more polished and melodious ditty. The friend who shared the adventure is dismissed, and the interest centres in the "author," or, as he is now more poetically styled, "the Muses' youngest child," or, with a touch of remorseful pathos, "the Muses' rude, untoward child." He has learned to sketch in Scott's lighter manner, and there is something of gracefulness and vivacity in his handling. "Well may fond memory love to trace Each cliff that frowns in darkness there; Each rock, each lonely dell, I knew, Knew where, to shelf of whitened rock, At eve the sable cormorants flock; And, venturous, stormed the badger's den. Hugh Miller was, at the time he left school, a rugged, proud, and stiff-necked lad, impossible to drive, and difficult to lead, his character already marked with strong lines, and developing from within or through self-chosen influences. "I saw," said Baxter, of Cromwell," that what he learned must be from himself;" and the observation might already have been made of Hugh Miller. To his friends he was a perplexity and offense; to his uncles, in particular, who knew him too well, and were too sagacious to accept the off-hand theory of his school-masters, that he was merely a stupid and bad boy, he must have seemed a mass of contradictions. Intellectual in his wildest play, fond of books, and capable of discerning excellence from its counterfeits in thought and style, passionately addicted to the observation of nature, and forgetting no fact he once ascertained how could he be dull in the ordinary sense? We find him as the boy mason in 1829, when he writes to Principal Baird: "My first six months of labor, presented only a series of disasters. I was, at the time, of a slender make and weak constitution; and I soon found I was ill-fitted for such employments as the trundling of loaded wheelbarrows over a plank, or the raising of huge blocks of stone out of a quarry. My hands were soon fretted into large blisters, my breast became the seat of a dull, oppressive pain, and I was much distressed, after exertion more than usually violent, by an irregular motion of my heart. My spirits were almost always miserably low; and I was so wrapped up in a wretched, apathetic absence of mind, that I have wrought for whole hours together with scarcely a thought of what I was doing myself, and scarcely conscious of what others were doing around me." Boy-life, with its freshness of faculty, its exuberence of delights, its opulence of wayward force, lies behind Hugh Miller. He found his way up as master of the workmen with whom he was once wont to drudge. But misfortunes overtaking him, he was forced back to a barrack life, finally finding himself a friendless wanderer in the woods. But in his wanderings over rock and mountain crag, Miller the geologist out-climbed Miller the mason. In seeking employment, or in wandering about on pleasant summer evenings, he made the best of his talent in those studies. which the naturalist or geologist delights in following. Hugh Miller was a remarkable and eccentric character. His life covered the beautiful, august and heroic. From the father, whose very image he in later years became, he derived the groundwork of his character, and for the education of conscience he was indebted to his uncle James. In early manhood he was encompassed with hardships, with coarseness, with manifold temptations. His soul took no taint. He rose superior to every form of vulgarity: the vulgar ambition of wealth, the vulgar ambition of notoriety, the vulgar baseness of sensuality and license. He aspired to fame, but it was to fame which should be the ratification of his own severe judgment. "I have myself," he said, "for my critic;" and while the decision of this sternest censor was even moderately favorable, no sneers could depress, no applause elate him. His course was a steadfast pursuit of truth and of knowledge, an unwearied dedication of himself to all that he believed to be true, and honest, and lovely, and of good report. Politeness is the last touch, the finishing perfection of a noble character. It is the gold on the spire, the sunlight on the corn field, the smile on the lip of the noble knight lowering his swordpoint to his lady-love. It results only from the truest balance and harmony of soul. Hugh Miller possessed it. A duke in speaking to him would know he was speaking to a man as independent as himself; a boy, in expressing to him an opinion, would feel unabashed and easy, from his genial and unostentatious deference. Years in the quarry have not dimmed in Hugh Miller that finishing gleam of genial light which plays over the framework of character, and is politeness. Not only did he require honest manliness for this; gentleness was also necessary. He had both, and has retained them; and therefore merits fairly So far as we can penetrate the charm of his composition, it lies mainly in the fine continuity of it, in the absence of all jerking, jolting movement, in the callida junctura, not of word to word merely, but of sentence to sentence, thought to thought, illustration to illustration. An author's peculiar excellence, if we have rightly discriminated it, will give us a hint as to where we should look for his besetting fault, and in reading Miller long at one time, we may find in his billowy regularity and