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Title: Beadle's Dime National Speaker, Embodying Gems of Oratory and Wit, Particularly Adapted to American Schools and Firesides - Speaker Series Number 2, Revised and Enlarged Edition
Author: Various
Language: English
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BEADLE'S
DIME
NATIONAL
SPEAKER
[Speaker Series, Number 2.]
NEW YORK:
BEADLE AND COMPANY, 118 WILLIAM ST.
Sinclair Tousey, 121 Nassau St., N. Y.
Beadle's Hand-books for Popular Use.
BEADLE & CO. publish several books of more than ordinary
interest and value to that class of persons who wish for aids in
letter writing, for assistance in becoming acquainted with the rules
and observances of society, etc., etc. They are particularly adapted
to meet a great popular want of reliable and _available_ text books on
their subjects, and can not fail to give perfect satisfaction. They
are:
BEADLE'S DIME LETTER-WRITER.
(Revised and Enlarged Edition.)
A PERFECT GUIDE TO ALL KINDS OF CORRESPONDENCE.
Embracing chapters and directions on the following:
The Art of Composition and Punctuation; the Meaning and
Uses of "Style;" Letters of Business; Letters of Pleasure
and Friendship; Letters of Love; Letters of Duty and Trust;
Letters of Relationship; Letters of Various Occasions;
Writing for the Press; Improprieties of Expression;
Complete Dictionary of Foreign and Classic Phrases;
Abbreviations; Poetic Quotations for Various Occasions;
Proverbs from Shakspeare, etc., etc.
BEADLE'S DIME BOOK OF ETIQUETTE.
(Revised and Enlarged Edition.)
For Both Sexes. A Guide to the Usages and Observances of
Society. Embracing important chapters as follows:
Entrance into Society; General Observances for Visits,
etc.; Special Observances for All Occasions; the Formula of
Introductions; on Dress and Ornaments; on Cleanliness and
Fastidiousness; Conversation and Personal Address; Writing
of Address, etc.; Balls, Evening Parties, Receptions, etc.;
the Card and Chess Table, etc.; Entertainments, Dinner
Parties, etc.; Etiquette of the Street; the Politeness of
Business; Advice to the Working-Man; Love, Courtship and
Marriage; Respect for Religion and Old Age; a Special Word
to the Lady; Impolite Things; the Phrenology of Courtship;
Special Word for Ladies only; Confidential Advice to Young
Men; Cultivate a Taste for the Beautiful; Etiquette of
Horseback Riding; the Laws of Home Etiquette; Cards of
Invitation for All Occasions; the Language of Rings; Good
Manners on the Ice.
These works are printed in very attractive form. They are to be had
of all News Agents, or can be ordered by mail, by remitting ten cents
each.
BEADLE & COMPANY, Publishers, 118 William St., N. Y.
BEADLE'S
DIME
[Illustration: ONE DIME]
NATIONAL SPEAKER
EMBODYING
GEMS OF ORATORY AND WIT,
PARTICULARLY ADAPTED TO
AMERICAN SCHOOLS AND FIRESIDES.
REVISED AND ENLARGED EDITION.
NEW YORK:
BEADLE AND COMPANY, PUBLISHERS,
118 WILLIAM STREET.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863,
By BEADLE AND COMPANY,
In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States,
for the Southern District of New York.
Speaker, No. 2.
CONTENTS.
Page.
The Union and its Results, _Edward Everett_, 5
Our Country's Future, _Id._ 7
The Statesman's Labors, _Id._ 9
True Immortality, _Id._ 11
Let the Childless Weep, _Metta Victoria Victor_, 13
Our Country's Greatest Glory, _Bishop Whipple_, 15
The Union a Household, _Id._ 16
Independence Bell, 17
The Scholar's Dignity, _George E. Pugh_, 18
The Cycles of Progress, _Id._ 21
A Christmas Chant, _Alfred Domett_, 23
Stability of Christianity, _Rev. T. H. Stockton_, 24
The True Higher Law, _Id._ 25
The One Great Need, _Id._ 27
The Ship and the Bird, _Owen Meredith_, 28
Tecumseh's Speech to the Creek Warriors, 29
Territorial Expansion, _S. S. Cox_, 30
Martha Hopkins, _Phoebe Cary_, 32
The Bashful Man's Story, 35
The Matter-of-fact Man, _Anon._ 38
Rich and Poor, _Joseph Barber_, 39
Seeing the Eclipse, _Anon._ 41
Beauties of the Law, 42
Ge-lang! git-up, _New Orleans Delta_, 44
The Rats of Life, _Charles T. Congdon_, 45
The Creownin' Glory of the United States, _Knick. Mag._ 46
Three Fools, _C. H. Spurgeon_, 47
Washington, _Bocock_, 48
The Same, _Id._ 50
The Same, _Id._ 52
Our Great Inheritance, _John J. Crittenden_, 54
Eulogium on Henry Clay, _Lincoln_, 55
Ohio, _Bancroft_, 56
Oliver Hazard Perry, _Id._ 57
Our Domain, _Id._ 59
Systems of Belief, _Rev. W. H. Milburn_, 60
The Indian Chief, 62
The Independent Farmer, _W. W. Fosdick_, 63
Mrs. Grammar's Ball, _Anon._ 64
How the Money Comes, 66
The Future of the Fashions, _Punch_, 67
Loyalty to Liberty our only Hope, _Bishop Whipple_, 68
Our Country First, Last, and Always, _Id._ 69
British Influence, _John Randolph_, 70
Defense of Jefferson, _Henry Clay_, 71
National Hatreds are Barbarous, _Rufus Choate_, 72
Murder will out, _Daniel Webster_, 74
Strive for the Best, 75
Early Rising, _John G. Saxe_, 76
Deeds of Kindness, 77
Gates of Sleep, _Dr. John Henry_, 78
The Bugle, _Tennyson_, 79
A Hoodish Gem, 80
Purity of the American Struggle, _Hon. H. Wilson, 1859_, 80
Old Age, _Theodore Parker_, 81
Beautiful, and as true as Beautiful, 83
The Deluge, 84
The Worm of the Still, 85
Man's Connection with the Infinite, 87
The Language of the Eagle, 88
Washington, _S. S. Cox_, 90
America vs. England, _David Dudley Field_, 91
If we Knew, _Ruth Benton_, 94
INTRODUCTION.
It is with real pleasure that this second number of the "Dime
Speaker" is given to the public. The issue of the first number
has been followed with such a demand as to render this additional
volume quite necessary to meet the calls of teachers, students, and
others. The experiment of "giving a dollar book for ten cents," which
should embrace _more_ new and _adaptable_ pieces for reading and
rehearsal--in prose and poetry, serious and humorous--than any single
work yet offered, has, it is needless to say, proven a success in
every respect; and this second number of our DIME SPEAKER is
given to teachers and scholars in the full assurance of its meeting
with their approbation in all respects. It will be found to include
some unusually valuable and beautiful pieces for the school-stage,
both in prose and verse--most of the matter being from speeches and
contributions lately given to the world by the best of our living
orators and writers. The effort has been to give as great variety as
possible--to suit all tastes and capacities, from the child to the
man. It is the purpose of the publishers to continue the series in
yearly issues, thus to place in the hands of the youth of our land, at
the smallest possible price, books which can not fail to expand their
tastes for what is best in style and sentiment, while they shall also
offer instruction and amusement, as well to the home circle as to the
school-room and exhibition.
