FASHION.

"THE power of fashion," says Mr. Cogan in his Treatise on the Passions, "is an idea! influenza, that spreads with the utmost rapidity, infecting a whole community where it commenced; sometimes exten. ding to distant nations, and acquiring such a strength in its progress, that nothing can resist its force. It does not possess the degree of merit attendant upon the excessive love of novelty, which always imagines the object to possess some degree of worth; a circumstance, this, by no means essential to the influence of fashion, whose authority is, in general, derived from things known to be idle and insignificant. Fashion gives absolute sway to modes, forms, colors, &c., wantonly introduced by the whim of an individual, with whom the majority have not the most distant connection; concerning whom they are totally ignorant, unless circumstances and situations of notoriety should render their characters either equivocal or unequivocal. It is capable of instantaneously altering our opinion of the nature and qualities of things, without demanding any painful exertions of the understanding, or requiring the slow process of investigation. With the quickness of a magic wand, it in a moment subverts all those ideas of beauty, elegance, and propriety, we had before cherished. It makes us reject, as odious, what we had lately contemplated as most desirable; and raptures are inspired by qualities we had just considered as pernicious and deformed. Unwilling to renounce our title to rationality, unable to resist the power of fashion, we make every attempt to reconcile reason with absurdity: thus, in numberless instances, we attempt to vindicate to ourselves and others the novel affection. We are assiduous to find out some peculiar excellence or advantage in whatever becomes the idol of the day, and to discover some insufferable defect in the divinity we have discarded. That which was once deemed grand and majestic in size or form, will now strike the eye as insupportably clumsy; and the regularity we once admired, now renders an object stiff, precise, and formal. Colors, which were yesterday so delicately elegant, will appear to-day faint, faded, and lifeless; and those which were lately much too strong and glaring for our weak optics, become, in an instant, bright, glowing, and majestic. Fashion will render that particular garb, which we once thought so warm and comfortable, hot and insupportable as the sultry dog days; and it makes the slightest covering, contrary to its pristine nature, remarkably pleasant in the depth of winter. The flowing hair, or adjusted ringlets, shall at one period be considered as becoming and elegant; at another, be rejected and reprobated as demanding a culpable waste of our most precious time;" These are admirable observations: let the votaries of fashion read them, and reflect on the abject slavery in which they are held.

Too much attention to fashionable dress certainly displays an imbecility of mind. Alphonsus, king of Arragon, used to wear no better apparel than the ordinary sort of his subjects did; and being advised by one to put on kingly apparel, he answered, "I had rather excel my subjects in my behavior and authority, than in a diadem and purple garments."

“It may be a sufficient censure of some fashions," observes Mr. Newton, to say they are ridiculous. Their chief effect is to disfigure the female form. And perhaps the inventors of them had no worse design than to make a trial, how far they could lead the passive, unthinking many in the path of absurdity. Some fashions, which seem to have been at first designed to hide a personal deformity, have ob. tained a general prevalence with those who had no such deformity to hide. We are informed that Alexander had a wry neck, and therefore his courtiers carried their heads on one side, that they might appear to be in the king's fashion. We smile at this servility in people who lived in Macedonia twenty centuries before we were born; yet it is little less general among ourselves at the present day."

When the duke of Sully was called upon by Lewis XIII. to give his advice in some great emergency, he observed the favorites and courtiers whispering to one another, and smiling at his unfashionable appearance. "Whenever your majesty's father," said the old warrior and statesman, "did me the honor to consult me, he ordered the buffoons of the court to retire into the anti-chamber."-Selected.

For the Microcosm.

BIBLE STORIES.

THE love of the marvelous, is one of the strongest loves in the heart of a child. One who would see that curious element of our humanity in its beauty, must look there for it. Witness "Blue Beard," "Cinderilla," and other conspicuous antiques in the archives of the nursery, that have passed by the lisping vote of successive generations, into a sort of Illiad-like repute in their literature. The wildest, the most sportive child, will wait by your side, mute and half breathless, for the unfolding catastrophe of some tale of wonder; and you have but slight skill in the recital, if it does not arouse and excite, till the dullest eye in your group flashes with animation.

