GOSSIP WITH READERS AND CORRESPONDENTS. The gold fever,' writes a 'downeast' correspondent,' is raging hereabout with great violence. S-, one of my neighbors, has contributed not a little to its fury. His office is a place where idlers most do congregate, and he interests them by reading letters which he has never received. Some five or six had assembled in his office a few days since, to talk over the gold news, when he suddenly remarked: By the way, they do give most extrod'nary accounts of that country. I received a letter this morning from a friend out there, and (taking up a letter from his table,) I'll read you a part of it :

'WE arrived at St. Francisco three weeks ago yesterday, and after stopping there four days to recruit and make preparations, we set out for the gold country. The country on the banks of the Sacramento is exceedingly fine, and the soil the most fertile in the world. We passed several wheat-fields which had just been reaped, and would yield over two hundred bushels to the acre. There is, however, one draw-back; this neighborhood is much infested with noxious serpents; and more than as likely as not, in picking up a bundle of wheat, you will take a huge rattlesnake in your arms! We passed along up the river without making much stop, and soon came to the gold region. We found the gold in small grains, or particles. My companions stopped to gather it, but I thought I would keep on and go to the head-quarters, if I could find them. I soon came to where I found the precious metal in lumps as large as a wal nut. Penetrating the country farther, I found it became more plenty; and I frequently noticed pieces of pure gold the size of a common tea-kettle. In fact, the appearance of the country in many places reminded me of one of our New-England corn-fields after the corn has been removed and before the pumpkins have been gathered! Still I did not stop there, but kept on toward the source of the river. Here the country was broken and mountainous, and large boulders of gold, of the size of a five-pail kettle, were quite common. I came at length to a mountain, in which, I suppose, the river takes its rise. On the side of my approach it was very abrupt and precipitous. At the base of a high cliff I looked up and saw, about one hundred and fifty feet above me, and almost over my head, a mass of solid, shining gold, as large as a bunch of screwed hay! It seemed to be suspended by a single root, or vine. I had nothing with me but my gun: it was loaded with ball, and my first thought was to fire and cut off the cord by which the glittering mass was hung; but as I was on the point of firing, it occurred to me that if I did the gold would infallibly fall on me and crush me to pieces; so I'

'Here the reader was interrupted by an old vagabond, his eyes transfixed with wonder, and the tobacco-juice running down each corner of his mouth, who broke out with,' By thunder! I'd a-fired!' . . . HERE is a deferred article,' reader, but it is too good to be lost, we think: 'Thus then' B.,' as touching Spring. Heaven forefend that he be not exulting before we are 'out of the woods.' March has certainly pleasant days, that sometimes surprise us with a touch of summer; but he is generally a roystering, blustering fellow, for the most part, in this meridian: First month of the Spring! Ever welcome commencement of the atmospheric Eden! WINTER has passed away; legitimate, three-monthed, old-fashioned WINTER, is no more. He is in his cave, warming his fingers, and getting the 'frost-bite' out of his toes. There let him stay, the old Turk! and ponder over the past—his past. How many poor devils has he frozen to death during his reign of terror'-how many starved! The mother, with her babe clasped in her withered, bloodless arms, dead, dead on her bed of icy straw! Can WINTER Weep? Let him weep now at these his crimes. Still, there are redeeming qualities in the old bore, and there is pardon for him, as well as for other sinners. Our sleigh-rides and our first-of-January calls; our Christmas glees and frolics; stockings of children, girls and boys, hung up by the fire-place or the bed-post; our friends lounging into the parlor and chatting with the wife and the wife's two sisters,

or three or four, if there be so many, and our retreat into the back-room, where BILL the waiter has made a spread of creature-comforts, segars and punch, and a cold piece of ham from Maryland or Virginia, with oysters stewed, broiled and fried, and the wind outside coming up against the windows in puffs, and when it finds it can't get in, whistling like a cow-boy, home returning from the fields at sun-down. Old warrior, grizzly old ruffian, stand aside, and do n't disturb the window-curtains with your surly breath! You have no business in our back-parlor, or in our front-parlor, or in the bed-rooms, where Virtue and Innocence and Love sleep under the canopy of Home. And now that Winter is away, and 'cut' by the other seasons, let us welcome the Spring. Delicious God-gift is Spring. It comes tripping over the fields like the girl we love,' buds bursting into flower twined within her hair; that hair which WINTER, the frosty barber, had coiffed in ice and powdered with snow. Welcome, then, bright Heart's Delight! Fill our souls with comfortable thoughts and dreamy happiness; and when the Summer solstice comes to take your place, may you yield up your wand of beauty with no immodest look, to make the burning season warmer in his career!' . . . SHERIDAN once stole a crown-piece from SWIFT when he was asleep, and left in its place these lines:

'DEAR DEAN, since you in sleepy wise

Have ope'd your mouth and closed your eyes,

Like ghost I glide along your floor,

And softly shut your parlor-door;

For should I break your sweet repose,

Who knows what money you might lose?