BEADLE'S
DIME SPEAKER,
No. 2.
THE UNION AND ITS RESULTS.--_Edward Everett, July 4th, 1860._
Merely to fill up the wilderness with a population provided with
the ordinary institutions and carrying on the customary pursuits
of civilized life--though surely no mean achievement--was, by no
means, the whole of the work allotted to the United States, and thus
far performed with signal activity, intelligence, and success. The
founders of America and their descendants have accomplished more
and better things. On the basis of a rapid geographical extension,
and with the force of teeming numbers, they have, in the very
infancy of their political existence, successfully aimed at higher
progress in a generous civilization. The mechanical arts have been
cultivated with unusual aptitude. Agriculture, manufactures, commerce,
navigation, whether by sails or by steam, and the art of printing
in all its forms, have been pursued with surprising skill. Great
improvements have been made in all those branches of industry, and in
the machinery pertaining to them, which have been eagerly adopted in
Europe. A more adequate provision has been made for popular education
than in almost any other country. There are more seminaries in the
United States, where a respectable academical education may be
obtained--more, I still mean, in proportion to the population--than
in any other country except Germany. The fine arts have reached a
high degree of excellence. The taste for music is rapidly spreading
in town and country; and every year witnesses productions from the
pencil and the chisel of American sculptors and painters, which would
adorn any gallery in the world. Our Astronomers, Mathematicians,
Naturalists, Chemists, Engineers, Jurists, Publicists, Historians,
Poets, Novelists, and Lexicographers, have placed themselves on a
level with those of the elder world. The best dictionaries of the
English language since Johnson, are those published in America. Our
constitutions, whether of the United States or of the separate States,
exclude all public provision for the maintenance of religion, but in
no part of Christendom is it more generously supported. Sacred science
is pursued as diligently and the pulpit commands as high a degree of
respect in the United States, as in those countries where the Church
is publicly endowed; while the American Missionary operations have won
the admiration of the civilized world. Nowhere, I am persuaded, are
there more liberal contributions to public-spirited and charitable
objects. In a word, there is no branch of the mechanical or fine
arts, no department of science, exact or applied, no form of polite
literature, no description of social improvement, in which, due
allowance being made for the means and resources at command, the
progress of the United States has not been satisfactory, and in some
respects astonishing.
At this moment the rivers and seas of the globe are navigated with
that marvelous application of steam as a propelling power, which was
first effected by Fulton. The harvests of the civilized world are
gathered by American reapers; the newspapers which lead the journalism
of Europe are printed on American presses; there are railroads in
Europe constructed by American engineers and traveled by American
locomotives; troops armed with American weapons, and ships of war
built in American dockyards. In the factories of Europe there is
machinery of American invention or improvement; in their observatories
telescopes of American construction, and apparatus of American
invention for recording the celestial phenomena. America contests with
Europe the introduction into actual use of the electric telegraph,
and her mode of operating it is adopted throughout the French empire.
American authors in almost every department are found on the shelves
of European libraries. It is true no American Homer, Virgil, Dante,
Copernicus, Shakspeare, Bacon, Milton, Newton, has risen on the world.
These mighty geniuses seem to be exceptions in the history of the
human mind. Favorable circumstances do not produce them, nor does the
absence of favorable circumstances prevent their appearance. Homer
rose in the dawn of Grecian culture; Virgil flourished in the court of
Augustus; Dante ushered in the birth of the new European civilization;
Copernicus was reared in a Polish cloister; Shakspeare was trained in
the green-room of the theater; Milton was formed while the elements of
English thought and life were fermenting toward a great political and
moral revolution; Newton under the profligacy of the Restoration. Ages
may elapse before any country will produce a man like these, as two
centuries have passed since the last-mentioned of them was born. But
if it is really a matter of reproach to the United States that, in the
comparatively short period of their existence as a people, they have
not added another name to this illustrious list (which is equally true
of all the other nations of the earth), they may proudly boast of one
example of life and character, one career of disinterested service,
one model, of public virtue, one type of human excellence, of which
all the countries and all the ages may be searched in vain for the
parallel. I need not--on this day I need not--speak the peerless name.
It is stamped on your hearts, it glistens in your eyes, it is written
on every page of your history, on the battle-fields of the Revolution,
on the monuments of your fathers, on the portals of your capitols. It
is heard in every breeze that whispers over the fields of Independent
America. And he was all our own. He grew up on the soil of America; he
was nurtured at her bosom. She loved and trusted him in his youth; she
honored and revered him in his age; and, though she did not wait for
death to canonize his name, his precious memory, with each succeeding
year, has sunk more deeply into the hearts of his countrymen.
OUR COUNTRY'S FUTURE.--_Edward Everett's Oration at the Webster Statue
Inauguration_, 1860.
What else is there, in the material system of the world, so wonderful
as this concealment of the Western Hemisphere for ages behind the
mighty vail of waters? How could such a secret be kept from the
foundation of the world till the end of the fifteenth century? What
so astonishing as the concurrence, within less than a century, of the
invention of printing, the demonstration of the true system of the
heavens, and this great world-discovery? What so mysterious as the
dissociation of the native tribes of this continent from the civilized
and civilizable races of man? What so remarkable, in political
history, as the operation of the influences, now in conflict, now in
harmony, under which the various nations of the old world sent their
children to occupy the new; great populations silently stealing into
existence; the wilderness of one century swarming in the next with
millions; ascending the streams, crossing the mountains, struggling
with a wild hard nature, with savage foes, with rival settlements of
foreign powers, but ever onward, onward? What so propitious as this
long colonial training in the school of chartered government? and
then, when the fullness of time had come, what so majestic, amidst all
its vicissitudes and all its trials, as the Grand Separation--mutually
beneficial in its final results to both parties--the dread appeal to
arms, that venerable Continental Congress, the august Declaration,
the strange alliance of the oldest monarchy of Europe with the Infant
Republic? And, lastly, what so worthy the admiration of men and
angels as the appearance of him the expected--him the Hero--raised
up to conduct the momentous conflict to its auspicious issue in the
Confederation, the Union, the Constitution?
Is this a theme not unworthy of the pen and the mind of Webster?
Then consider the growth of the country, thus politically ushered
into existence and organized under that Constitution, as delineated
in his address on the laying the corner-stone of the extension of
the Capitol--the thirteen colonies that accomplished the Revolution
multiplied to thirty-two independent States, a single one of them
exceeding in population the old thirteen; the narrow border of
settlement along the coast, fenced in by France and the native tribes,
expanded to the dimensions of the continent; Louisiana, Florida,
Texas, New Mexico, California, Oregon--territories equal to the
great monarchies of Europe--added to the Union; and the two millions
of population which fired the imagination of Burke, swelled to
twenty-four millions, during the lifetime of Mr. Webster, and in seven
short years, which have since elapsed, increased to thirty!
