* * * * * THE SABBATH.--Nature always seemed to me to “keep Sabbath” in the wilderness. I used to fancy that the wild birds were more quiet on that day, sitting on the branches with their heads under their wings, smoothing their plumage, or looking quietly about them, and sometimes venturing a faint warble, scarcely above a whisper. And I have seen a large wolfish animal stand for hours upon a dry log, on the bank of the river, contemplating the stream, or gazing into the air; once or twice, perhaps, starting suddenly a few paces, but then halting as if he had given up the idea; and his tail all the while hanging listlessly down, as if indicating that no enterprise could be undertaken on that day. Just like the merchant who may be seen in the city, on a bright Sunday morning, in clean shirt collar, and with hands thrust into his pockets, loitering slowly down the street, or standing in ruminating attitude at the corner, pondering carefully every step of the morrow’s tangled path, or perhaps calculating the amount of time lost in Sundays, by the whole world, taken individually and collectively from Moses’s day to the present time; but on the whole, enduring the Sabbath with Christian resignation. * * * * * CRITICS.--It is a little singular that the mass should attach much importance to the small opinions of every-day critics. Because a man happens to have the facilities of _publishing_ his views and opinions to the world, though he be the veriest blockhead on earth, his verdict is often of more than ordinary weight among men. Indeed, a Johnson could not influence some men by his _verbal_ opinion, to the extent that an ignoramus can influence them through “press and types.” The “dignity of print” has a strange effect. Although it is but one man who speaks, and he may have one hundred opponents who may argue successfully against him, yet they will all fail with the public. But let either of them _publish_ the same opinion, and the ore, which was rich and weighty, becomes refined. Common critics, moreover, are always ready to find imperfections, for thus will the public be made acquainted with their _penetration_. In fact, many of them seem to think that to criticize _is_ to find fault; “else (they reason) where is the necessity of criticism?” It is said that any fool can fire a house. So can any man criticize a book; but very few can build the one or write the other. Many of the vinegar-critics of the day who haunt the shores of literature, would utterly fail in penning even the _preface_ to a respectable book. It is a recorded and well-known fact that many of our standard works were rejected for the want of a publisher, owing to the unfavourable opinion of stolid rule-and-figure critics; but when they came before the people, who, judging from the impulses of the heart, are never wrong, how soon was their verdict reversed! The PEOPLE are the only true tribunal. They