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No nobler heart than his slumbers in the halls of death, and to us the world looks sadder since his gentle and generous nature forBook it.

We close these remarks, and for the present take leave of a pleasant theme upon which more might profitably be said. We look on the field of American poetry, with respect for the moral character, and faith in the intellectual force and literary standing of the country. We thank God that here no mind has immortalized itself by its obliquity, perverseness and misanthropy, and by pandering to the base passions of the heart. We are thankful that we have some immortal names in the peaceful walks of literature, and that our sons of song have understood the high uses of the lyre, and made poesy minister to the happiness and refinement of the nation. As at the presence of Orpheus in Pluto's realm, the wheel of Ixion stopped, the stone of Sisyphus stood still, Tantalus for

got his thirst, and even the furies relented, so has the poetry of which we have been speaking, assuaged the sorrows, relaxed the rigors, and tempered the storms of the world in which man is a pilgrim and a stranger, and too often a mourner; and our heart and head have been made wiser, better and happier, by its sage inculcations and its soothing music. A healthy spiritualism interfuses itself with the common mind, and elevates it to a sunnier level and a serener sky; and the mild lights of a kinder, holier humanity break and beam from a thousand towers and headlands over the laboring waves of life. Poetry, no longer the glorifier of barbaric violence, of horrid war, of vaulting chivalry, becomes a ministering angel, hovering over us from the friendly heavens, commissioned to tranquillize the heart, wipe the tear from the eye, and kindle a living virtue and a beaming joy in the soul of man.

THE FUCHSIA, one species of which embellishes this number of the Magazine, is a genus of most beautiful exotics. It belongs to the eighth class and first order, according to the artificial system of Linnæus; and according to the natural system of Jussieu, it is ranked under the order onogra. The common name of the plant is LADIES EAR DROP. The genus was so named in honor of Leonard Fuchs, a celebrated German botanist, and if we recollect aright, the author of an extensive work on some subject connected with natural history.

The Fuchsia, except one species indigenous on the island of New Zealand, is a native of South America. It is said to grow in the valleys among the Andes in great abundance, and more luxuriantly than when cultivated in our more northern latitude. A botanist of some note, who made the tour of South America in search of interesting plants for the Royal Botanic Gardens in England, describes one species as attaining sometimes the height of eight feet. She is quite enthusiastic in her account of this family as they appear in their native clime.

Their drooping branches, covered with clusters of crimson flowers, which form a happy contrast with their dark green leaves, blooming in humble seclusion, she represents as in the highest degree attractive and beautiful. The Indian girls of the country are accustomed to adorn their hair with wreaths of these flowers at their bridal festivities, and few plants are there more admired for their beauty.

There are several species of the Fuchsia-it is scarcely possible to determine how many. Some botanists enumerate ten; the Metropolitan Encyclopædia says twelve; but of these, doubtless, some are mere accidental varieties, rather than distinct species. Loudon, in his admirarable Encyclopædia of Plants, describes only four species; and the inference is, that he found scarcely sufficient authority for extending the genus farther. The calyx of all the species is funnel-form, of a brilliant red color, almost concealing the petals. The engraving represents the F. gracilis, one of the most deservedly admired of this beautiful family.

THE monk is an omnipresent character in modern history. The Romish church will have it that he is an essential element of our religion, and that he dates his birth coëval with the Son of God. However this may be, it is certain the seeds from which he sprang were already flying in the theological atmosphere before the first century was closed, and that these seeds subsequently took root and blossomed under every sky, vegetating like toadstools upon the fallen and decaying branches of Christianity.

The source of this monastic mania is asceticism. Austerities of the body were recommended by the Oriental and Grecian sages to their pupils, as a means of moral and intellectual purification, which in its turn would fit the soul for initiation into the sacred mysteries of high philosophy. The Gnostic school, which at the birth of Christ enjoyed the highest popularity with the western Asiatics, was uncommonly full and rigid in this article of discipline. Its religious dogmas were a singular compound of half-formed truths, and gloomy sentimentalism. Under a sky and a sun which forced the physical powers forward to an early maturity, while they left the mind with only a stinted growth, this dyspeptic state of religion spread like wildfire. When Christianity met so universal an antagonism, she might at first overwhelm it in the open conflict, but in the slow process of establishing her organization among her new subjects, she could hardly escape, for she was not on her guard against, those modifications, which a vanquished and subtle enemy might introduce. Egypt was the hothouse in which this religious weed first shot forth; but like all hothouse plants, it dragged out a weakly, sickly existence, until it had been transplanted into the vigorous soil of Northern Europe, and acquired strength and flexibility by exposure to wind and storm.

The first institutor of the monastic life, Antony the Great, was born in Upper Egypt, about the middle of the second century. An illiterate young man, of great wealth, enervated by idleness, and almost imbecile in mind, he was educated in the Christian religion. Inoculated with the poison of the Gnostic school, he resolved, after the death of his parents, upon the observance of a rigid asceticism, and thus with a hearty

contempt of all learning, and a sentimental mania for solitary meditation, animal emotion, and for the indulgence of a lively though diseased fancy, he bade adieu to the stir and confusion of society, and buried himself in the desert. His secret sin and his great transgression were one and the same-the product of an impure imagination. Against this vice he bent all his energies; and in this his conduct was commendable. But when he failed to root out the seeds of the disease, and turned the bitterness of his own disappointment upon the heads of those, who contrived to live full as happily and morally as himself in the social sphere in which God had placed them, he exposed himself to the charge of being an addled fanatic.

Antony denied himself every pleasure of sense, reduced his allowance of bread and salt to the last possible pennyweight, blushed to be seen eating in public, slept only when driven by the demands of exhausted nature, used the scantiest clothing of goats' and camels' hair, wrought mats of palm leaves for a livelihood, put in practice every expedient for torturing and emaciating his body, and spent most of his hours in meditation and prayer. These habits of life required solitude; but while he was fleeing from man, a host of admiring followers hung upon his retreat, and swarmed about his footsteps. His physical powers must soon have yielded under these austerities, but for the employment thrust upon him by the attendant crowd. Despairing of escape, he made the best of his irksome company, by teaching them a philosophy which is now pronounced deism, and imposing upon them a set of unwritten rules for their governance. These rules were a transcript of those observed by himself, and in overseeing their faithful administration, and correcting delinquents, Antony found his hands full. At length, erecting an edifice upon the sloping side of an Egyptian mountain, he formed his company into a band of cœnobites. Thus was the monastic system fully developed in his own person and career. His first stage was that of a voluptuary suffering under a plethora of wealth, in ridding himself of which he contracted another, and became an ascetic, or a sort of Christian dervise. The second stage was that of a monk, or a variety of the Chris