he tries hard enough; but I don't believe india-rubber over-shoes can be made out of lawyers' consciences. I believe there is a difference in quality, if not in price, between pure milk and chalk and water; but I don't believe the moon is a green cheese made out of the milky-way. I believe there are as many beautiul forms, noble minds, and just as pure blood running among the common peasantry as there is in high-born nobility; but I don't believe that fine clothes ever made a gentleman of a clown by nature or a blackguard by profession. I believe that a man can put himself down in the world much easier than he can be put down by others; but I don't believe a steamboat can be propelled by fever-and-ague power alone. I believe no persuasive preaching can coax you into heaven if you are determined to go to the other place; and I don't believe you can prevent a young couple from committing matrimony when they have both agreed to do the deed, and feel in firstrate order for it. I believe that the brute creation is possessed of a mysterious instinct, which is more valuable to them than reason is to man; but I don't think a frog knows enough to go into the water when it rains. I believe a woman can do the most scolding when she has a lot of children about her; but I don't believe a hen clucks any louder whether she has two or a dozen chickens at her heels. I believe that going to bed late and getting up late is taking a kind of cross-cut to the church-yard; but I don't believe it is in consequence of early rising that makes the sun so bright and cheerful in his old age. My dear friends-I believe and disbelieve a good many things which I don't think it necessary to mention; but I believe this :that if you don't grow wiser and better as you grow older, the little stock of happiness you now have on hand will gradually decrease till finally it is all wafted away like the fragrance of a flower. You will fall into bad habits, and become morally as mouldy as an old cheese that has lain in a damp cellar for a month of Sundays, and you will drop to the ground like a summer apple, rotten as soon as ripe. But if you only try to do well, I believe you can do it and be happy, just as easy as a sheep can walk over a stone wall into a clover lot. So mote it be! ON UNRECIPROCATED LOVE. TEXT. To love is painful, that is true- But oh! it gives the greatest pain MY HEARERS-I love to preach about love; for love forms a rosy wreath for the heart, in which the green leaves of friendship, the flowers of affection, and a few thorns of pain, are entwined, just for the sake of variety. It is the precious cement that adheres soul to soul-the food of angels in heaven, and a stimulant to mortals on earth. It smooths down the asperities of human nature -lines the breast with the velvet of sympathy-and gives a silken coating to the rough exterior of humanity. To love ardently, deeply, devoutly, I acknowledge is sometimes painful; nevertheless it is a pleasant pain, attended with some delightful sensations. It is a kind of inward itching, which requires the continual exercise of scratching, and yet the irritation is never allayed. The more we scratch, the more we itch-and nothing but matrimony can serve as an effectual remedy-and that, in too many instances, is far worse than the disease. My friends-not to love is also painful. To have all our thoughts entombed in the dark sepulchre of selfishness, and our hopes lost in the cold mists of misanthropy, is about as bad as being confined in a dungeon, to be fed with the fragments of one's former follies. The light of love, admitted through the windows of the heart, warms and nourishes the soil of the soul-causes the buds of benevolence to expand, and the capsules of charity to be filled with the ripe seeds of sympathy. Without the genial innocence of love, the bosom freezes and becomes as barren as a goose-pasture in winter. If a flower chances to bloom, it is destitute of fragrance; or, if it have any, it wastes its sweetness, as the poet says, upon the desert air. To be without love is like being without a fire in winter, a lamp at night, and a sun at mid-day. The heart that never loves is as hard as a brick-bat, as insensible as a pickled clam to all the finer feelings, and a stranger to every delightful emotion. An old bachelor, my friends, whose heart is never warmed with affection, is a miserable nobody in the world. He is as cold-blooded as a turtle, and looks as melancholy as a clam. His hopes die as soon as they begin to pin-feather-there is no more sentiment in his soul than there is music in a corn-stalk fiddle-his thoughts are wrapped up in the shroud of self-he knows not the pleasures attendant on the sexual amalgamation of soulshis abode is fixed in the solitary wild of celibacy, where all is cheerless, comfortless, and dreary. There he lives, and there he dies, unhonored and unwept ; and when he is finally carried away by the current of time, we can only say, There goes another parcel of rubbish into the gulf of eternity! corns. My hearers-it is painful to love, and painful not to lovepainful anyhow you can fix it; but oh! it is excruciating pain to love and not have it reciprocated! To go to an extravagant outlay of affection, and then have it all wasted, or sent home as sour as swill, is enough to make a man tear his shirt or tread on his own It's manslaughter for a girl to spurn a young chap's love, whe she knows that by so doing she drives the poor fellow to destruction in a considerable of a