Is this innate longing for what is strange and new, to be crushed in embryo?—and that most natural and childlike petition, "Tell me a story;" shall we frown upon it, as the germ which will one day become the eager inquiry for the last new novel? But he who contrived the secret springs of human intellect, surely knew that this was among them, and it is not for us in the pride of our ignorance to destroy the slightest portion of that mysterious mechanism. We might as kindly extinguish the beautiful organs of sight in a child we love, lest they should one day become the ministers of evil, as thus to seal its avenue of mental vision-as thus to destroy that principle, by which it would fain look out from the narrow circle of trifling events and objects that bounds its every day routine, lest perverted and uncultured, and starved of the truth which is its natural aliment, if it be not wholly lulled, it should at last seek the morbid excitement of fiction. For the

eye, with its beautiful fitness for the light, does not more clearly point to its Divine Designer, than does this principle of humanity; in that in every path of being, on the page of science, in the records of human destiny, amid the beautiful things of nature, aye, and on the leaves of his own holy book, God hath strown the mysteries and marvels it thirsts for. He never made us the dull, unintellectual beings we are; the mind, fresh from his hand, is an eager, restless thing, on the wing for knowledge; through the stupifying influences of early culture, it rises tamed and contented, with half its fine springs rusted hopelessly.

We would not then repress this principle in the discipline of an infant mind. We would arose and excite it to action, and seize on it in all its power, as a grand engine, for pouring in the redeeming influences of truth, ere the gathering illusions of earth shall have overshadowed it, and the temptation and sin of coming years, shall have hardened, and sealed it up, to all that is not selfish and earthly. But the instrument is powerful-it should be wielded carefully, and with the wisdom that cometh from above. The stern reproof, the gentle entreaty, will perchance scarce outlive one night's dreams, but the fireside tale you breathe into the ear of a little child, may leave a trace that the sleep of the grave cannot obliterate. It may tell on the future destiny of the man when that whole scene shall have faded from his memory,-when that low murmur of your voice, the light of that glowing hearth, aye, and the loved faces it shines upon, are all forgotten, or remembered only, faintly and fleetingly with the dreamy recollections of childhood. As you go on with your tale, beware of the power you are wielding. The boy at your side, whose darkening eye and flushing features reveal the intellectual and moral energies that tale is awakening, may indeed resume his frolic when it is ended, as gaily as ever, and while he sports his top, or guides his mimic team, there may be no visible token to you, of the deep and silent mouldings of the spirit. Yet other eyes may read the moral of your story, when many years of their long sleep have settled on yours, they may trace it in the intellectual lineaments of the coward, or the hero, the poet or the philosopher; in the moral lineaments of the cold-hearted unbeliever, or the high-hearted saint, the murderer or the martyr ;—you yourself may hear it, in the songs of the redeemed.

In exerting this influence, need we borrow from the resources of fiction? Oh let no word of ours be given in defense of those crowds of young novels that are now gliding with impunity around the firesides of New England, in the sanctimonious garb of the Sabbath School, working in the hearts of the sons and daughters of the pilgrims, an influence whose evil it is hard to estimate. The mind that is just waking from the thoughtlessness of infancy, pressing forward to survey the mysteries of its being, surrounded by an infinity of truth, all unknown, separated by a few brief suns, from the presence of an eternity where all is truth, for such a mind must we contrive an unreal world of things; as though in the loveliest creation of human thought, there could be any thing more worthy its wealth of power and feeling, than that vast system of which God is the author. Fictions, historical, moral and religious, Heaven grant they never rise in judgment against us, from thousands of immortal spirits whose threshold of being they darkened, whose earliest aspirations after knowledge they cloyed forever. When all that is winning and ennobling

in the vast reservoirs of truth is exhausted, will there not be time enough for its idle mimicry?

But this is a field as yet scarce touched. With but few exceptions, those who write for children now, are all busying themselves with the mould and coloring of their artful imitations, while the living roses droop in myriad paths, wasting and waiting, for some hand to pluck them. Surely, from the rich variety within these sacred limits, one might select a class of facts, that in the beauty of a clear and vivid delineation, should succeed, even by the sufferance of that marvel loving age, not merely to the place of the Cinderilla's and Goody Two Shoes of antiquity, but to the Lucy's, the Sophia's, and all the modern host of miniature romances.