With these stupendous results in his own time as the unit of
calculation; beholding under Providence with each decade of years, a
new people, millions strong, emigrants in part from the Old World,
but mainly bone of our bone, and flesh of our flesh, the children of
the soil, growing up to inhabit the waste places of the continent, to
inherit and transmit the rights and blessings which we have received
from our fathers; recognizing in the Constitution and in the Union
established by it the creative influence which, as far as human
agencies go, has wrought these miracles of growth and progress, and
which wraps up in sacred reserve the expansive energy with which
the work is to be carried on and perfected, he looked forward with
patriotic aspiration to the time, when, beneath its ægis, the whole
wealth of our civilization would be poured out, not only to fill up
the broad interstices of settlement, if I may so express myself,
in the old thirteen and their young and thriving sister States,
already organized in the West, but, in the lapse of time, to found a
hundred new republics in the valley of the Missouri and beyond the
Rocky Mountains, till our letters and our arts, our schools and our
churches, our laws and our liberties, shall be carried from the arctic
circle to the tropics, "from the rising of the sun to the going down
thereof."
THE STATESMAN'S LABORS.--_Ibid._
This prophetic glance, not merely at the impending, but the distant
future, this reliance on the fulfillment of the great design of
Providence, illustrated through our whole history, to lavish upon
the people of this country the accumulated blessings of all former
stages of human progress, made Webster more tolerant of the tardy and
irregular advances and temporary wanderings from the path of what he
deemed a wise and sound policy, than those fervid spirits, who dwell
exclusively in the present, and make less allowance for the gradual
operation of moral influences. This was the case in reference to the
great sectional controversy, which now so sharply divides and so
violently agitates the country. He not only confidently anticipated,
what the lapse of seven years since his decease has witnessed and
is witnessing, that the newly acquired and the newly organized
territories of the Union would grow up into free States; but in
common with all or nearly all the statesmen of the last generation,
he believed that free labor would ultimately prevail throughout the
country. He thought he saw that, in the operation of the same causes
which have produced this result in the Middle and Eastern States, it
was visibly taking place in the States north of the cotton-growing
region; and he inclined to the opinion that there also, under the
influence of physical and economical causes, free labor would
eventually be found more productive, and would therefore be ultimately
established.
For these reasons, bearing in mind, what all admit, that the complete
solution of the mighty problem, which now so greatly tasks the
prudence and patriotism of the wisest and best in the land, is beyond
the delegated powers of the general government; that it depends, as
far as the States are concerned, on their independent legislation,
and that it is of all others a subject, in reference to which public
opinion and public sentiment will most powerfully influence the law;
that much in the lapse of time, without law, is likely to be brought
about by degrees, and gradually done and permitted, as in Missouri,
at the present day, while nothing is to be hoped from external
interference, whether of exhortation or rebuke; that in all human
affairs controlled by self-governing communities extreme opinions
and extreme courses, on the one hand, generally lead to extreme
opinions and extreme courses on the other; and that nothing will more
contribute to the earliest practicable relief of the country from this
most prolific source of conflict and estrangement, than to prevent its
being introduced into our party organizations, he deprecated its being
allowed to find a place among the political issues of the day, north
or south, and seeking a platform on which honest and patriotic men
might meet and stand, he thought he had found it, where our fathers
did, in the Constitution.
It is true that, in interpreting the fundamental law on this subject,
a diversity of opinion between the two sections of the Union presents
itself. This has ever been the case, first or last, in relation
to every great question which has divided the country. It is the
unfailing incident of constitutions, written or unwritten; an evil to
be dealt with in good faith, by prudent and enlightened men, in both
sections of the Union, seeking, as Washington sought, the public good,
and giving expression to the patriotic common-sense of the people.
Such, I have reason to believe, were the principles entertained by
Mr. Webster; not certainly those best calculated to win a temporary
popularity in any part of the Union, in times of passionate sectional
agitation which, between the extremes of opinion, leaves no middle
ground for moderate counsels. If any one could have found and could
have trodden such ground with success, he would seem to have been
qualified to do it, by his transcendent talent, his mature experience,
his approved temper and calmness, and his tried patriotism. If he
failed of finding such a path for himself or the country--while we
thoughtfully await what time and an all-wise Providence has in store
for ourselves and our children--let us remember that his attempt
was the highest and the purest which can engage the thoughts of a
Statesman and a Patriot: peace on earth, good-will toward men, harmony
and brotherly love among the children of our common country.
TRUE IMMORTALITY.--_Ibid._
It has been the custom, from the remotest antiquity, to preserve and
to hand down to posterity, in bronze and in marble, the counterfeit
presentment of illustrious men.
* * * * *
Your long rows of quarried granite may crumble to the dust; the
cornfields in yonder villages, ripening to the sickle, may, like
the plains of stricken Lombardy, a short time ago, be kneaded into
bloody clods, by the maddening wheels of artillery; this populous
city, like the old cities of Etruria and the Campagna Romana, may be
desolated by the pestilence which walketh in darkness, may decay with
the lapse of time, and the busy mart, which now rings with the joyous
din of trade, become as lonely and still as Carthage or Tyre, as
Babylon and Nineveh, but the names of the great and good shall survive
the desolation and the ruin; the memory of the wise, the brave,
the patriotic, shall never perish. Yes, Sparta is a wheat field;
a Bavarian prince holds court at the foot of the Acropolis; the
traveling virtuoso digs for marbles in the Roman Forum and beneath the
ruins of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; but Lycurgus and Leonidas,
and Miltiades and Demosthenes, and Cato and Tully "still live;" and
Webster still lives, and all the great and good shall live in the
heart of ages, while marble and bronze shall endure; and when marble
and bronze have perished, they shall "still live" in memory so long as
men shall reverence Law, and honor Patriotism, and love Liberty!
That solemn event, which terminates the material existence, becomes
by the sober revisions of contemporary judgment, aided by offices
of respectful and affectionate commemoration, the commencement of
a nobler life on earth. The wakeful eyes are closed, the feverish
pulse is still, the tired and trembling limbs are relieved from their
labors, and the aching head is laid to rest on the lap of its mother
earth, like a play-worn child at the close of a summer's day; but all
that we honored and loved in the living man begins to live again in
a new and higher being of influence and fame. It was given but to a
limited number to listen to the living voice of Daniel Webster, and
they can never listen to it again; but the wise teachings, the grave
admonitions, the patriotic exhortations which fell from his tongue
will be gathered together and garnered up in the memory of millions.
The cares, the toils, the sorrows; the conflicts with others, the
conflicts of the fervent spirit with itself; the sad accidents of
humanity, the fears of the brave, the follies of the wise, the errors
of the learned; all that dashed the cup of enjoyment with bitter
drops and strewed sorrowful ashes over the beauty of expectation and
promise; the treacherous friend, the ungenerous rival, the mean and
malignant foe; the uncharitable prejudice which withheld the just
tribute of praise, the human frailty which wove sharp thorns into the
wreath of solid merit--all these in ordinary cases are buried in the
grave of the illustrious dead; while their brilliant talents, their
deeds of benevolence and public spirit, their wise and eloquent words,
their healing counsels, their generous affections, the whole man, in
short, whom we revered and loved and would fain imitate, especially
when his image is impressed upon our recollections by the pencil or
the chisel, goes forth to the admiration of the latest posterity.
