REFLECTION. THE sun shall set and rise; day shall succeed to night; and times and seasons shall come again to gladden and to bless mankind: spring shall renew the face of nature, shall again make gay the field with verdure, and the wood with foliage. The beneficence of nature's operations forbid the dread of entire and lasting deprivation: she delights in the act of renovating and restoring she reproduces, in the round of agreeable vicissitude, those seasons, those accommodations, and those blessings,which, conformably to her laws of variety and change, she withdraws awhile from man in the course of her wise and provident revolutions. The dread sound of-for ever obliterated, and, gone-and the dread anticipation of that moment's arrival, are banished from the human ear and human forecast, by our experience of the pro visions and the movements of external nature, from all considerations-save onethe eventful one of-death. Here is the period, and the pause. But is this the period, and the pause of intellectual existence?-of the faculties, the moral and religious energies, progressive powers, and intimations of the human mind?- I will trust my reader with the answer. ASTRONOMICAL REMARK. SINCE the days of the immortal Newton, the doctrines of gravitation and attraction have been judged to rest upon evidence perfectly conclusive, and thought sufficient to explain the phenomena of the planetary system. Of late we have indeed just heard the term impulse as a substitute to both the foregoing. Whether this includes more than nomenclature-a term, onlyI submit to the decision of the learned. These, however, are the terms which we employ, and employ with satisfaction, to explain the established order which is observed, and the regular movements which are performed by our yet discovered planets. Habit or usage has certainly reconciled these terms, and the ideas which accompany them, to the acknowledgment of our minds: they have long ago, become as warranted by our suffrage, as they are T familiar to our ear. They may also be perfectly correct, and significant of the phenomena intended to be expressed by them: they may be founded in natural truth. But, when we catechise our feelings; when we search into our actual impressions; when we examine severely into our faculty of perception; are we sensible of any satisfaction of their truth? are the facts which they imply; is the philosophy which they import; are the results which they bespeak, what we can, as it were, "touch with our understandings"? are we conscious of a settled belief in them? does it come home to the privity of our minds that we are so? are we satisfied that a body, of the magnitude of this earth, is held floating in air, by a principle of gravitation to another body-(i.e.)-the Sun placed at a distance of 95,000,000 of miles from the former ? That this philosophy, however certainly it may be true, is of difficult conception, will not, I apprehend, be denied by any candid examiner of his own perceptions. If it is true of this earth, it is, of course, fair to infer the the application of a similar philosophy to our entire planetary system. It must be true of Jupiter: it must be true of Saturn: it |