A single step leads to a mine of rich material. He who reads the bible for an hour, with the feelings of a little child, will be astonished to perceive how much of that sacred volume is a "Child's Own Book." You can invent nothing to suit an infant mind, nothing of the marvelous, the beautiful or the touching, that has not its pattern in this most splendid model. There is no child that is learned at all, even though it be but in the simple language of his earliest perceptions, you cannot draw for, from this rich repository. Would you feed his bold, unchastened fancy? Tell him of the gold, the jewels, the ivory and the purple-let all the sparkling magnificence of God's ancient tabernacle float before him. Does he ask for some exciting tale of bears and lions? Can your memory or imagination furnish one, like that of him who lay of old, all night, quiet and unharmed, in the midst of that hungry and panting group, whose fierce mouths God had shut; or of those that came on the flock of the young shepherd, who, in the same high trust, slew both the lion and the bear; or if you would stamp on his mind an image he shall carry freshly to his grave, tell him of the little mockers of Bethel. But why do not children read the bible with that avidity with which they seize on less sacred volumes? There are many prejudices in the mind of a child on this subject. Perhaps some slight circumstance has left with its idea a train of gloomy thought. He has seen it, from his earliest memory, banishing smiles from the fireside, ere he could distinguish between the gloom of sadness and the thoughtful calm of devotion; it is a large book too, a book for grown people, and as he turns its sacred leaves, perhaps from compulsion, he finds hard names, long histories whose broken links he cannot gather-he has no clue, like the maturer mind, to guide him through its labyrinths. There are many allusions too, historical and local, which, while they enrich the page with invaluable beauty, for those who feel their meaning, are only so many clogs in the way of every little learner.

Effort is required to remove these prejudices. Careful selection; we must crop the bright flowers in those solemn shades, and bring them out, and hold them up, ere we can lure the little wanderers in thither. We must give them a cup of the living water, ere they will come themselves, and draw patiently from these ancient wells. Poor little things! what painful ideas, what weariness and darkness mingle with their reverence for holy things, while reading the bible "in course," plodding on through genealogies and apostolic discussions, and the visions of prophecy, from Genesis to Revelation.

We are glad to see that this rich department is beginning to be explored, and that too, by writers of no mean note in the realms of juvenile literature.

Several little books have lately appeared, exactly fitted to meet this prejudice. They contain stories from the bible exquisitely adapted to the tastes of children, divested of all that they cannot understand, and enriched with those illustrations which the educated mind supplies from its own associations. Such are the "Life of David," the "Life of Paul," "Female Scripture Biography," &c. We commend them heartily to the notice of our readers. We believe they will be worth more in the little world we write for, than myriads of human invention-more perhaps than we can estimate till we reckon with the heavenly figures.

We believe that the events selected by the Creating Mind to move the human, are better for their purpose than any of human imagining; we believe that when the bible was written, little children, marvel-loving children, were had in remembrance by their Almighty Father.

I.

ENCOURAGEMENT WITHOUT COMMITTAL.

"STOP, Ellen, don't run away-I've been watching for an opportunity to talk with you this whole week."

"I mistrusted as much."

"It was a guilty conscience then, made you avoid me, was it ?”

"No, but you are always preaching,-I know you have a lecture in store for me and it is rather quizzical for you to pretend to be as sage as if you were my grandmother."

"Well, we will not stop now to discuss the absurdity of my turning preacher, as you call it: so long as I can plead an interest for you and others as the occasion, I can bear the reproach, if there is any. Since you were so ready in discovering my premeditated lecture,' perhaps you have guessed out the subject of it, too."

“To be sure I have. I have heard so much on all sides during the last few weeks, that I am tolerably well able to decide upon what is coming." "Well, then, to come to the point at once,-almost every body thinks you to blame in this affair. You know Mr. G. is a universal favorite, and perhaps that makes the public more disposed to take his part."

"I wish people would leave off meddling with what does not concern them."

"It would be a very desirable improvement, I own, but as long as people will talk and will censure, it is best to do right and leave them as little wrong to talk about as possible. Besides, you know there is a moral balance to be adjusted, which it is of more importance to meet equally poised, than to be measured by the standard of public opinion. The latter is vacillating, and easily swayed by contrary influences-but there is a stern right and wrong which is unchanging and uncompromising."

"I should think by this preamble, you supposed me guilty of some great wrong."

"I do not say that. I am unacquainted with the particulars of the present