keeps the spirit lean, hectic, fiery, ready to put on wings and fly away into the future millennium; but not quite able to deal wisely with the present aspect of this mixed America.

The North-west, in its relations to the central region, reminds one of a splendid, eager, overpowering lover, battering away at the heart of a somewhat sleepy, but deep-souled and large-hearted maiden, who, alternately charmed and offended, at last surrenders, and becomes the wife of a man who is sure to come out at fifty a far nobler specimen of massive manhood than otherwise he could have been. The spirited cities and communities of the Lakes by turns ridicule and denounce our slow and undemonstrative region of the valleys; but the Lakes will end by marrying the valleys. Already Northern politics have revolutionized "Egypt," lifted up Indiana into a leading State, and sentenced the Pendletons and Pughs of Ohio to political exile. Northern ideas of industry, education, and society will follow. When this union of these States is complete, the Western character will be far more weighty, deliberate, and genial than now. May a good Providence speed that wedding-day!

In this final crystallization of the Western character, the German element of our population will doubtless be influential. Especially will the great masses of honest, industrious, kindly, slow but broad and deep-souled German farmers and mechanics and laborers, be a vast mine of healthy life, out of which can be drawn treasures of private and public worth. Even the Catholic Germans, who are the lowest of all, are not so obstinately wedded to the hierarchy that they will refuse to blend finally with the best elements of our population. The German Jews are often as genuine Americans as they "to the manor born." The Protestant German people are generally intelligent, industrious, economical, and virtuous as men can be who live chiefly in the realm of material comfort and social enjoyment. The complex despotisms of Central Europe have done their work upon them; for there is something in German despotism so subtle, elaborate, and persistent, that it seems to paralyze whole regions of the human mind.

The worst result of this Central European order of society on its subject masses is this paralyzing of the spiritual nature. Our German emigrants are now the most grossly materialistic of the American people. They live in this world as if there could be no other, and treat their bodies as if they were only the temples of a refined nervous organization. But this is a transition state. The thunders, lightnings, and earthquakes of our new Western life will split this stolid crust of materialism; and out of these good-natured, moderate, stingy, prosaic Hermanns and Minnas, will come the poets, the artists, the singers, the statesmen, and the saints of the West. They have no new ideas to give us; but their moderation, patience, and kindliness will be a fine atmosphere to pour around our fierce, restless intellectualism, and lunatic haste to build the millennium. The able men who represent this section of our German population are already among our most valuable citizens, and largely influential in our public, social, and religious affairs.

The least influential class of Germans will be that crowd of wild, long-haired, beer-drinking philosophers, who, on the strength of temporary residence inside a German University and banishment for revolutionary tendencies, put on Continental airs, and regard themselves as the legislators for the future American society. The headquarters of this tribe seems to be the State of Missouri; but they have active allies in all the cities and villages of the West. They are so near materialism and atheism in their central philosophy, that a wise man does not care to analyze the residuum of spiritual nature they leave in the crucible, to learn whether it be the soul or the sediment of the universe. In politics they are the wildest of impracticables, and were a sharp thorn in the side of long-suffering Abraham Lincoln during the war. Their political idol was John C. Fremont, - a romantic, miscellaneous French savan, accidentally made candidate for President and Commander-in-Chief in the West. Their social theories are admirably accommodating; their ideas of education, amusement, labor, the organization of society itself, ranging through all the varieties of communism. Their personal conceit is of that boundless kind which only cholera or cold lead can abate. Now and then, one of these men can be caught and caged in Western society, where his learning or special skill can be made available. But they are almost useless for any work that demands respect for the spiritual realities, or the common sense even of the worldly American mind. They naturally affiliate with the Wendell. Phillips and Anna-Dickinson school of American reformers, though far more impracticable than they. Over their meerschaums and their wine, in their obscure societies, they convince each other they are the breeze that blows the ship of Western society towards the "radicallissimi" millennium. But they are the barnacles and seaweed that will be scraped off the keel when the good ship is put in dry dock for repairs.