hurry. It's murder in the first degree-it's cruelty to helpless animals-it's worse than skinning eels alive; and any female guilty of such a wanton act ought to be courted by fiends during her life-time, and wedded to the devil at last. When any of you, my young male friends, get so tangled up with the object of your loves that you don't hardly know to which gender you belong, you know very well that you care a precious little who, what or how you are, so long as you remain in such a happy, pleasing perplexity; but let the least breeze of jealousy, doubt or disappointment blow, you straighten right out, like a dead frog. Your bosoms fill up with buttermilk and bitter meditations -your stomachs with bile, and your heads with suicidal ideas. You grow saturnine-get sick-neglect your business--and then, perhaps, to wind up the whole, admit the common atmosphere into your gizzards with a dirk knife, or ventilate your brains' cell with a pistol. Oh! unreciprocated love has fed the jaws of Death with many a precious morsel of humanity; and Cupid's arrow, which is said to tickle while it wounds, sometimes tickles pretty confounded hard. Its head is often dipped in poison, and wo betake the poor victim it pierces! I don't know, myself, exactly how a fellow feels when he loves almost to distraction, and then suddenly sees his adored flirting with, or wedded to, another; but I suppose he feels at first as though a piece of ice was thrust under his shirt, and his bosom ready to collapse. He must endure the tor ments of the damned, for a time at least; and the only way in which he can heal his wounds, is to plaster them over with the salve of forgetfulness, and swallow this consoling anodyne:-'There are yet as good fish in the sea as have ever been caught.' My dear friends-if you were all to love one another, in a moderate, but sincere, christianlike way, you might be sure of being loved, not only by your sister, woman, and your brother, man, but also by your Father, God. Then would peace, harmony and happiness prevail upon earth, and joy among the angels of heaven. Then would our thorn-covered ways be turned to flowery lawnsthen would the rank weeds of hatred put forth the sweet blossoms of friendship-and then might we all partake of the pleasures of love unpoisoned by pain. So mote it be! ON THE PRESENT DAY POETS. TEXT.-I've genius, I've fame, I've friends without number, Shall rot in my grave; Thou beautiful world! Must fade from my eyes! That never had been! MY DEAR FRIENDS-and foes, too, if I am blest with any!-I fear that there may be some among you who don't understand me, and my preaching. What makes me think so, is, that a man stopped me in the street the other day, and told me that he thought my sermons had a tendency to bring religion into ridicule. I at first shuddered at the idea, and a sort of chill crawled up my trousers' legs like a bushel of spiders; but I soon saw that the film of prejudice had grown pretty thick over the eyes of his understanding, and, moreover, that he often slept during my preaching; or, in other words, he didn't read my sermons enough to know more than a precious little about them. So I reasoned with him. I told him to examine carefully every one of my back discourses, and he would find that I never took a text from the Bible-never quoted from the scriptures-seldom or never referred to them—nor meddled with religion in any way. This brought him to his milk a little, and he could only find fault with the title, Short Patent Sermons.' Now, my friends, let me tell you, I call my discourses Sermons, because I go on in a sermonizing strain with whatever subject my fancy pitches upon. A sermon is not necessarily confined to religion. I cannot call them Lectures, as lectures merely elucidate subjects, or speculate upon theories, without giving admonition or friendly advice. I cannot call them Sentimental Cogitations, as such are not directed to an audience. I must have an audience to preach at; and, thank my stars, I have a large one, and a respectable one. I call them Patent, because their style is peculiar to myself: inherent within me, and I can't help it. They are short, because they are not long. This explains the whole, and if anybody can point out a single sentiment of mine clashing with the sensibilities of a christian-making due allowances for the eccentricities of my nature-I will forfeit my grey hairs to the makers of fiddle-bows. My tenacious friends! the words that compose my text were the last ones uttered, said or sung by a disconsolate old bachelor, who seemed to feel that the black curtain of death was about to drop between him and the gaze of an admiring world; that his talents and virtues were soon to be buried in the deep sea of oblivion, unpicked by memory, and never to be fished up by the grappling irons of recollection. He was disconsolate, because he knew that he had genius, fame and popularity, and that his friends without number would allow all these to sink into forgetfulness, soon after he himself had taken his leave, and become as a mere nothing that never had been. Yet the death-tone of his harp breathed melody, and put forth blossoms even in the cold December of the tomb! It was his bad fortune, my friends, to be a modern poet-to have a few tears wasted on his grave, and then remembered no more. When a minstrel dies at the present day, his harp is buried to rot with him; and the clod-worm dissevers its strings while feeding on his once-devoted heart. It is not suffered |