smoothness of movement a sense of monotony. Yet, after all, there is a marvelous enchantment in his books; the breath of the hills is in them, the freshness of the west wind and the sea. "As It was impossible to be long in Miller's company without perceiving the ardor of his devotion to science. He considered literature inferior to science as a gymnastic of the mind. For the facile culture of the age he had great contempt, and ranked both religion and labor as stimulating, training agencies for mind and character, higher than what is commonly called education. for the dream," he says in one of his books, "that there is to be some extraordinary elevation of the general platform of the race achieved by means of education, it is simply the hallucination of the age-the world's present alchemical expedient for converting farthings into guineas, sheerly by dint of scouring." All that he had won had been won by stern effort, and he had no faith in royal roads to any kind of attainment. A man of priceless worth; fine gold, purified sevenfold; deli cate splendor of honor, sensitive and proud; perfect sincerity and faithfulness in heart and mind. He never failed a friend. His comrade of the hewing-shed sits down at his table when he has become one of the most distinguished men of his time; another friend is discoved to be at hand-grips with fortune, and he applies himself, with cunning delicacy, to solve the problem of inducing him to accept assistance. This was the manner and habit of the man. Of his power of brain-of his genius and originality-his books, viewed in connection with the circumstances of his career, are the living witnesses. To their testimony must be added the fact of the great influence he exerted upon his contemporaries, the personal weight, the intellectual mass and magnitude, he was felt to possess. Hugh Miller was a Presbyterian. He performed editorial labors during the Great Disruption, and later was a most eloquent and vigorous writer in the newly constituted Free Church. Severe mental toil at last undermined his powerful brain, and, in a moment of insanity, on the night of Dec. 23d, 1856, he committed suicide at Portobello, near Edinburgh. DWIGHT L. MOODY. At WIGHT L. MOODY, the great Evangelist was born in Northfield, Massachussets, in 1837. In his boyhood he displayed great originality and force of character and the power of leadership that characterizes his later movements. eighteen years, he entered the boot and shoe store of his uncle, in Boston; his parents were Unitarians, and he had been brought up in their belief; but he became a member of the Sunday-school attached to Dr. Kirk's Congregational Church, where an evangelical sermon had the effect of making him uncomfortable, and he determined not to go again; induced to go back the next Sunday, the serious impression was renewed,and having obtained joy and peace in believing, he applied for admission to the church on the 16th of May, 1855. The committee by whom his application was considered, recommended delay until he could acquaint himself thoroughly with the fundamental truths of Christianity. After six months he was received into the communion of the church. He removed, in 1856, to Chicago, where he obtained a situation in a shoe store. Desiring to make himself useful, he went into a Mission Sunday-school, and asked for a class. The answer to his application was, that the school was fully supplied with teachers, but that if he could gather a class for himself, he would be allowed a place in the school-room. He succeeded in bringing in eighteen boys, and he enjoyed this sort of work, and handed the class over to another teacher, and continued bringing in recruits until he had filled the school. He soon organized a separate school for the benefit of the lower classes, in one of the most forbidding parts of Chicago. It was called the "North Market Hall Mission School," and it became one of the most famous of the West, the attendance reaching one thousand. Mr. Moody decided to give up his business and devote his time to the work he had planned for himself. Mr. Moody's work lay in a part of the city in which Roman Catholics and Germans abounded. Being no singer, he secured the help of a friend to sing for him, and for the first few evenings they spent the time alternately singing hymns and telling stories to the children. Very soon the children began to manifest a lively interest. Meetings were held every evening, and prayers offered and addresses delivered, the parents began to attend these meetings, and some of them were greatly blessed. Some of those then converted through his instrumentality, have since been among Mr. Moody's most valuable and active helpers in Chicago. An independent church grew out of the school and Mr. Moody became its unordained pastor. It was a hive of Bible readers, tract distributors, lay preachers, and missionary visitors. Mr. Moody is not a man of education or culture; his manner is abrupt and blunt, his voice is sharp, rapid, and colloquial, and he never attempts anything like finished or elaborate composition. But he is in downright earnest. He believes what he says, says it as if he believed it, and expects his audience to believe. nothing of novelty in the doctrine which he proclaims. old Gospel, old yet always fresh. There is |