By the benignity of our Creator, we have been endowed with the powers of taste and imagination, to throw a charm over the ruggedness of human life, and bring in a thousand tributes of enjoyment to cheer our hearts in our journeyings through this ‘vale of tears.’ These pleasures, as long as the powers themselves are uncorrupted by vice, and their purity free from the taint of unhallowed passions, are of a kind the most pure and innocent. We believe it to be an immutable law, in all the operations of the mind, that the exercise of our virtuous affections, as far as it is carried, induces the highest possible degree of happiness which we are capable of feeling. Our most exquisite enjoyments in Literature and the Fine Arts, will be found to receive their origin from something which most directly calls up virtuous associations; and in the beauties of the natural world, those scenes prove the most delightful, which elevate our contemplations to the infinite perfections of the ‘great First Cause.’ We would remark, that the influence of moral feeling tends to heighten the pleasure which we derive from Eloquence and Poetry. The pleasure which flows from these sources belongs to the highest and purest order of intellectual enjoyments. They bear with them a voice that wakes the soul to intense interest, now throwing over its powers the inspiration of sublimity, and now floating around it in tones as mellow and gentle as the last whisper of a summer breeze. Who, as he has listened to the voice of the living speaker, and been borne along on the full tide of eloquence at the will of the moving spirit, has not felt his heart swell within him to a loftier expansion, and his bosom throb with the pulsations of a new and more glorious intelligence? Who, as his imagination has drank in the sweet and thrilling strains of the poet’s lyre, and his own spirit has caught the glow of his burning aspirations, has not felt a yearning to soar above and beyond the cold, sluggish atmosphere of sense, and mingle in the fancied existence portrayed so winningly before him? There is something in the ideal but splendid creations of poetry, embodying in its images all that is sublime, and all that is beautiful in the world of thought and of nature, that must ever strike within us a kindred chord. It bids the dim and far off past roll back its tide of vanished years, and centuries of almost forgotten ages pass again, with their memorials, across the theatre of existence. Palmyra rises before us from her ruin of ages, and her long deserted streets are thronged once more by the congregated strangers from a thousand lands. Rome, too, shakes off the yoke of Goth and Vandal, and resumes her proud title of ‘mistress of the world.’ Again the lofty Capitol is reared on the Tarpeian rock, the long and splendid triumphal procession enters the gates of the temple of Jupiter, and Rome is once more the ‘eternal city.’ Then we turn