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Or the Discourse from the perusal of which we have just risen, more cannot be said, and less ought not to be said, than that it is well worthy both of its occasion and theme, and of the rising and rapidly maturing promise of its accomplished author. Mr. Bellows speaks evidently from a mind deeply imbued with a sympathetic compre hension of what it was his noble though mournful task to describe. Earnest and conscientious, his sole aim seems to be to utter the true thought and the true feeling with which mind and heart are filled in the contemplation of the memory of the great dead, in an unaffected and unembellished manner, a manner in harmony with the spirit of his subject, simple while solemn, strong while subdued, and alike free from ambition of eloquence and exaggeration of excited enthusiasm. If he glows, he does not seek to glitter. If he satisfies the reason, and calls out a full flow of the sympathies of his hearer or reader, he makes no attempt to charm his fancy or court his admiration. Or if ever his step betrays a tendency to stray from the line of a severer simplicity of style by which he evidently strives to walk, he promptly checks and recalls it, seeming to remember that the ground he treads upon is holy. If ever he indulges for a moment any rhetorical temptation, as when he exclaims

"City of the Pilgrims! Eye and heart of New England! how art thou spoiled of thy beauty! As on one of thy battlecrowned hills rises at length to its capital

No. LIV.

that proud column of freedom, which gives the traveller and the sun their earliest welcome and their last farewell, from another of thy heights suddenly falls a nobler and more costly pillar of thy glory and thy strength-visible beyond oceans, and a Pharos to the world!"—

he is quick to perceive that his heightened voice is out of accord with the more subdued and sober tone of language and of mind appropriate to the occasion; and remarking that "this is not the way in which he would be spoken of," he invites us to proceed with him to "more calmly contemplate the character of this great and good man."

Dr. Channing passed from the present mode of existence on the afternoon of the second of October, of a typhus fever-at the same hour at which the calm glory of an unclouded Sabbath sunset seemed to be a reflection of that higher sublimity which it looked upon, in the departure from the earth of a still mightier, a still diviner light. In our present notice of this event we desire that no reader will connect our remarks with any reference to such opinions with which Dr. Channing stood identified, as are foreign to the general scope of this Review; and especially is it proper for us to disclaim allusion to the peculiar theology of which he was for many years the head and representative in this country. We refer to him as a great moralist, reformer, philanthropist, and Democrat. "A calamity," says Mr. Bellows, "has befallen our faith, our country, the

A Discourse occasioned by the Death of William Ellery Channing, D.D., pronounced before the Unitarian Societies of New York and Brooklyn, in the Church of the Messiah, October 13th, 1842. By Henry W. Bellows. Published by request. New York: Charles S. Francis and Company. 1842.

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church, and the world." A calamity, we add, has befallen the cause of those great moral principles of freedom, progress, love, and truth, to which this Review has always declared its devotion; and which, more or less truly and efficiently, through all the move ment and machinery of the politics of the times, it has always aimed to pursue. It is fitting and right, therefore, that we should not allow such an event to pass-the event of the year -without at least a brief record in these pages, and a brief tribute of the grateful and affectionate reverence due to the memory of such a man, from every friend of the high and holy truths which he wrote, wrought, lived, and was. In a future Number we will endeavor to give our readers an engraved portrait of Dr. Channing, believing that there will be found few among them, however widely separated from him on any particular points of opinion, for whom it will not possess an interest and value, to contemplate and preserve, second to none other within the whole range of contemporaneous selection.

More than any other individual writer, speaker, or actor of the age, Dr. Channing may, we think, be regarded as the highest embodiment, the most complete expression and organ, of its spirit, we mean that spirit of a free, bold, hopeful, and progressive Humanity, which is now beginning to manifest itself, at the same time so deeply and so widely, in the new and growing civilisation of the epoch, the ChristianDemocratic. We shall not attempt the impossible calculation of how far he ought to be regarded as an active influence and power the creation of this young school of a new political and religious philosophy, whose impress is already to be seen marking itself so deeply upon the mould of the times; or how far rather himself a result and effect of the existence of its spirit, already widely distributed through the mass of the moral intelligence of the age, and working strongly upward, though scarcely yet to any great extent apparent on the surface until it embodied and uttered itself in him. We are not of those who are prone to exaggerate the relative power of individual minds over the collective mind of their time. Few among the great men" of any epoch are, after all, much in advance of their age. If

