Chapter II (3)

Still the conflict of principles endures in the world at large--the Aristocratic Principle, represented by autocracy, absolutism, prelacy, and slaveholding authority, on the one hand, and the Democratic Principle, represented by republicanism, Protestantism, dead-levelism, with free and destructive competition, on the other. As Slavery and Freedom have been preparing for their local conflict in America during the thirty years past; so, for the whole century gone by, the threatening cloud of the final conflict between the two great governing ideas in the world has been gathering. Occasional sharp and some terrific encounters have been had. Is this conflict of opinion to become more and more consolidated and defined, and finally embodied in two great hostile camps, covering the whole earth with an actual war, replete with desolation and carnage--not a war of distinct nationalities, but of the partisans of the two great antagonistic drifts of human development? Is there to be literally the great battle of Armageddon in the world before the incoming of a better age? or has the ignorant wrath of man sufficiently prevailed, and are we in truth prepared to investigate with sobriety, accept with simple honesty, and faithfully to practise the lessons of wisdom which the experience of the past or the new discoveries of the present or the future may bring? The religious world is becoming deeply penetrated with the conviction that we are, in the world at large, upon the verge of great events--that we are nearing the termination of an Old Dispensation and the commencement of a New; without, perhaps, defining very clearly, or attempting even to define distinctly to the imagination the nature of the change. The deepest philosophy of the age forecasts similar eventualities for an early day and for the whole earth. Thus it is that the investigation of The Great American Crisis, actual and urgent, might properly lead us up to the consideration of a Great World Crisis, impending and probable. On some other occasion it may be thought proper to give to this latter subject a distinct and more elaborate treatment. The object which we have proposed in the present series is now sufficiently accomplished, and the writer takes leave of the reader, with a profound conviction that to the anxious cry, What of the night? the answer, All is well, can be conscientiously returned. Even should the seemingly disastrous features sketched above in the alternative programme of our national future yet providentially reveal themselves in the scroll of our nation's history, let not the patriot or the lover of mankind for a moment despair. It will be but the intensified darkness preceding the light--the crisis of a deep-seated disease prognosticating health. The destiny of America is the destiny of man; and that is, that we come soon into the inheritance of new glories--an unlimited development and prosperity, founded on Religion married to Science, eventuating in the reconciliation of Order and Progression, in Universal Justice, and in the elevation, protection, mutual coöperation and happiness of all.

THISTLE-DOWN.

Pale and fleecy, ghosty and white,
Onward borne in their unknown flight--
Flimsy and fragile, pure and fair--
Mystic things the thistles are.

Drifting about on a windy day--
Ghosty children at their play--
Revelling up above the trees,
Hither and thither on the breeze.

Slow and sadly, how they fly,
Chasing shadows in the sky!
Never resting, never still,
Through the valley, o'er the hill.

Walking round o'er the churchyard mould,
Up above the bosoms cold;
Flitting past each marble door,
Sadly breathing: 'Gone before!'

Spectres _wild_ with their viewless steeds,
Riding on where nothing leads;
Up to the sky when the earth gets brown--
_Ever restless_ thistle-down.

Through the forest cool and dark,
Never hitting the destined mark;
Over the earth and through the air,
Downy thistles _everywhere_.

Darting in at the open door,
Telling of joys that come no more;
Robed in grave clothes fine and thin--
Shades of phantoms, ever dim.

Up the church-aisles Sabbath-days,
Where the dusky twilight plays;
Round the altar, o'er the bier,
Preaching _more than priests do here_.

Solemn are the words they say--
_Silent sermons free of_ PAY;
And the _lessons_ they impart,
_Never vanish from the heart_.

THE LOVE LUCIFER.

[The author of 'The Love Lucifer' says in regard to it: 'I enclose
a narration of _facts_. Not noted for assurance, I yet feel well
assured that its publication in THE CONTINENTAL 'will do
uses.'' Should there be any among our readers who have inquired
into our modern necromancy, they will not fail to recognize in the
excited, wild, incoherent, and uncultured jargon of the spirits of
'The Love Lucifer,' the same style and character evinced by those
to whom they may have been introduced by the 'mejums.' The two
Bulwers, the Howitts, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Halls, the De
Morgans, &c., have taken a deep interest in these half-comic,
half-serious, and always incoherent demonstrations.

Perhaps the matter-of-fact experience of our author may shield some
of our readers from 'obsessions, delusions, magnetic streams of
Od,' be they angelic, human, demoniac, or Koboldic in their
origin.--_Ed. Con._]