Since oftentimes it hath been found

A dream has given ten thousand pound.

Then sleep, my friend-dear DEAN, sleep on,
And all you get shall be your own,
Provided you to this agree,

That all you lose belongs to me!'

WHEN we hear a pompous, censorious person inveighing against his acquaintances, enlarging upon mere flaws in the characters of those who are infinitely his superiors in every virtue which reflects honor upon human nature, we can hardly resist the inclination to say to him in the words of an old author: Look into the dark and hidden recesses of your own heart, and consider what a number of impure thoughts brood and hover there, like a dark cloud upon the face of the soul; take a prospect of the fancy, and see it acting over the several scenes of pride, of ambition, of envy, lust and revenge; tell how often a vicious inclination has been restrained, for no other reason but just to save your credit or interest in the world, and how many unbecoming ingredients have entered into the composition of your best actions. Would you be able to bear so severe a test? Would you be willing to have every thought and inward motion of your heart laid open and exposed to view?' Not a bit of it! ... Wɛ asked in our last number Who is H. Melvill?' The question has been answered to our great satisfaction. In the first place, our esteemed contemporary of The Albion' weekly journal tells us: 'He is a Doctor of Divinity, Chaplain of the Tower of London, and Principal of Haileybury College, an establishment belonging to the East-India Company, in which youths are educated for the civil department of their service. Dr. MELVILL is beyond all doubt the most eloquent preacher in England.' In the second place, we have received from our friends the publishers, Messrs. STANFORD AND SWORDS, Number 139 Broadway, two large volumes, containing all of Dr. MELVILL'S published sermons; and after a careful perusal of them, we can well believe in the justice of the high praise awarded by the Albion' to the eloquence of

their author.

Without farther preface, we propose to present the reader with the means of judging himself of the style and genius of our author; his breathing words, his bold figures, his picturesque images, and rapid, vivid, fervid aspirations.' The 'spring-time of the year' has come; and in the warm bosom of the earth, and up through the veins of countless trees and plants, nature's resurrection is going on. It seems an appropriate period wherein to ask ourselves the momentous question,' With what body do we come,' when at the general resurrection we appear at the bar of judgment? Mr. MELVILL'S argument, based upon the declaration of HIM who said 'I am the resurrection and the life,' is, that there hath not died the man who shall not live again, and live again in that identical body which his spirit abandoned when summoned back to God.' Our eloquent author treats of this great subject in two discourses, one entitled The Doctrine of the Resurrection,' the other The General Resurrection and Judgment.' From the first we segregate the ensuing passage:

'I CANNOT master the mysteries of the sepulchre. I may have sat down in one of the soli. tudes of nature; and I may have gazed on a firmament and a landscape which seemed to burn with divinity; and I may have heard the whisperings of a more than human voice, telling me that I am destined for companionship with the bright tenantry of a far lovelier scene; and I may then have pondered on myself; there may have throbbed within me the pulses of eternity; I may have felt the soarings of the immaterial, and I may have risen thrilling with the thought that I should yet find myself the immortal. But if, when I went forth to mix again with my fellows, the splendid thought still crowding every chamber of the spirit, I met the spectacle of the dead borne along to their burial; why, this demonstration of human mortality would be as a thunder-cloud passing over my brilliant contemplations. How can this buried man be judged? How can he be put upon trial? His soul may be judged, his soul may be put upon trial; but his soul is not himself.'

In calling attention to the eloquent passages which ensue, we should not omit to premise, that many of the most eminent medical and surgical authorities of the world pronounce the resurrection of the natural body as physically impossible. How many have given their bodies to be burned?' They were consumed, and vanished out of their place.' 'Nor,' reason many benevolent and christian impugners of the doctrine of a physical resurrection, 'would it be desirable, were it possible. Are deformities, are all the ills, to which our frames are subject on earth, to be revived and perpetuated in heaven? We confess that the deformed little girl, who was for the first time called by her brother, when in anger, a 'hunch-back,' asked, to our conception, a very natural question of her weeping mother, when the poor child lay dying: 'Mother, I shall not be so there,' pointing upward, 'shall I? I shall be straight, won't I, when I get to heaven? Yet you will know me, dear mother, won't you?' But to

our extracts:

