133

Bela would have declined this offer of the kingdom, but the persuasions of the nobles and of his mother prevailed; and, a few days after, he was solemnly crowned in the cathedral of Alba Regalis.

Julian was continued in the confidence of the king, and became one of the first lords of his court. He remained, as he had always been, eyes to the blind, and the most faithfully attached and beloved of all the royal Bela's friends.

Bela also rewarded every one who had shown compassion to him in his distress. Having improved the sweet uses of adversity, he became in his prosperity a bright example of meekness, humility and piety, and every virtue that can render a monarch worthy of his people's love; so that to this day, no name is so endeared to the heart of Hungary as that of Bela the Blind Prince.

12

A Student's Manuscript.

BY F. S.

ACTION is life and life is action. Our vitality is sustained by a thousand rapid, intense, varied motions; and death overcomes us not, till the heart ceases to throb and the pulse forbears to beat. There is no absolute rest in all the universe of God. Our unquiet minds go out from their narrow dwellings, and pass from earth to heaven and heaven to earth in the ample range of their meditations. The winds, like birds ever on the wing, tire not in their flight. The inconstant ocean, as if 'twere the great heart of the earth, throbs and swells with perpetual tides. The stable firmament itself revolves. Even He who is the Lord of Life, does not sit aloof, like the god of Epicurus, in indolent tranquillity on a solitary throne, but is ever busied in guiding and governing His unwasting worlds. Below us through all the descents of an infinity of littleness; above us through all the heights of an infinity of greatness; around us on every hand, we discover constant action. It is on the wing, in the air, on the earth, in the deep, "glows in the stars and blossoms in the trees."

Action is the condition of life; and the mind or the body which dissociates itself from this activity, which is at the same time the parent and the offspring of life, ceases to live in the full comprehension of that term; or, if the motions of life be visible, they resemble galvanic mockeries rather than the spontaneous developments of genuine vitality. The sluggard violates the law of action and we despise him, and predict that he will come to naught. Monachism violates the same law; for the Creator of man hath not endowed him with such heaven-aspiring faculties, that they might rust in him unused. This would be an ostentatious, because useless display of creative power. Gifts, whether they be great or small, are not to be nicely wrapped in a napkin and then buried in the earth, but are to be exercised-eminently exercised, for "the glory of the Creator and the relief of man's estate."

In the same category with the sluggard, the miser, and the monk, we make bold to place the cloistered and closeted scholar, who burrows under ground in the dark, and never brings up any fruit of his labours into the light of the sun. He is the miser of knowledge, adding to his gains with feverish haste, night and day, and worse in one respect than the miser of lucre, for his gains die with him and cannot come into circulation even after his decease. But, it may be replied, seclusion shuts out the Babel-clamour of the world, turns the mind, freed from all the distractions, inward upon itself, and gives it wings for heavenly contemplation. This may be so, but if all believed it, all would become "gentle hermits of the dale," or woods, or desert.

There is a romance hanging about the cells of sages. An attractive glory invests their prolonged vigils. Hence a life of scholastic seclusion has become consecrated in the eye of the world. When thus shut up, the scholar's example is lost upon society; and if he fails to add a compensatory contribution to the common stock of knowledge, he has sadly defeated the end of living. A contemplative mood of mind is by all means to be cultivated; but the spirit of contemplation dwells not alone in cells amid weeds and beads; for, if rightly apprehended, like the ever-present Deity, she is not far from every one of us. As the truly devout can indulge in pious emotions without entering a church, so the truly disciplined scholar, should be able to lose himself with a freely soaring fancy, in divinest meditations, without abandoning a single duty of active life. This is that which, in the judgment of Bacon, "will indeed dignify and exalt knowledge, if contemplation and action be more nearly and straightly conjoined and united than they have been." This is the highest point of disciplinary perfection to which the human mind can attain-to act quickly, strenuously, in the discharge of every rising duty, and yet bear about with it the thought's collected will, and all the experience of the past-to act from impulse and yet have that very impulse subjected to the better judgment-to struggle on this vast battle field of existence, not like unreflecting hirelings, driven about by animal incitements and lust of reward, but like heroes, who view the whole plain with an untrembling eye, and amid the fearful onset, and the bloody repulse, stand self-collected, self-reposing, calm and meditative. God has

made every man dependent on all other men. A golden, everlasting chain, coming down from His own throne, binds together all life and all that has life. It is not merely a dull truth of political economy, that man depends on man. Sympathy, that like a holy dove, nestles in our hearts, goes forth now, as in the days of the patriarch, and attests the existence of but one family. Of the same original descent, passing through the same solemn scenes, and tending to the same inevitable future, we cannot but feel that there is a unity of interest enveloping us all. Thus our own emotions as well as revealed truth prompt us to give as we have received, to bless as we have been blessed. Who then without guilt can sever these manifold, soft ties-cloister himself up from every thing human, and never, even in wild dreams, go forth to his kindred men, to lighten a single load of sorrow, to wipe away a single tear, to feed a faint soul with a single truth, to remove from the path of toiling humanity a single abstraction? A morbid sentimentalism, or "high-fantastical" whim may lead the scholar to some monkish retreat into which the foot of man may not enter, and from which no generous benefaction, like a fore-warning oracle from a prophet's cell, shall go forth to bless mankind. But he forgets that it has been by prayer and agony, by strife and martyrdom, continued through generations, that the privilege of an unmolested retreat has been secured to him by protecting laws and an advanced social state. To his countrymen, to the race, he owes a debt of gratitude, and he is ungrateful if he retreat from the sacred

12*