_Extinctus amabitur idem._
LET THE CHILDLESS WEEP.--_Metta Victoria Victor._
The news is flying along the streets:
It leaves a smile with each face it meets.
The heart of London is all on fire--
Its throbbing veins beat faster and higher--
With eager triumph they beat so fast--
"The Malakoff--Malakoff falls at last!"
Hark to the murmur, the shout, the yell--
"The Malakoff's fallen!"--well, 'tis well!
But let the childless weep.
I am faint and stunn'd by the crowd;
My head aches with the tumult loud.
On this step I will sit me down,
Where the city palaces o'er me frown.
I would these happy people could see
Sights which are never absent from me;
The sound of their joy to sobs might swell,
They would swallow tears--well--it is well!
But let the childless weep.
If they could see my two young sons
Shatter'd and torn by Russian guns,--
The only children God gave me--dead!
With the rough earth for a dying bed.
Side by side, in the trenches deep--
Perchance they would weep as I must weep.
No sons of theirs on that red hill fell,
And so they smile and say, "'tis well!"
But let the childless weep.
I know where in the cottages low
Women's faces grow white with woe;
Where throats are choked with tears unshed
When widows' children ask for bread.
I think of one whose heart has grown
As cold and heavy as this stone.
But cabinets never think so low
As a mother's anguish, and so--and so
Why let the childless weep.
O Queen! your children around you sleep;
Their rest at night is sweet and deep.
Do you ever think of the mothers many
Whose sons you required, and left not any?
Do you think of young limbs bruised and crush'd
And laughing voices forever hush'd?
My soul with a fierce rage might swell,
But grief hath all the place--'tis well!
Let the childless weep.
Could God have seen with prophet eye,
When He piled the Malakoff hill so high,
That it was to be soaked through and through
With streams and streams of blood-red dew,
And covered over with anguish?--no!
Or He would have leveled it small and low.
It is man who is haughty, fierce, and cruel--
Who heaps on his altar the living fuel!
Let the childless weep.
England! England! haughty and bold!
You still covet what you behold;
To have your own proud will and way
You will make widows, thousands a day.
You buy your power with human life,
And the sobbing child and hopeless wife
Give up their dearest at your call--
But hearts must break and towers must fall
Let the childless weep.
Weep? I can not weep while around
Swells the victory's awful sound.
The Malakoff fell,--but England's way
O'er the bosoms that loved her deepest lay.
Victoria's children laugh in glee!--
Does she remember mine, or me?
Oh, footman, leave me this cold stone--
My sons are dead and I am alone--
The childless can not weep.
OUR COUNTRY'S GREATEST GLORY.--_Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota_, 1860.
The true glory of a nation is in an intelligent, honest, industrious
Christian people. The civilization of a nation depends on their
individual character; a constitution which is not the outgrowth of
this is not worth the parchment on which it is written. You look in
vain in the past for a single instance where the people have preserved
their liberties after their individual character was lost. The ruler
represents the people, and laws and institutions are the simple
outgrowth of domestic character. It is not in the magnificence of the
home of the ruler, not in the beautiful creations of art lavished
on public edifices, not in costly cabinets of pictures or public
libraries, not in proud monuments of achievements in battle, not in
the number or wealth of its cities, that we find pledges of national
glory. The ruler may gather around his palace the treasures of the
world, amid a brutalized people; the senate chamber may retain its
faultless proportions long after the voice of patriotism is hushed
within its walls; the marble may commemorate a glory which has
forever departed. Art and letters may bring no lesson to a people
whose heart is dead; the only glory of a nation is in the living
temple of a loyal, industrious, and upright people. The busy click
of machinery, the merry ring of the anvil, the lowing of peaceful
herds, and the song of the harvest home, are sweeter music than pæans
of departed glory or songs of triumph in war. The vine-clad cottage
of the hill-side, the cabin of the woodsman, and the rural home of
the farmer are the true citadels of any country. There is a dignity
in honest toil which belongs not to the display of wealth or the
luxury of fashion. The man who drives the plow, or swings his ax in
the forest, or with cunning fingers plies the tools of his craft, is
as truly the servant of his country, as the statesman in the senate
or the soldier in battle. The safety of a nation depends not on the
wisdom of its statesmen or the bravery of its generals; the tongue of
eloquence never saved a nation tottering to its fall; the sword of
a warrior never stayed its destruction. There is a surer defense in
every Christian home. I say Christian home, for I know of no glory to
manhood which comes not from the cross. I know of no rights wrung
from tyranny, no truth rescued from darkness and bigotry, which has
not waited on a Christian civilization. Would you see the image of
true glory, I would show you villages where the crown and glory of the
people was in purity of character, where the children were gathered in
Christian schools, where the voice of prayer goes heavenward, where
the people have that most priceless gift--_faith in God_. With this as
the basis, and leavened as it will be with brotherly love, there will
be no danger in grappling with any evils which exist in our midst; we
shall feel that we may work and bide our time, and die knowing that
God will bring the victory.
THE UNION A HOUSEHOLD.--_Ibid._
The great object which the statesmen of the Revolution sought, was
the defense, protection, and good government of the whole, without
injustice to any portion of the people. Experience had taught them
that it was impossible for a great republic to grow up where its
every act of public policy was liable to be thwarted by the vote of
the individual States; therefore they framed an organic law at the
foundation of our common government, which gave the men of Carolina
and Massachusetts a name dearer than any sectional name--the name of
an _American citizen_! In that conflict of opinions, by a temper of
conciliation and brotherly love, by an earnest loyalty to freedom and
profoundest reverence for law, they framed that constitution which has
been the admiration of the world.
I yield to no man in my admiration for those noble men whose names are
our household words; but in this history I see the hand of God and
acknowledge that our nationality was his gift and not the fruits of
our fathers' wisdom. Ours is not the only nation who have sought to
be free. Strong arms and stout hearts have often failed--the world is
filled with the lamentations of the patriots and dirges for the dead.
God always gives to a nation its birthright and its name. A nation is
not a mere aggregate of households, or villages, or States--national
life is something beyond the fact that individual men have banded
together for mutual defense. This belonged to the savage tribes
who once roamed over this goodly land. They may be strong, daring,
freedom-loving men, without national life. There never was a nobler
race than the people who dwelt in the fastnesses of Scotland, but
their tie was only one of kindred; the family became a clan, separate
clans warred with each other in murderous strife, and Scotland was
a field of blood. Until the cross was firmly planted in Britain,
England had no nationality--it was a land of faction until the law
and providence of God became the people's guide, and then the nobler
name of Saxon became a Christian name to tell of all that is manly
and true. Our national life is the gift of God. No other hand could
gather out of other lands millions of people of different tongues and
kindred, and mold these into one mighty nation that shall receive
into itself the men of every clime, and stamp on them its own mark of
individuality, teaching them its language, making them its kin, and
binding them as one household under its own constitution and laws.