THIS frame-work of flesh in which my soul is now enclosed will be reduced at death to the dust from which it was taken. I cannot tell where or what will be my sepulchre; whether I shall sleep in one of the quiet church-yards of my own land, or be exposed on some foreign shore, or fall a prey to the beasts of the desert, or seek a tomb in the depths of the unfathomable waters. But an irreversible sentence has gone forth: Dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt return; and assuredly ere many years, and perhaps ere many days have elapsed, must my earthly house of this tabernacle be dissolved, rafter from rafter, beam from beam, and the particles of which it has been curiously compounded be separated from each other, and perhaps scattered to the four winds of heaven. And who will pretend to trace the wanderings of these particles, into what substances they may enter, of what other bodies they may form part, so as to appear and disappear many times in living shape before the dawn of the great day of the universe? The elements of which my body is composed may have belonged to the bone and flesh of successive generations; and when I shall have passed away and been forgot. ten, they will again be wrought into the structure of animated beings. And when you think that my body at the resurrection must have at least so much of its original matter as shall be necessary for the preservation of identity, for the making me know and feel myself the very same being who sinned and suffered and was disciplined on earth, you must admit that nothing short of infinite power could prevail to the watching and disentangling and keeping duly separate what is to be again builded into a habitation for my spirit, so that it may be brought together from the four ends of the earth, detached from other creations, or extracted from other substances. . This matter may have passed through innumerable changes. It may have circulated through the living tribes of many generations; or it may have been waving in the

The

trees of the forest; or it may have floated on the wide waters of the deep. But there has been an Eye upon all its appropriations and all its transformations; so that, just as though it had been indelibly stamped from the first with the name of the human being to whom it should finally belong, it has been unerringly reserved for the great day of the resurrection. myriads upon myriads of atoms, the dust of kingdoms, the ashes of all that have lived, are perpetually jostled, and mingled, and separated, and animated, and swept away, and reproduced; and nevertheless, not a solitary particle but holds itself ready, at the sound of the last trump, to combine itself with a multitude of others, in a human body in which they once met perhaps a thousand years before.'

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What a scene will be presented, when the cloud and the mist shall have been rolled away from the boundless hereafter;' when the whole globe, its mountains, its deserts, its cities, its oceans, shall seem resolved into the elements of human kind; and millions of eyes look up from a million chasms; and long-severed spirits rush down to the tenements which encased them in the days of probation; standing in their resurrection-bodies on the earth, as it heaves with strange convulsions, and looking on a firmament lined with ten thousand times ten thousand angels, and beholding a throne of fire and cloud, such as was never piled for mortal sovereignty! That hour,' adds our eloquent author, 'so full of mystery and night, has not yet arrived; but it must come; it may not perhaps be distant; and there may be some of us, for aught we can tell, who shall be alive on the earth when the voice issues forth; the voice which shall be echoed from the sea and the city, the mountain and the deserts, all creation hearkening, and all that hath ever lived simultaneously responding. But whether we be of the quick or the dead, on the morning of the resurrection, we must hear the voice, and join ourselves to the swarming throng which presses forward to judgment.' In the sermon entitled Testimony confirmed by Experience' is the following glowing description of the fruition of christian hope:

OH, as the shining company take the circuit of the celestial city; as they walk about Zion, and go round about her,' telling the towers thereof, marking well her bulwarks and considering her palaces; who can doubt that they say one to another,As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of our GOD?' We heard that here the 'wicked cease from troubling,' and now we behold the intense deep calm. We heard that here we should be with the LORD, and now we see him face to face. We heard that here we should know, and now the ample page of universal truth is open to our inspection. We heard that here, with the crown on the head and the harp in the hand, we should execute the will and hymn the praises of our GOD, and now we wear the diadem and wake the melody.' IT is not the voice of a solitary and weak fellow-man

which now tells you of heaven. GOD is summoning you. Angels are summoning you. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses. The battlements of the sky seemed thronged with those who have fought the good fight of faith. They bend down from the eminence, and bid us ascend, through the one MEDIATOR, to the same lofty dwelling. We know their voices as they sweep by us solemnly and sweetly. They shall not call in vain.'

