J. Bennett, a free negro, fifteen dollars to transport him to a free state, and he, according to contract, boxed him up, and would have set him at liberty had he been successful."

SEASONABLE ALLUSIONS." Leaves dropping from the trees in autumn, may well be compared to the friendship of this world; while the sap of maintenance lasts, friends swarm in abundance; but in the winter of need they leave the neglected naked.”

MODESTY." Modesty is the appendage of sobriety, and is to chastity, to temperance, and to humility, as the fringes are to a garment."

BRIEF BELIEF.-"A sceptic once said to the learned Dr. Parr that he would not believe anything that he could not understand; to which the doctor wittily replied, "Then, sir, your creed will be the shortest of any man's I know."

OVER ANXIETY.-" Almost all men are overr anxious. No sooner do they enter the world, than they lose their taste for natural and simple pleasures, so remarkable in early life. Every hour do they ask themselves what progress they have made in the pursuit of wealth and honour? and on they go, as their fathers went before them, till weary and sick at heart, they look back with a sigh of regret to the golden time of childhood."

LOVE AND HATRED." If I hate, I deprive myself of something; if I love, I am the richer by what I love. Pardon is the recovery of an alienated possession-human hatred a prolonged suicide-selfishness the greatest poverty of a created being."

CURIOUS EMIGRATION OF ANTS.-"In the month of June, says a correspondent of the Aberdeen Journal, my gooseberry bushes were infested with a very destructive species of caterpillar, and with a view of having them destroyed, I caused a bushel of the ants, Formica Rufa to be conveyed from Shin Glen and distributed amongst the bushes, which they perfectly cleared of the varment in two days. At the end of that period, however, the little creatures appeared in deep contemplation, gathered together in groups, and on a sudden marched off in the most perfect order to a neighbouring ant-hill (which no doubt some of their scouts had discovered,) where a succession of defeats and victories occurred before they were admitted to the freedom of the burgh.”

"A wise man should not obstinately adhere to particular habits and customs, nor should he be like a weathercock to change with every wind of fashion."

"If there be one habit more than another the dry rot of all that is high and generous in youth, it is the habit of ridicule. The lip ever ready with the sneer, the eye on the watch for the ludicrous, must always dwell on the external; and most of what is good and great lies below the surface."

"THERE is this difference between happiness and wisdom. He that thinks himself the happiest man is really so, but he that thinks himself the wisest is generally the greatest fool."

June 17, 1846.

POETRY.

LINES.

Our noble craft is wisely based
On well judged mysteries,
And each advancing step is traced
Progressively by threes.

First is the opening glimpse of light,
Then the more high award;
The third, in blest effulgence bright,
Of both is the reward.

So in the charities we claim,
Exclusively our own,

To feed and educate, our aim,
Too long was only known.
But in this great-this last degree,
Our charity has made,

A higher, holier, thought we see,
THE nobler third displayed.
The orphan and the penniless
Right well our help demand,-
What Mason ever knew distress
And could withhold his hand?
From them we may expect return-
From these, alas! but one-
The light from charity's pure urn,
More brilliant than the sun.

EDWARD RALEIGH MORAN.

THE ENCHANTED LAKE.

From "An Hour in Fairy Land."

THERE is in the west of Ireland a lake called the "Enchanted Lake," whose depths are the supposed habitations of the "Good people." In this lake many young men had at various times been drowned, and what made the circumstance more remarkable was, that their bodies were never found. People at length wondered at this, and at last it was believed that the drowned young men were not drowned at all, but that they were taken by the Fairies, and kept there for their sweethearts. I suppose at any rate it was supposed-that they were endowed with perpetual youth, and the place is called the Enchanted Lake to this day. I was told of a poor Irish girl whose lover was upset in a boat and lost upon this lake; I endeavoured to console her in the accompanying song:

Ah! linger not by that gloomy shore,

The treasures beneath it come back no more;
I know the beloved of thy heart is there,
That he sunk in the wave-but why despair?
They do not die who have sunk below,
'Tis but to the fairy realms they go;
Then, Norah, dear, for thy lover's sake
Mourn not-he dwells in the fairy lake!

Norah! thy Dennis was young and brave
When his boat went down in the closing wave;
But under that wave-as the old wives say—
Is the land of youth, where's no decay.
Then Norah think that his young bright form
Shall never decay 'mid time and storm;
And mourn no more, for his own dear sake,
That he dwells below-in the fairy lake.

LINES

J. E. CARPENTER.

ON THE ARRIVAL OF THE FIRST STEAM MAIL-PACKET THE THAMES," COMMANDED BY CAPTAIN HASTE, R.N., AT NASSAU,* NEW PROVIDENCE,

BAHAMAS.

"

"What will not man attempt," so sang the bard†
Mecænas lov'd, "when wealth is the reward?
What ought not man assay, when virtue's meed
Prompts the bold task and consecrates the deed;
When universal good, with smiling eye
Invites to taste the sweets of ev'ry sky;
And enterprise, subservient to the cause
Of truth's best interest, forbids to pause;
When distant shores, scarce visited by man,
Sigh for instruction in Redemption's plan.
And Albion's sons, as generous as brave,
Bold to explore and ever quick to save;

With hearts, which, while they scorn the foeman's fears,
Can beat for other's woes-for other's tears.

Dead to their own, alive to other's care,

Find for themselves but cravings of despair?

Oh, see where, dumb with grief, they thoughtful stand
In useless woe, a melancholy band,

The stalwart race of England, doom'd to feel,

E'en worse than ocean's rage, or foeman's steel-
Want §-with'ring ev'ry hope with canker blight-
Want-dark'ning ev'ry joy with sorrow's night-
Want-forcing those with ruthless hand to part,||
Whom love and nature make but one in heart;
And consecrated ties have bound to share
One common roof of happiness or care!
Yet, cease, ye sons of industry, from grief;
The First Great Cause of all supplies relief.
Let suff'ring patience bear you up awhile;

'Though hard your lot, hope brightens with a smile;
Bids emulation other lands explore,

And poverty at home bewail no more.

The writer was then at this place, when the event alluded to occurred. + Horace.

In allusion to emigration.

§ Referring to the great distress amongst the poor classes some short time back, consequent on want of employment and low wages.

Whatever expediency or policy may advance in support of that system of poor law, which separates the wife from the husband, and the children from the parents, as the existing one in England now does, on economical and prudential motives; humanity, civil rights, and religion condemn, and ever must stamp it, as unworthy an enlightened nation.