INDEPENDENCE BELL.--_July 4th_, 1776.
When it was certain that the Declaration would be adopted and
confirmed by the signatures of the delegates in Congress, it was
determined to announce the event by ringing the old State-House bell
which bore the inscription, "Proclaim liberty to the land: to all the
inhabitants thereof!" and the old bellman posted his little boy at the
door of the hall to await the instruction of the doorkeeper when to
ring. At the word, the little patriot-scion rushed out, and, flinging
up his hands, shouted "_Ring!_ RING! RING!"
There was tumult in the city,
In the quaint old Quaker's town,
And the streets were rife with people
Pacing restless up and down;
People gathering at corners,
Where they whisper'd each to each,
And the sweat stood on their temples,
With the earnestness of speech.
As the bleak Atlantic currents
Lash the wild Newfoundland shore,
So they beat against the State-House,
So they surged against the door;
And the mingling of their voices
Made a harmony profound,
'Till the quiet street of chestnuts
Was all turbulent with sound.
"Will they do it?" "Dare they do it?"
"Who is speaking?" "What's the news?"
"What of Adams?" "What of Sherman?"
"Oh, God grant they won't refuse!"
"Make some way there!" "Let me nearer!"
"I am stifling!" "Stifle, then!
When a nation's life's at hazard,
We've no time to think of men!"
So they beat against the portal,
Man and woman, maid and child;
And the July sun in heaven
On the scene look'd down and smiled,
The same sun that saw the Spartan
Shed his patriot-blood in vain,
Now beheld the soul of freedom
All unconquer'd rise again.
See! See! The dense crowd quivers
Through all its lengthy line,
As the boy beside the portal
Looks forth to give the sign!
With his small hands upward lifted,
Breezes dallying with his hair,
Hark! with deep, clear intonation,
Breaks his young voice on the air.
Hush'd the people's swelling murmur,
List the boy's strong joyous cry!
"_Ring!_" he shouts, "RING! _Grandpa_
_Ring!_ _Oh_, RING for _Liberty_!"
And straightway, at the signal,
The old bellman lifts his hand,
And sends the good news, making
Iron-music through the land.
How they shouted! What rejoicing!
How the old bell shook the air,
Till the clang of freedom ruffled
The calm gliding Delaware!
How the bonfires and the torches
Illumed the night's repose,
And from the flames, like Phoenix,
Fair Liberty arose!
That old bell now is silent,
And hush'd its iron tongue,
But the spirit it awaken'd
Still lives,--forever young.
And while we greet the sunlight,
On the fourth of each July,
We'll ne'er forget the bellman,
Who, twixt the earth and sky,
Rung out OUR INDEPENDENCE;
Which, please God, _shall never die_!
THE SCHOLAR'S DIGNITY.--_Hon. George E. Pugh July 5th_, 1859.
The purpose of all genuine effort, beyond the satisfaction of physical
wants, should be to enlarge the compass of human sympathy and desire,
to purify, elevate, ennoble the intellectual constitution of our race.
God has so created us that these results can be attained by simple
and even direct agencies. Man is a sympathetic being; and the full
discharge of his obligation toward his own family, his friends, his
neighbors, is the method by which he can best discharge his duty in
other relations; toward God and his country, toward the millions of
his fellow-beings now alive, and the millions who will inherit the
earth in a course of ages. Hence arise man's real pleasures, and (not
less) his noblest responsibilities and actions. But, as our nature
is composed of appetites and passions which rightly adjusted, each
with another, lift us almost to the dignity of the Godhead, but when
disorganized, show us to be meaner than the brutes; so civil society,
or the association of mankind pursuant to the Divine order, while
capable, in its normal state, of the utmost happiness for all its
members, is now disorganized and demoralized, its sweet bells of
sympathy turned to discord, even its charities stained by selfishness
and base pretension; its capacities for good entirely perverted to
the oppression, to the cruel debasements of the multitude, and to
the unjust advantage of a few. Here is the field of chivalry for
him--scholar and squire who would be something more--conscious of his
earnest duty, of the vast rewards which must crown success, and alive
to the inspiration of all the past, the present, and the future; here
is a field on which he may win the gilded spurs of knighthood, and
where, with his own arm, he can truly redress the innocent, rescue
the unfortunate, and reclaim even the oppressor to a recognition of
the rights of the oppressed. Or, if he would choose a holier part,
although less conspicuous, it may be, let him join that valiant array
of pioneers which is marching now (as, in time past, it ever has
marched) at the head of the generation; hewing down primeval forests
of ignorance; bridging the torrents of crime; leveling mountains of
doubt and difficulty; filling up quagmires of sorrow; that so, in age
after age, the hosts of pilgrims from the cradle to the grave shall
traverse their distance without harm, and measurably anticipate, if
not realize, the beatitude of toil forever accomplished.
In a true sense, the scholar is a king of the noblest power. Not
his that dominion which exercises itself over the bodies of men,
subduing alike their happiness and their will, making of his
fellow-creatures a mere sport or convenience, but that dominion
which exists by the full consent of the governed, and without which,
in reality, their happiness and peace can not be secured. [Nam,
uti genus hominum compositum ex anima et corpore, ita res cunctæ,
studiaque omnia nostra, corporis alia, alia animi naturam sequuntur.
Igitur, præclara facies, magnæ divitiæ, ad hoc vis corporis, alia
hujuscemodi, omnia brevi dilabuntur; at ingenii egregia facinora,
sicuti anima, immortalia sunt. Postremo, corporis et fortunæ bonorum,
ut initium, finis est: omnia orta occidunt, et aucta senescunt: animus
incorruptus, æternus, RECTOR HUMANI GENERIS, agit atque habet
cuncta, neque ipse habetur.] The liberty of men does not stand in
rebellion against the truth, nor against the truly-anointed genius of
the age:
Unjustly thou depravest it with the name
Of servitude, to serve whom God ordains,
Or Nature; God and Nature bid the same,
When he who rules is worthiest, and excels
Them whom he governs. This is servitude,
To serve th' unwise, or him who hath rebell'd
Against his worthier.
THE CYCLES OF PROGRESS.--_Ibid._
The world moves in a grand cycle of days, and weeks, and months, and
years, susceptible of approximation, but not of exact ascertainment.
There are cycles, also, of the human understanding; or, at least,
of opinions with regard to the faculties and organism of the human
intellect. Locke was thought to have demonstrated, by unanswerable
argument, our entire lack of innate ideas; thus demolishing the
foundation upon which others had erected so many and such various
theories. But now Kant has proven, by a logic far more subtle, and
altogether more conclusive, that the mind acts only in certain
processes, or by means of certain categories, which are the laws of
its organization, and whence result conceptions or ideas not derived
from experience, or observation, or confidence in others. Plato
arrived at the same conclusion two thousand years ago, although he
supposed these conceptions or ideas to be the _reminiscences_ of a
former and superior state of intellectual existence. What has Kant
accomplished, in all his philosophy, except our remission to the
speculations of Plato, as enforced and illustrated by the wisdom of
revealed religion? And so, in the world of moral sentiment, there must
be cycles of repetition and restoration, but of restoration with _new
auspices_, and informed by principles of higher and pure significance.