The grand mistake in all their estimate of American Society is their omission to recognize a spiritual nature in man, together with the religious, moral, social, and civil obligations flowing therefrom. Whatever may be true of this peculiar people, the American people are endowed with souls, and recognize the logical consequences of this fact. The Western American people cannot live this German socialistic life, because that is constructed on the idea that man is only a clever animal. Men who believe this can do a multitude of things as the end of existence, whose charm is dispelled by the suspicion of a nobler origin and a vaster destiny. Our people cannot guzzle beer, smoke in gardens, or roll on the grass with their sweethearts, wives, and babies on Sunday, because they believe that on one day an immortal being ought to live a higher life of the soul than he can easily achieve in the toil and unrest of the other six. They cannot be infinitely jolly, and full of careless, sensuous delight in their families; because they believe themselves responsible for the civilization of a mighty people, and do not see how all the social twittering and chirping in creation is to bring this about. If they were less bothered by an old American notion of honesty, they might come into some of the radical notions of property which titillate the boozy brains of these philosophical economists in the absence of pocket-money. They believe in teaching Young America to read and write the English language, confident that the Western mind will plough its way to a wisdom which shall overtop the learned folly of a thousand universities. The fact is, this clique is no faithful representative of the nobler side of Germany. To the real philosophy, the matchless criticism, the varied scholarship, the music, the theology, of the German mind, the West will make all due acknowledgment when its day comes. It will absorb as much of the charming geniality and catholic kindliness of its social life as can be blended with our own. But for this lager-beer brigade of atheistic anarchists it has only the regard of an express train, that thunders through a drove of mad bulls, leaving a few spots on the track to illustrate the result of an actual measurement of social forces.

Up to the present day, the Western character, thus forming from manifold combinations of the richest elements in the world, has been completely developed only in industry, politics, war, and the beginning of the people's school, church, and social life. The vast majority of large-minded men-the men who, in older communities, would be scholars, divines, statesmen, literati - are engrossed in business. Business in the West is nothing less than the shaping of a new empire into a fit area for the experiment of the largest civilization yet seen upon the earth. In politics, the broad foundations of mighty commonwealths are being laid, in which humanity can expand into a true American manhood and womanhood. The people's common-school will finally absorb all other forms of education, and culminate, as in Michigan, in free universities, which can command the largest culture of the age for every child. In war, it has made one demonstration which has written a new chapter in human history, and turned the eyes of the world on the people beyond the Alleghanies. But, beyond this, the Western character has not been fully developed. Its day for literature and art has not appeared. Its social life is the broadest and most genial in the world, but still fluctuating and crude, with great sloughs of coarseness and sensuality; and it doth not yet appear what it will finally become. Its organized religion represents its social far more than its religious life. But all things come in their order: "first the natural, afterward that which is spiritual; " and our children will see the West we only behold in vision, and recognize in it the most characteristic American life, and the broadest and highest organization into human affairs of the American Declaration of Independence and the Saviour's Golden Rule.

ART. II. - GEOGRAPHY OF PALESTINE.

The Comparative Geography of Palestine and the Sinaitic Peninsula. By CARL RITTER. Translated and adapted to the use of Biblical Students. By WILLIAM L. GAGE. 4 vols., 8vo. pp. xiv., 451, 418, 396, 410. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1866.

Four solid octavos upon the Lands of the Bible, attractive to the eye by the bright color of their covers, by their luxury of paper and type, by the name of their author, and by the charm of their subject, which, worn as it is, never fairly becomes wearisome to a student of the Bible! Shall we not find in these the last word concerning the sacred soil, and the wise and final decision of the numerous disputed questions? Will not this work of the acknowledged master in geographical science, -the great organizer of the chaos of voyages, journals, and letters in all tongues, - will not this work bring an authority which we may implicitly trust, a verdict which cannot be set aside? That expectation is not realized. These full volumes, interesting as they are, settle hardly any important Biblical question. They give the best literature of the subject; but they leave readers to judge for themselves among the conflicting accounts and opinions. We are left more uncertain than ever, after the discussion of Ritter, whether the Serbal of Lepsius may not be the Sinai of the Exodus, and the traditional claim of the Mount of Moses be