“Great as her fame has been, I never considered it equal to her merit. Such a fine and complete combination of talent and goodness, and of zeal and discretion, I never witnessed. All her resources, influences, and opportunities, were simply and invariably made to subserve one purpose, in which she aimed to live, not to herself, but to Him who died for us and rose again.”— WILLIAM JAY. _LITERATURE._ Every piece of composition takes up, and must take up, as its basis, some element or assumption of fact,—states, affirms, or denies something; but unless it be animated by imagination, it is not literature. The power of seeing and expressing the æsthetic element in nature and life is that which entitles a composition to be regarded as a literary product. It is this element which inspires, vitalises, and gives immortality to a production, whether it be an address to a mountain daisy, or a history of the world. Science may become obsolete through the progress of discovery, polemics may become irrelevant through the progress of society, but literature is ever new, and never old; it is enduring as the great features of nature which are imaged in it, and the manifold aspects of human life from which it derives its chief value and fascination. The dominion of popular writing is being increased at a most marvellous rate. Literature is now crowned as the very chiefest monarch of these times. On many topics we differ, but editors, authors, critics, and all the disseminators of literature, are unanimous as to the necessity of the diffusion of knowledge. What a mine of intellectual wealth has that admirable art, the art of printing, now laid open to all! A lifetime would not exhaust those treasures of delight supplied by English genius alone. Not only have we men gifted with the highest attributes of mind, writing entertaining, instructive, suggestive, Christian, and progressive books; but women in every department of literature have taken up, not by courtesy, but by right, a full and conspicuous place. Not a few of these authoresses heard “that Divine and nightly-whispering voice, which speaks to mighty minds of predestinated garlands, starry and unwithering,” and have already received their reward. _BIOGRAPHY._