The Age of Chivalry was an age of moral improvement, an age of
sympathy and generous enterprise, after centuries of darkness,
antagonism, and oppression. When scholars, therefore, shall have
become true to themselves, true to the mission of their faith and
labors, as against the overwhelming allurement of our time; shall
have become the actual prophets, and priests, and rulers, which
once they were, another Age of Chivalry will arise and dawn upon
earth. It will restore us a Government paternal in character, and
yet stripped of the usurpations by which government is now rendered
oppressive; it will restore us a Church of pristine authority and
influence, but authority and influence derived from purity in practice
as well as in precept. And with these two elements so long extinct or
lost--leaving mankind to all the terrors of tyranny and all the wiles
of imposture--with a Church and a Government reflecting the Divine
conception of men's duties toward their Creator and toward each other,
will Human Society attain, at last, the summit of human perfection.
Then will the original brotherhood and equality of our race be forever
acknowledged; then will there be work for all, and wages for work,
instead of the injustice, the crime, the misery, the wasteful disorder
which fill our hearts with so much despondency and woe. This Chivalry
is of magnificent design; since to the faith, to the hope, to the
steadfastness of our fathers, to their moral excellence and solid
greatness, will thus be united the wondrous material achievements for
which we have been so distinguished--a Chivalry of splendors enhanced
as well as rekindled, or splendors essentially bright, and joyous, and
immortal.
History tells us of republics full of promise and full of glory like
our own. Such were those which clustered upon the shores of the
Mediterranean, in almost the same latitude with us, and accomplished,
centuries ago, their rise, their zenith, and their fall. Such were
those free states and cities which braved the bleakness and inclemency
of the Baltic and German coasts; and which likewise had their
increase, and fullness, and extinction. These were all the children of
Commerce, and followed her along the borders of the sea. Their ships
explored the very ends of the world; laid the Indies under tribute;
and on this remote continent, also, planted colonies and outposts
of civilization. Alas! those republics and free states and cities
have gone to their decay; the armed legions of Despotism tread upon
their tombs, and scatter even their sacred ashes to the winds. But
may our New World, which inherits their enterprise as well as their
liberty, rejuvenate the nations grown old in oppression and despair,
and plant upon the Eastern Continent the germs of a Civilization
nobler than has yet been recognized--nobler than was ever sung by the
poets, or foretold by oracles--a Civilization which shall raise up
LABOR from its fallen estate, heal its infirmities, cover
its nakedness, and enthrone it with honor; as the rescued maniac, by
Divine compassion, was seated near the feet of our Saviour, clothed,
and in his right mind!
A CHRISTMAS CHANT.--_Alfred Domett._
It was the calm and silent night!
Seven hundred years and fifty-three
Had Rome been growing up to might,
And now was queen of land and sea!
No sound was heard of clashing wars,
Peace brooded o'er the hush'd domain;
Apollo, Pallas, Jove, and Mars,
Held undisturb'd their ancient reign,
In the solemn midnight,
Centuries ago!
'Twas in the calm and silent night!
The senator of haughty Rome
Impatient urged his chariot's flight,
From lordly revel rolling home.
Triumphal arches, gleaming, swell
His breast with thoughts of boundless sway;
What reck'd the Roman what befell
A paltry province far away,
In the solemn midnight,
Centuries ago?
Within that province far away
Went plodding home a weary boor;
A streak of light before him lay,
Fallen through a half-shut stable-door
Across his path. He paused, for naught
Told what was going on within;
How keen the stars, his only thought;
The air, how calm, and cold, and thin,
In the solemn midnight,
Centuries ago!
Oh, strange indifference! low and high
Drowsed over common joys and cares;
The earth was still, but knew not why;
The world was listening--unawares!
How calm a moment may precede
One that shall thrill the world forever!
To that still moment, none would heed,
Man's doom was link'd, no more to sever,
In the solemn midnight,
Centuries ago!
It is the calm and silent night!
A thousand bells ring out, and throw
Their joyous peals abroad, and smite
The darkness, charm'd and holy now;
The night that erst no shame had worn,
To it a happy name is given;
For in that stable lay, new-born,
The peaceful Prince of Earth and Heaven,
In the solemn midnight,
Centuries ago!
STABILITY OF CHRISTIANITY.--_Rev. T. H. Stockton, House of
Representatives, March 19th_, 1860.
I contemplate the heaven and earth of the old world: the overrulings
of Providence and changes of society there. I think of the passing
away of the whole circle of ancient Mediterranean civilization. I
think of the dark ages of Europe. I think of the morning of the
Reformation, and the fore-gleamings of "the latter-day glory." I think
of Art, and her printing-press; of Commerce, and her compass; of
Science, and her globe; of Religion, and her Bible. I contemplate the
opening of the heaven and earth of the New World: the overrulings of
Providence and changes of society here. I think of the passing away
of savage simplicities, and of the rude semblances of civilization in
Mexico and Peru, and of earlier and later declensions. I think of the
gracious reservation of our own inheritance for present and nobler
occupancy. I think of our Revolution, and its result of Independence.
I think of our first Union, first Congress, first prayer in Congress,
and first Congressional order for the Bible; and of our wonderful
enlargement, development, and enrichment since. And, in view of
all--of the whole heaven and whole earth of the whole world; and of
all changes, social and natural, past, present, and future; profoundly
and unalterably assured, as I trust we all are, that the truth as it
is "in Jesus" is the only stability in the universe--I feel justified,
in invoking, this day, your renewal of our common and constant
confession--that: Heaven and earth shall pass away, but the words
of Christ shall never pass away. And, standing where we do, on the
central summit of this great Confederacy, unequalled in all history
for all manner of blessings,--if we did not so confess Christ; if we
did not cherish the simple confidence of His primitive disciples,
and hail the coming of our Lord with hosannas; if we could ignobly
hold our peace,--the very statues of the Capitol "would immediately
cry out;" the marble lips of Columbus, Penn, and Washington, of War
and Peace, of the Pioneer, and of Freedom, would part to praise His
name; and the stones of the foundation and walls, of the arcades and
corridors, of the rotunda and halls, would respond to their glad and
grand acclaim.
From Maine to Florida, from Florida to Texas, from Texas to
California, from California to Oregon, and from Oregon back to Maine;
our lake States, gulf States, and ocean States; our river States,
prairie States, and mountain States, all unite in confessing and
blessing His name, beholding His glory, surrounding His throne, high
and lifted up, and ever crying, like the six-winged seraphim, one to
another, far and near, from the North and the South, from the East and
the West: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts, the whole earth is
full of His glory!"
THE TRUE HIGHER LAW.--_Ibid._
We hear much of the higher law; and the application of the phrase to
civil affairs has excited great prejudice and given great offense.