In the discourse upon The Power of Religion,' Mr. MELVILL thus depicts a man whose attention has been engrossed by commerce, and whose thoughts have been given wholly to the schemings and workings of trade:

MAY we not affirm, that when the grace of GoD takes possession of this man's soul, there will occur an extraordinary mental revolution, and that too brought round by the magnificence of the subjects with which his spirit has newly grown conversant? In place of oceans which can be fathomed, and weighed and measured, there is an expanse before him without a shore. In place of carrying on intercourse with none but the beings of his own race, separated from him by a few leagues of distance, he sends his vessels as it were to lands tenanted by the creatures of a more glorious intelligence, and they return to him freighted with a produce costlier and brighter than earthly merchandise. In place of acquaintance with no ledger save the one in which he casts up the debtor and creditor of a few fellow-worms, there rises before him the vast volume of doomsday, and his gazings are often on the final balance-sheet of the human population.'

We have extended our extracts almost beyond the limits of our available space, but we can't help it ;' nor are we yet quite done. The reader will require no apology on our part for giving the subjoined desultory sentences from a discourse on 'The Advantages of a State of Expectation :'

'WHAT is hope, but the solace and stay of those whom it most cheats and deludes; whis

pering of health to the sick man, and of better days to the dejected; the fairy name on which young imaginations pour forth all the poetry of their souls, and whose syllables float like aerial music into the ear of frozen and paralyzed old age? In the long catalogue of human griefs there is scarce one of so crushing a pressure that hope loses its elasticity, becoming unable to soar, and bring down fresh and fair leaves from some far-off domain which itself creates. Hope proves man deathless. It is the struggle of the soul, breaking loose from what is perishable, and attesting her eternity. It is good that we hope; it is good also that we quietly wait. Strive ye therefore to 'let patience have her perfect work. It is yet a little while, and he that shall come will come.' Be ye not disheartened; the night is far spent, the day is at hand.' As yet there has been no day to this creation; but the day comes onward. There is that edge of gold on the snow-mountains of a long-darkened world, which marks the ascending of the sun in his strength. Watchman, what of the night? Watchman, what of the night? The watchman said, The morning cometh, and also the night.' On then, still on ! lest the morning break ere hope and waiting have wrought their intent.'

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THE chance quotation which we made in our last number, 'There shall be no Night in Heaven,' is from a sermon upon that great theme, in the present reading of which we were forcibly impressed with these brief sentences: In heaven the mind will have the power of the eye, so that the understanding shall gather in the magnifi cence of truth with the same facility as the organ of sense the beauties of a landscape.' In the consideration of these sermons of MELVILL we have confined ourselves to the first only of the two volumes before us. We may find occasion hereafter to devote a kindred subsection of this department to a review of the second volume. . . . NEXT to the Prock'. that remarkable western animal, which has two short legs on one side and two long ones on the other, to enable him to keep his perpendicular' while grazing or browsing on the sides of steep mountains, and which is only caught by being ' headed' and turned round, when, in reversed position,' he falls to rise no more' as a 'free and independent Prock' - next, we say, to this animal, must now be reckoned the Ice-Breaker of the Upper-Penobscot,' of which a correspondent sends us the following full and satisfactory account: It is said that they den in an immense fissure on the northerly side of Katahdin. They generally make their appearance on the lakes about the first of April. It is believed that there are not more than four or five extant, and some go so far as to say that there is but one, alleging that there is no sufficient evidence of more having been distinctly seen. From all accounts (I speak of the one concerning which their seems to be no doubt) he is about two-thirds as large as a middling-sized elephant. There is nothing very peculiar about his form, proportions, etc., except his tail. This is said to be seventeen or eighteen feet long, and at a distance of eight to ten inches from the extreme tip is a knot, or bunch, of the size of a bushel-basket, and of great consistency. With this he strikes a tremendous blow, and will break the strongest ice, a foot thick, with perfect ease. The lumbermen on the West Branch have frequently heard the report of his blows on the Chesuncook ice, a distance of thirty miles. I have often wondered that our naturalists have made no attempts to obtain them.. I think with proper care they might succeed. Let a company well furnished and prepared be in the vicinity of the fissure, say about six weeks hence, and I make no doubt they would take some;' especially if they should have the Baskahegan Giant with them.' . . . WHEN, in 1779,' writes 'W. S.,' a new correspondent, that most lamentable comedy of a tragedy, 'The Critic, or a Tragedy Rehearsed,' was first produced on the Drury Lane boards, SHERIDAN was censured of some, as having ridiculously overdrawn some of his satirical sketches. Probably the concluding scene in the first Act was of this number; and verily, to that class of readers who see nothing in a newspaper but the news, and dismiss the advertising columns to the demnition bow-wows,' there may be things passing strange therein. We allude to the discourse on the sublime mystery of Puffing, wherein the Magnus APOLLO of that science divides the whole genus into sundry dis