AN AVOWAL.

MY DEAR MAGENTA, - I am constrained, by an article which appeared in a late number of the Advocate, to make confession of a creed which I hold with others. I make no attempt to reply to that article, because the writer, against whom it was particularly directed, has already answered it; and, indeed, the statement might seem to contain fit replies in themselves. My purpose is only to confess myself a believer in sentiment, and to give a few reasons for clinging to something which has at least the approval of some former times, and which, I had thought, was beginning to prevail in our own. Indeed, it is for this reason that I have never before obtruded upon you my opinions in regard to this subject. But if a confession of sentiment is to be considered a confession of folly, why then it behooves every true lover of sentiment boldly to acknowledge himself such, and bear up as he may against the abuse of Mr. Bounderby, the facts of Mr. Gradgrind, or the more delicate sarcasm of less fictitious persons.

In the first place, then, What is it to give up sentiment? Religion, held by some writers to be of first importance, will lose much of its hold on human nature. The Mahometan and the Puritan, it is true, would be little affected, but those large portions of what is known as the Christian world, who build much upon ritual and the reverence due to antiquity, will suffer grievously, - a fact which deserves to be considered by all sentiment-destroyers. We must lose, too, or rather throw away, as useless and not money-making, that large part of history which teaches us so little, being mainly occupied in pandering to our taste for sentiment of a venerable sort, which has come down unharmed through many years.

The labor of the antiquary, too, except in so far as it throws light upon "useful" points in history, must be condemned at once. If there still exists an old curiosity shop in some unsuspected and hardly useful spot, let it be dismantled at once. Out with the useless lumber, - it will make firewood at least, - and away to the poor-house with the doting old fool who sleeps in a Mayflower bed and pokes his fire with a blade of Damascus.

And so I might go on with the long list of great things which we owe to sentiment, but the lesser ones are dearer to us. I know, my dear Magenta, that I am a person of very small consequence, that my literary contributions are but little valued by you, but must I give up as useless even the few mementos of consideration and regard which I cherish with so much care? Must I light my fire with the paper which contains a record of my one College office? May I not feel sentiment? Nay, may I not grow sentimental (utilitarians may sneer if they choose) over my one photograph and the little bundles of dried flowers? Reason would say they were given out of compassion only, and utility would bid me throw them away; but sentiment steps in and makes that to be a choicest possession to me, which, to the utilitarian, is but dust and ashes. No; these are things which I cannot give up. They depend upon feelings which lie too deep for logic. They carry with them a certainty which neither logic, facts, nor figures have ever brought to the mind of man. Is it, then, strange or wrong that they should be so loved by a

SENTIMENTALIST.