But, what is the higher law? It is said to be something higher than
the Constitution of the United States. Can there be a law, within
these United higher than the Constitution of the United States? If
there can be and is such a law--what is it? I need not and will not
recite inferior, questionable, and inappropriate answers here. But,
is there not one unquestionable answer? Suppose it be said, that,
in relation to all subjects to which it was designed to apply, and
properly does apply, the Bible is a higher Law than the Constitution
of the United States? Will any man, unless an utter infidel, deny
this? Surely not. Waiving its practical operations, certainly, as
an abstract proposition, this must be admitted as true. It may be
extended, so as to include all our State constitutions, and all our
Church constitutions, and all our more Social constitutions. Put them
all together, magnify and boast of them as we may, not only is the
Bible a higher law, but it is an infinitely higher law. For thus saith
the Lord: "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways
higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts." Therefore,
also, the universal and perpetual prophetic challenge: "Oh, earth,
earth, earth, hear the word of the Lord!"
All human constitutions, social, ecclesiastical, and civil, are
changeable, and contain provisions for change; but, the Bible is
unchangeable. Instead of any provision for change, it is guarded,
at all points, against change. The writer of its first five books
declares in the last of the five: "Ye shall not _add_ unto the word
which I command you, neither shall ye _diminish_ from it, that ye may
keep the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you."
And, in like manner, the author of its last five books, declares in
the last of the five: "If any man shall _add_ unto these things, God
shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: and if
any man shall _take away_ from the words of the book of this prophecy,
God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the
holy city, and from the things which are written in this book." And
so Isaiah, standing midway between Moses and John, exclaims: "Lift up
your eyes to the heavens, and look upon the earth beneath; for the
heavens shall vanish away like smoke, and the earth shall wax old
like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall die in like manner;
but My salvation shall be forever, and My righteousness shall not be
abolished." Therefore, it is only in accordance with the testimony of
all His witnesses, that Christ Himself avers: "Think not that I am
come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy,
but to fulfill. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass,
one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be
fulfilled. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not
pass away."
THE ONE GREAT NEED.--_Ibid._
Tell me, oh, tell me, what is it we need? Do we need health, or
genius, or learning, or eloquence, or pleasure, or fame, or power?
Do we need wealth, or rank, or office? Does any one of us need to
be chaplain, or clerk, or representative, or senator, or speaker,
or vice-president? an officer of the army or navy? a member or head
of any department? a foreign minister? a cabinet officer? or even a
successor in the line of presidents of the United States? Is such our
need? Ah, no! we need salvation.
What did I say in the beginning? Did I not say we need elevation? as
men, Americans, and Christians, we need elevation: in our persons and
families, states and churches, we need elevation. Certainly I did thus
speak, and meant all I said.
Oh, my Friends! All the distinctions alluded to such as we know
them here, are comparatively little things. Greater things are in
prospect; but these things, though they seem great, are really little.
Pause, think, recall what life has taught you--what observation
and experience have combined to impress most deeply upon your
consciousness--and begin your review with the sad words, _after all_!
After all, health is a little thing, and genius is a little thing,
and learning, and eloquence, and pleasure, and fame, and power, and
wealth, and rank, and office, all earthly things are little things.
How little satisfaction they yield while they last, and how soon they
pass away!
THE SHIP AND THE BIRD.--_Owen Meredith._
Hear a song that was born in the land of my birth!
The anchors are lifted, the fair ship is free,
And the shout of the mariners floats in its mirth
'Twixt the light in the sky and the light on the sea.
And this ship is a world. She is freighted with souls,
She is freighted with merchandise; proudly she sails
With the Labor that stores, and the Will that controls
The gold in the ingots, the silk in the bales.
From the gardens of Pleasure, where reddens the rose,
And the scent of the cedar is faint on the air,
Past the harbors of Traffic, sublimely she goes,
Man's hopes o'er the world of the waters to bear!
Where the cheer from the harbors of Traffic is heard,
Where the gardens of Pleasure fade fast on the sight,
O'er the rose, o'er the cedar, there passes a bird;
'Tis the Paradise Bird, never known to alight.
And that bird, bright and bold as a poet's desire,
Roams her own native heavens, the realms of her birth,
There she soars like a seraph, she shines like a fire,
And her plumage hath never been sullied by earth.
And the mariners greet her; there's song on each lip,
For the bird of good omen, and joy in each eye,
And the ship and the bird, and the bird and the ship,
Together go forth over ocean and sky.
Fast, fast fades the land! far the rose-gardens flee,
And far fleet the harbors. In regions unknown
The ship is alone on a desert of sea,
And the bird in a desert of sky is alone.
In those regions unknown, o'er that desert of air,
Down that desert of waters--tremendous in wrath--
The storm-wind Euroclydon leaps from his lair,
And cleaves through the waves of the ocean, his path.
And the bird in the cloud, and the ship on the wave.
Overtaken, are beaten about by wild gales,
And the mariners all rush their cargo to save,
Of the gold in the ingots, the silk in the bales.
Lo! a wonder which never before hath been heard
For it never before hath been given to sight;
On the ship hath descended the Paradise Bird,
The Paradise Bird never known to alight!
The bird which the mariners bless'd, when each lip
Had a song for the omen which gladden'd each eye,
The bright bird for shelter hath flown to the ship
From the wrath on the sea and the wrath in the sky.
But the mariners heed not the bird any more,
They are felling the masts--they are furling the sails,
Some are working, some weeping, and some wrangling o'er
Their gold in the ingots, their silk in the bales.
Souls of men are on board; wealth of man in the hold;
And the storm-wind Euroclydon sweeps to his prey;
And who heeds the bird? "Save the silk and the gold!"
And the bird from her shelter the gust sweeps away!
Poor Paradise Bird! on her lone flight once more
Back again in the wake of the wind she is driven--
To be whelm'd in the storm, or above it to soar,
And, if rescued from ocean, to vanish in heaven!
And the ship rides the waters, and weathers the gales:
From the haven she nears the rejoicing is heard.
All hands are at work on the ingots, the bales,
Save a child, sitting lonely, who misses--the Bird!
TECUMSEH'S SPEECH TO THE CREEK WARRIORS--_Clairborn's Life of Gen.
Dale._
In defiance of the white warriors of Ohio and Kentucky, I have
traveled through their settlements, once our favorite hunting-grounds.
No war-whoop was sounded, but there is blood on our knives. The pale
faces felt the blow, but knew not whence it came.
Accursed be the race that has seized on our country and made women of
our warriors. Our fathers, from their tombs, reproach us as slaves and
cowards. I hear them now in the wailing winds.
The Muscogee was once a mighty people. The Georgians trembled at our
war-whoop, and the maidens of my tribe, in the distant lakes, sung the
prowess of your warriors, and sighed for their embraces.
Now, your very blood is white, your tomahawks have no edge, your bows
and arrows were buried with your fathers. O Muscogees! brethren of my
mother, brush from your eyelids the sleep of slavery; once more strike
for vengeance--once more for your country! The spirits of the mighty
dead complain. The tears drop from the weeping skies. Let the white
race perish!
They seize your land; they corrupt your women; they trample on the
ashes of your dead!
Back whence they came, upon a trail of blood, they must be driven.
Back! back, ay, into the great water whose accursed waves brought them
to our shore!
Burn their dwellings! Destroy their stock! Slay their wives and
children! The red man owns the country, and the pale face must never
enjoy it!
War now! War forever! War upon the living! War upon the dead! Dig
their very corpses from the grave. Our country must give no rest to a
white man's bones.
