its rapidity, which is easily measured, however, by the apparent dizzying flight of the trees and fences.

In passing down the Hudson amidst the unrivalled scenery of its shores one cannot fail to be struck with the constantly increasing rush of the multitudes entering and departing from steamboats, at each of the stopping places. The customs of the boat indicated a much more vigilant apprehension in regard to the fare, than formerly. Dishonesty naturally advances in the same ratio with avarice, and avarice requires the hundred eyes of Argus to find the means to send every body upon their travels.

At length I embraced you, my dear friend, you, the playmate of my boyhood, the companion of my early studies, and connected in memory with every incident, project, pleasure, and vicissitude of my subsequent life. We once more saw together the church where we were baptized, and the church yard containing the remains of our parents and our kindred, the place of our first thoughts and imaginings, and beheld the faces of our kindred, and the companions of our first days, that still survive. What a change had time wrought, since our last visit to the same places! Many since then had passed beyond the last bourne. Others were scattered by their pursuits in different climates. One most justly dear had become utterly blind. Another, at whose hospitable table I had so often sat and listened to the merry tale and anecdote, sat apart in paralytic silence and melancholy. We have often expatiated on the theme, that the fashion of the world passeth away. It is such visits, made at intervals of years, that cause us to feel the truth.

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Manufactures build cities in the east, as agriculture does in the forests and prairies of the west. To me it affords matter of untiring interest to compare the changes introduced by the former and the latter. The one offers more show, fashion, vivacity, gayer dress and equipage, more movement, more amusing and sparkling conversation, in a word, a more forced and artificial life. me, however, the more quiet manners of those who guide the plough, and drive their herds and flocks afield, though more rustic, and it may be more awkward in their conversation and manners. Passing by Waltham, Leominster, Fitchburg, and the smaller manufacturing establishments, our survey of Lowell was somewhat particular and detailed. This town is a study to a west countryman, worthy of a voyage across the Atlantic. It is the most striking sample of what manufacturers can effect, and of the short time requisite to the result, I presume, that is to be seen on this side the ocean. It is a still more striking spectacle to one who had not noted its monthly and yearly progress, but who now observed it grown up to the show and populousness of a large town, and who well remembers to have often passed over its site, when one or two ordinary farm houses afforded the only evidences

of habitancy upon the sterile plain where the town stands. It presents double the show of houses and manufactures that it did when last we saw it. Some part of this show is beautiful, and some even magnificent. It wants nothing now of the public buildings, churches, and appliances for comfort and amusement, that Delong to old towns, whose institutions have become consolidated by time. It is not necessary that I should here repeat our comments and reflections, as, at the striking of the dinner bell, we saw the mile of girls not now as on a recent occasion, moving in procession dressed for holiday show, but in the business garb and step of their diurnal vocation, issuing from the great manufacturing enclosure in one continuous stream for nearly half an hour. I trust, that the melancholy though eloquent views taken by Saddler and Blackwood's periodical, of the results of the large manufacturing establishments in England, have no applicability here. But when we saw the blanched faces, the slender forms, and taper fingers of the girls, and heard the report of the physician, with whom we were conversing, and thought of their position, and imagined the undertow of influence and consequences that is operating invisibly beneath this interesting exterior of grace and beauty, and recurred to the disclosures of Avery's trial, and compared this mass of fair faces with the muscular, hardy, bashful girls of ruddy cheeks, that used to be seen spinning and weaving, and tending the dairy in remote farm houses, we, who hold no factory scrip, and who have always loved the pursuits, the homely joys, and destiny obscure of the children of agriculturists, could not but inquire, which class was most likely to become good wives and mothers, and ruminate upon the tendency and issue of this prodigious change that is gradually coming over New-England. One thing to me is clear. It will produce an entire change in the manners and habits, and probably in the institutions. Philanthropy the most enlarged, religious zeal the most earnest and sincere, taking the form of excellent regulations, instruction, Sunday schools, humane and considerate provisions, have done all, and are still devising all that seems practicable to avert or heal the natural tendencies of this order of things in the large manufacturing establishments. But the great efforts of this kind, the numerous and strict provisions for regulating the morals of these places, prove the estimate of the danger that calls for them. It is the moral influence, the absence of maternal control, of parental instruction, and domestic restraint and training, that are to be dreaded. New-England is intrinsically too humane to allow these fragile beings to be overwrought, or to permit the corporate arithmetical intellect, which is said not to be guided by a soul, to count upon the products of the human tenants of these establishments, as though they too were a part of the machinery. To the dweller in cities, who sees with the physical

eye, the air of smartness and fashion with which all this show is invested, these factory tenants will seem infinitely more agreeable, and their condition more enviable, than that of the rude dwellers in a log cabin just rising amidst the western woods. At least this order of things will preclude the necessity of tens of thousands of emigrants from repairing there. But while we have countless millions of fertile and unoccupied forest and prairie acres, it is questionable if it would not be better for the whole country, if there were more emigrants and fewer tenants of factories.

