obliged to depend each week upon the fresh coinage of his own brain, instead of falling back upon the large literary capital accumulated by a veteran sermon-writer. The consequence is that the first two or three years of a preacher's life are quite likely to decide his destiny, and if he does not break down within this period after his settlement, he is pretty well seasoned and stocked for subsequent needs. It is advisable, therefore, on many accounts, that he should take what the Germans call his "Wanderjahre," and travel a year or two before pitching his tent for permanence. Travel merely for pleasure, or for general information, is dangerous to a young man's habits of study and sobriety of purpose, whilst travel with professional aims, for periods of service for a few weeks or months in different places, gives him a wide field of observation, and prepares him for his parish duties alike as a man of practical experience and of literary resources. I remember very well the events of the two years passed in this way, and have been inclined to ascribe the good health and constant labor of the long time since to the influence of those years of wandering. I visited, in some way, almost every State in the Union, and in various cities and towns remained several weeks, and in a few cases several months. No place lingers more fondly in memory than the city of L———, Kentucky.
Contrast is one of the laws of sympathy, and there is something in the electric beat of the Southern pulse quite fascinating to a young man educated under the sedate discipline of New-England, and taught to depend upon cool reasoning as the only sure path to the convictions of his audience. Most of our young theological students of the more ambitious kind, put study and thought enough into their first sermon to expand into a whole volume, forgetful of the fact that it is the emotional life that gives the sermon its power, and that, without this, the gun "ecclesiastic," however crammed with balls or shot, has no powder, and can not be fired. A Southern audience is sure to teach a young man this fact, and, whilst fond of clear reasoning, it is so greedy for fervor in feeling and utterance, as to have little patience with the speaker who does not meet this want. The tone of social life is somewhat in the same spirit, and nothing can more successfully take the stiffness out of the manners and conversation of our North-
