In a private letter with which the reverend gentleman has since favored us, he expresses the opinion that Mr. Wilbur’s life was shortened by our unhappy civil war.  It disturbed his studies, dislocated all his habitual associations and trains of thought, and unsettled the foundations of a faith, rather the result of habit than conviction, in the capacity of man for self-government.  “Such has been the felicity of my life,” he said to Mr. Hitchcock, on the very morning of the day he died, “that, through the divine mercy, I could always say, Summum nec metuo diem, nec opto.  It has been my habit, as you know, on every recurrence of this blessed anniversary, to read Milton’s ‘Hymn of the Nativity’ till its sublime harmonies so dilated my soul and quickened its spiritual sense that I seemed to hear that other song which gave assurance to the shepherds that there was One who would lead them also in green pastures and beside the still waters.  But to-day I have been unable to think of anything but that mournful text, ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword,’ and, did it not smack of pagan presumptuousness, could almost wish I had never lived to see this day.”

Mr. Hitchcock also informs us that his friend “lies buried in the Jaalam graveyard, under a large red-cedar which he specially admired.  A neat and substantial monument is to be erected over his remains, with a Latin epitaph written by himself; for he was accustomed to say pleasantly that there was at least one occasion in a scholar’s life when he might show the advantages of a classical training.”

The following fragment of a letter addressed to us, and apparently intended to accompany Mr. Biglow’s contribution to the present number, was found upon his table after his decease.—­EDITORS ATLANTIC MONTHLY.]

To the Editors of the ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

Jaalam, 24th Dec’r, 1862

RESPECTED SIRS,—­The infirm state of my bodily health would be a sufficient apology for not taking up the pen at this time, wholesome as I deem it for the mind to apricate in the shelter of epistolary confidence, were it not that a considerable, I might even say a large, number of individuals in this parish expect from their pastor some publick expression of sentiment at this crisis.  Moreover, Qui tacitus ardet magis uritur.  In trying times like these, the besetting sin of undisciplined minds is to seek refuge from inexplicable realities in the dangerous stimulant of angry partisanship or the indolent narcotick of vague and hopeful vaticination; fortunamque suo temperat arbitrio.  Both by reason of my age and my natural temperament, I am unfitted for either.  Unable to penetrate the inscrutable judgments of God, I am more than ever thankful that my life has been prolonged till I could in some small measure comprehend His mercy.  As there is no man who does not at some time render himself amenable to the one,—­quum vix Justus sit securus,—­so there is none that does not feel himself in daily need of the other.