The interior of the manufacturing establishments presents great numbers of foreigners; and the more complicated operations of weaving carpets and rugs, and coloring and printing calicoes are principally performed by them. It was interesting to note, how simple and unerring are those processes, the mode of executing which I had found it impossible to imagine. Every thing becomes simple when traced to its principles and causes. A glance here shows us how much more delicately, surely, and accurately the nerveless, unshrinking, untiring fingers of machinery operate, than those of the human hand. This place, too, presents in one view the most striking evidence of the astonishing progress of the arts concerned in manufactures. We were told that the machinery was not only equally perfect with that in similar English establishments, but that, for various nice operations, they have here simplified and improved upon the models in the old world. The beautiful and delicate engravings on the burnished cylinders for printing calicoes conveyed stronger impressions, in regard to the perfection of the arts among us, than any thing I have elsewhere seen or imagined. The products of carpets, rugs, and printed calicoes struck me to be as brilliant and beautiful as the best of those that are imported. The horrid clatter of the machine for pounding cotton into linen, the sights and smells of the dye houses, the whirl of the countless wheels, the infinite ingenuity exhibited in the machinery, the multitudes of girls moving up and down the long aisles of these strange habitations, amidst this everlasting din and whirl, not only confused my head in the inspection and hearing, but have more than once come over my dreams.

I revisited too the remote and quiet village, where, before I became a sojourner in the distant west, I terminated a ministry of fourteen years. Since then, I have wandered so far and so much, and have endured so many vicissitudes and sufferings, and have been so long and laboriously occupied in pursuits so wide from those of this place, that on returning to it, and looking round for my walks, the houses where I had solemnized weddings, and stood over the sick and dying bed, administered baptism, and attended funerals, in efforts excited to pain to call up from the deep places of memory images so confused, as to create doubt if they

were remembrances or dreams; the whole seemed like the consciousness of transmigration, and of having long been in a different mode of being from that I passed here. It was painful to learn, that the people were so divided into schisms, and had formed so many churches, that no one possessed the means of sustaining a regular worship. There were the two or three churches, erected as hostile spiritual batteries against each other, where the means of the whole place were with difficulty adequate to the support of a single minister. In the whole excursion, from the green hills of the interior of New-Hampshire to the limit of a sea board ride on the south shore, in almost every village we saw this same array of rival churches, where the population called for but one. We every where heard the bickering and tale bearing of mutual efforts at proselytism. The ministry, that used to be considered in this region a tie as permanent and sacred as that of wedlock, now becomes in consequence a relation suddenly contracted and recklessly dissolved, a circumstance strongly tending to produce fickleness of character. How beautiful a feature would these spires constitute in the scenery of these neat and white villages, if they did not instantly bring to our thoughts, not the influences of the gospel of peace, but struggle, rivalry, backbiting, petty contention, alienation of families, ministers forgetting the dignity of their calling in stirring up these divisions, by creeping into the houses and becoming parties to them, in a word, the breaking down of all regular worship. Strange, that all this should grow out of the inculcation of the religion of the Prince of Peace! Nothing, however, is too incredible to believe of the dogmatism and bigotry of human nature. The more minute and undefinable the question of dispute, the fiercer and more embittered the quarrel about it, and the more positively eternal salvation is made to depend upon embracing or rejecting it. The only endurable view we can take of these disputes, generally about nothing, is this. Strongly as every one affirms the contrary, the age is yet a thousand leagues from any thing like a liberal and tolerant spirit. The gas of human pride and intolerance of opinion would be dangerous, if it remained pent in the human breast. Perhaps it escapes as safely through this valve, as that of politics, or philosophical dogmas. Unhappily the ultimate tendency is to bring contempt and reproach upon the worthy name, by which we are called.

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I know not how to speak, or to forbear in recurring to the hospitality which I have received on this and former visits from the citizens of your beautiful and opulent town. The kindness I have received there is registered too deeply ever to be forgotten. The name ought not only to be interpreted peace but hospitality. It should become the abode of literature and the muses, for the air of repose and leisure, the rus in urbe aspect, the number and opu

lence of its men of letters seem peculiarly to invoke study and meditation. Chestnut-street, with its ample and noble, but plain and unostentatious houses and gardens, and its long line of umbrageous elms, and the delicious coolness of their shade, presents a more inviting aspect than any other street which it has been my forte to see.

A visit which we made to a manufactory in that vicinity, offered more interest than any single one we observed at Lowell. It was, perhaps, because the article manufactured was in my line, that the inspection of it gave me so much pleasure. It was the paper mill of Francis Peabody, Esq. This gentleman has long had a taste for scientific manufactures, and has carried some branches, particularly that of white lead to great perfection. Nothing can exceed the ingenuity of the machinery and the beauty of his process of manufacturing paper. Various steps in the common process are performed by manipulation, which are here operated by the unerring exactness of machinery. The rags are cut, passed on, and ground by cylinders, which one after another reduce them to a more perfect pulp, which is still propelled on to the weaving process, which is performed by machinery with admirable accuracy. At each advancing process, the article is seen in progress toward perfection. It finally is convolved over heated cylinders, and is thence unrolled dry and fit for the press, and is cut into sheets by two persons, who each cut off, I should think, a sheet every two seconds. The process of cutting and grinding commences in an upper story, and the pulp is conveyed down by a conduit, whence it regularly passes on through all these stages, so that the whole manufacture, from cutting to the ultimate finish, is uniform and continuous, and in constant circulation. The article thus manufactured is smooth, firm, equable, and beautiful; and as the stock is from assorted linen rags imported from Europe, is, I presume, of the best quality.

I cannot forget, and I hope neither can you, the day in which I parted from you, my dear friend, who gave up, in accompanying me on these various tours through the different parts of our native state, and who shared with me all our social pleasures, more than a month. The conversations and sentiments of these interviews are not recorded with the disclosures of rival candidates for office, nor the crimination and recrimination of displaced cabinets. But if aught that is said or felt on earth find a place in higher chronicles, these may be found to have been as worthy of record as those. You, at least, will need no other remuneration than the consciousness of having done kindness and conferred favors, and living in the memory of your friend. These pleasures are now added to the things that were. But I shall find a new enjoyment in passing them in review again by the aid of remembrance.