the mountain summit is the first to catch the direct ray, there is already, even then, considerable light diffusing itself, through a common and all-pervading atmosphere, over the humblest depth of the valley, and presently the full flood of the heavenly radiance will be equally poured over all alike. The diadem that crowns the crest of the hill does not bring the light, though it may be the earliest manifestation and reflection of it, flaming across the plain, to the upturned eyes of men, as a signal of its coming, of its arrival already come. So, therefore, we do not agree with some whose enthusiasm would elevate Dr. Channing to a position above his rightful claim, as a creator and cause of that of which he was so glorious an effect and example. Had he not risen up in the midst of our assemblage, with his sweet voice of apostolic fervor and power, the same spirit that kindled its tones as with a coal from the altar, would have poured out the necessary, the irrepressible utterance of itself through other lips,the cloven tongue of fire would have descended upon another head,-and there were many, doubtless, ripe and ready for its reception, and for the mission which Providence made his. So, too, do we differ from those whose sorrow exaggerates the importance of the loss we have sustained in him. He had spoken and acted himself out, with a completeness not often, it seems to us, to be declared of other men. He had done his work; all that he was v allotted to do-all, probably, that he could do; and he has laid himself beside it to rest, in a venerable maturity of years. He had a word given him to speak, and he has spoken it over and over again; in many variations and applications. He might perhaps have continued to repeat it in other modes, and on fresh occasions as they might arise, but it would have been still the same thing. While in his writings his voice yet speaks to his age, as sweet and as strong as though it still issued from his living tongue.

That we should protest against being understood, in these remarks, in any sense at all depreciating to Dr. Channing's real power and influence, cannot be necessary. It is precisely because they were so great that many persons are apt now to run into the error of an exaggeration in their estimate of them.

We only desire to reduce it within the just bounds of reason and truth. He most undoubtedly did exert a vast though quiet power. He spoke the great ideas of the age so persuasively and so powerfully that men could not continue insensible to them; he illustrated them so beautifully in his own daily walk of life that we could not refuse to them our admiration and love; he exhibited in himself so pure and perfect a model of what they could and ought to make a man, that none who witnessed it could fail to become alike wiser and better by the contemplation of such example, and cheered by it to a more hopeful striving forward and upward along the shining track of his footsteps. Upon the rising generation particularly, the young men just now in the act of coming forward upon the broad stage of life, did this moral influence exerted by his life and writings operate most strongly. In his hopefulness, in his enthusiasm, in his faith in good and in God, he was as one of them. His word went direct to the deepest seat of all their best sympathies and noblest aspirations. Many such a one has he rescued from the spiritual perdition of doubt and despair. From before many a young eye has his hand rolled away the cloud of darkness which had begun to settle as a death-pall upon the harmony and grandeur of the moral creation around it. And many a young man, we doubt not, has been at once stimulated and strengthened by him to record the vow, at the inmost and holiest shrine of his own soul, to be, to make himself, a true man--not utterly unworthy of the glorious possibility of his own better semi-angelic nature; to cast from him with a noble scorn the fetters of selfishness and sensuality with which a false and bad society so basely enslaves us, and to devote himself, even though it yield him no other reward than the happiness of the martyr, to good, to truth, to liberty, and to love. Who, who, we repeat, can number the young souls, scattered through the length and breadth of the land, -already perhaps unconsciously and vaguely stirred with an undeveloped tendency toward this direction, derived from the spreading influence of the spirit of the age-which have been thus quickened and brought forth by him into the light of a new moral life, for which they ever after will recognize

an obligation due to him, as a spiritual parent, far outweighing the natural debt of gratitude for the mere boon of common existence ?

But we wrong our readers in withholding from them such extracts as our limits permit, from Mr. Bellows's fine analysis of Dr. Channing's moral and mental character and life. Although it is not easy to make satisfactory selections from a production which we would strongly recommend in its entireness to the perusal of all within whose reach it may fall, we gladly enrich our pages-in preference to giving them to the reflections thronging on our own mind in association with the luminous name at their head-with all for which we are at present able to make room. The following present a comprehensive portraiture of his personal history and private life, in which no others will see an exaggeration of coloring, but those who have not enjoyed the opportunity of seeing and knowing personally, that of which the recollection remains like one of the most precious of memories in the hearts of his friends:

"Of his personal history, there is little to be said. He is known to the world not by the variety of ways in which he has appeared upon the stage, not by having acted upon many points, or pubhaving provoked incessant attention, or lished many books. He has neither run the usual career of a great preacher nor He has done what he has done, in the a great author, nor a great philanthropist. process of a calm, common, and uneventful life. He has been chiefly instrumental in great changes in public sentiment, without leading any party. He is the acknowledged head of a religious denomination, without ever having heartily cooperated with any organized sect. He has set thousands of minds into excited activity without a particle of bustle in his own life. For thirty years the unpretending pastor of a church in Boston, he mission than feeble health demanded, to devoted himself without any other interthe teaching of Christian truth as he felt

and knew it in his own heart, to the cor

rection of erroneous theological views and opinions, which conflicted with the spiritual growth of his own people. Preaching rarely anywhere but at home, not seeking notoriety, nor anxious to widen, so he might deepen his influence, using no tricks of oratory to attract the

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"Dr. Channing's public character was his private character. He knew no distinction between public and private morality. As you saw him abroad, such he was at home, conducting the smallest details of his life upon the broadest and loftiest principles. His natural temper must have been sweet, for I cannot learn that it ever improved, and no one saw that it was capable of improvement. An undisturbed serenity reigned over his soul, He would not allow himself to read or hear the attacks that were sometimes made upon him, abroad and at home, He carried on public controversy with the same angelic temper with which he managed private and friendly discussions.

popular attention, and producing at no of them, Both are simple, grand, and time any outward excitement, he led as inspiring. retired and unassuming a career as his humbler brethren. His talents did not dazzle, his eloquence intoxicate, his peculiarities attract. His church, though usually full, was never thronged. There was nothing there to please the common ear, nor excite the popular passions. His ministry was not attended by showy results; his people as a people, were not specially spiritual, his society by no means the pattern society of the place. And yet at this very time, and on these unmarked occasions, and in this quiet way, he was saying that which went down deeper into the hearts open to his influence, than any word that had been uttered from the pulpit for centuries. In the patient and painful thoughtfulness of his secluded life, he was in high and close communion with God and his truth. And it was the light and life that were in his discourse "His stature was small, and his frame that vivified and illuminated the best slight. There seemed only enough body minds that approached him. He did not to anchor his soul among us. His health move or enlighten masses in his earlier was extremely feeble, and he had led the life, but he mightily moved, and, as it life of an invalid for thirty years. This were, recreated a few. It doubtless made him more contemplative than he might otherwise have been. It narrowed his activity in one kind only to widen it in another. Had he been better able to labor as a parochial minister, he might have been less a philanthropist and philosopher, and the world have lost what his people gained. The slenderness and debility of his frame gave an increased expressiveness to his character and discourse. His head was so full and finely turned, that no sense of diminutiveness disturbed you, and least of all in the pulpit. His countenance was surpassingly beautiful. Heavenly-mindedness, truth, compassion, love, and peace, reposed in his features. His voice, tremulous always, was melodious and melting beyond any parallel; and his articulation distinct and elegant, but simple, slow, and slightly delayed, had the effect of those notes in music which reluctantly give way to each other. His eloquence was persuasive, but not he, but truth and love took you captive. He had no peculiarities of manner. There was nothing oratorical in his discourses; for they read as well as they sounded, which can never be true of artificial eloquence. His gesture you neither minded nor missed. He left you full of the subject and not of himself. And if an occasional hearer only, you went from his discourse with a feeling that it was an era in your moral life. He was rarely heard by any aspiring mind without the inward thought, I could not have done without that help, and it is by the special providence of God that I am

is by the instruments he has created, that the palpable influence of Dr. Channing must be measured, He stands alone in the reverence and gratitude of many men, equal among themselves in ability and usefulness, and none of them second to any but him. He is a class by himself, both in the mode and the kind of his influence. It is of a higher order, and a more profound depth. It is nearer the centre of moral motion. It is this which accounts for the nature of his reputation, which is as great abroad as at home, and no greater, if as great in his own city, than wherever the English language is known. His influence is not diminished by distance, because its seat is the mind and soul of those who receive his spirit. There is no more enthusiasm about him, felt by those who know him, than by those who intelligently read him, because his greatness resides in the grandeur of the truth he embodies alike in his writings and his character. You do not need to see that he is what he preaches or writes, For the truths he reveals, the emotions he awakens, attest their own genuineness, and leave you not only without suspicion, but without thought of him. His presence neither disappoints nor heightens your idea of him. You expect to see a man of uniform elevation of mind, and dignified simplicity of manners, and such he is found. He converses about things always with reference to principles, and the same principles. His conversation is as great as his writings, and as if a part

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