All the tribes of the North are dancing the war dance. Two mighty
warriors across the seas will send us arms.
Tecumseh will soon return to his country. My prophets shall tarry with
you. They will stand between you and the bullets of your enemies. When
the white man approaches you, the yawning earth shall swallow him up.
Soon shall you see my arm of fire stretched athwart the sky. I will
stamp my foot at Tippecanoe, and the very earth shall shake.
TERRITORIAL EXPANSION.--_Hon. S. S. Cox, House of Representatives,
March 19th_, 1860.
Is there any American who wishes to consult European Powers as to
the propriety or policy of our territorial expansion? Is there any
one who fears a fatal blow from these Powers? We do not exist by the
sufferance of Europe, but by its insufferance. We did not grow to our
present greatness by its fostering care, but by its neglect, and in
spite of its malevolence. We do not ask its pardon for being born, nor
need we apologize to it for growing. It has endeavored to prevent even
the legitimate extension of our commerce, and to confine us to our own
continent. But if we can buy Cuba of Spain, it is our business with
Spain. If we have to take it, it is our business with Providence. If
we must save Mexico, and make its weakness our strength, we have no
account to render unto Europe or its dynasties.
If European Powers choose to expand their empire and energize their
people, we have no protests, no arms to prevent them. England may
push from India through the Himalayas to sell her calicoes to the
numberless people of Asia, and divide with France the empires of
India, Burmah, and China. Civilization does not lose by their
expansion. Russia may push her diplomacy upon Pekin, and her armies
through the Caucasus, and upon Persia and Tartary; she may even
plant her Greek cross again on the mosque of St. Sophia, and take
the Grecian Levant into her keeping as the head of its church and
civilization. France may plant her forts and arts upon the shores of
the Red Sea; complete the canalization of Suez; erect another Carthage
on the shores of the Mediterranean; bind her natural limits from
Mont Blanc, in Savoy, to Nice, upon the sea. Sardinia may become the
nucleus of the Peninsula, and give to Italy a name and a nationality.
Even Spain, proud and poor, may fight over again in Africa the
romantic wars with the Morescoes, by which she educated that chivalry
and adventure, which three centuries ago made her the mistress of
the New World. She may demand territory of Morocco, as she has, as
indemnity for the war. America has no inquiry to make, no protocol to
sign. These are the movements of an active age. They indicate health,
not disease--growth, not decay. They are links in the endless chain of
Providence. They prove the mutability of the most imperial of human
institutions; but, to the philosophic observer, they move by a law as
fixed as that which makes the decay of autumn the herald of spring.
They obey the same law by which the constellations change their places
in the sky. Astronomers tell us that the "southern cross," which
guarded the adventurer upon the Spanish main four centuries ago, and
which now can be seen, the most beautiful emblem of our salvation,
shining down through a Cuban and Mexican night,--just before the
Christian era, glittered in our northern heavens! The same GREAT
WILL, which knows no North and no South, and which is sending
again, by an irreversible law, the southern cross to our northern
skies, on its everlasting cycle of emigration--does it not control
the revolutions of nations, and the vicissitudes of empires? The
very stars in their courses are "Knights of the Golden Circle," and
illustrate the record of human advancement. They are the type of that
territorial expansion from which this American continent can not be
exempted without annihilation. The finger of Providence points to our
nation as the guiding star of this progress. Let him who would either
dusk its radiancy, or make it the meteor of a moment, cast again with
nicer heed our nation's horoscope.
MARTHA HOPKINS.--_Phoebe Cary._
From the kitchen, Martha Hopkins, as she stood there making pies,
Southward looks along the turnpike, with her hand above her eyes;
Where along the distant hill-side, her yearning heifer feeds,
And a little grass is growing in a mighty sight of weeds.
All the air is full of noises for there isn't any school,
And boys, with turned-up pantaloons, are wading in the pool;
Blithely frisk unnumber'd chickens, cackling, for they can not laugh,
Where the airy summits brighten, nimbly leaps a little calf.
Gentle eyes of Martha Hopkins! tell me wherefore do ye gaze,
On the ground that's being furrow'd for the planting of the maize?
Tell me wherefore down the valley, ye have traced the turnpike's way
Far beyond the cattle-pasture, and the brick-yard with its clay?
Ah! the dog-wood tree may blossom, and the door-yard grass may shine,
With the tears of amber dropping from the washing on the line,
And the morning's breath of balsam, lightly brush her faded cheek--
Little recketh Martha Hopkins of the tales of spring they speak.
When the summer's burning solstice on the scanty harvest glow'd,
She had watch'd a man on horseback riding down the turnpike road;
Many times she saw him turning, looking backward quite forlorn,
Till amid her tears she lost him in the shadow of the barn.
Ere the supper-time was over, he had pass'd the kiln of brick,
Cross'd the rushing Yellow River, and forded quite a creek,
And his flat-boat load was taken, at the time for pork and beans,
With the traders of the Wabash, to the wharf at New Orleans.
Therefore watches Martha Hopkins--holding in her hand the pans,
When the sound of distant footsteps seems exactly like a man's:
Not a wind the stove-pipe rattles, not a door behind her jars,
But she seems to hear the rattle of his letting down the bars.
Often sees she men on horseback coming down the turnpike rough,
But they came not as John Jackson, she can see it well enough;
Well she knows the sober trotting of the sorrel horse he keeps,
As he jogs along at leisure, with head down like a sheep's.
She would know him 'mid a thousand, by his home-made coat and vest,
By his socks, which were blue woolen, such as farmers wear out West;
By the color of his trowsers, and his saddle which was spread,
By a blanket which was taken for that purpose from the bed.
None like he the yoke of hickory, on the unbroken ox can throw
None amid his father's cornfields use like him the spade and hoe;
And at all the apple-cuttings, few, indeed, the men are seen,
That can dance with him the polka, touch with him the violin.
He has said to Martha Hopkins, and she thinks she hears him now;
For she knows as well as can be, that he meant to keep his vow;
When the buck-eye tree has blossom'd, and your uncle plants his corn,
Shall the bells of Indiana usher in the wedding-morn.
He has invited his relations, bought a Sunday hat and gown,
And he thinks he'll get a carriage, and they'll spend a day in town;
That their love will newly kindle, and what comfort it will give,
To sit down to the first breakfast in the cabin where they'll live.
Tender eyes of Martha Hopkins! what has got you in such scrape,
'Tis a tear that falls to glitter on the ruffle of her cape;
Ah! the eye of love may brighten, to be certain what it sees,
One man looks like another, when half-hidden by the trees.
But her eager eyes rekindle, she forgets the pies and bread,
As she sees a man on horseback, round the corner of the shed,
Now tie on another apron, get the comb and smooth your hair,
'Tis the sorrel horse that gallops, 'tis John Jackson's self that's there.
THE BASHFUL MAN'S STORY.--_Charles Matthews._
Among the various good and bad qualities incident to our nature, I am
unfortunately that being overstocked with the one called bashfulness;
for you most know, I inherit such an extreme susceptibility of
shame, that on the smallest subject of confusion, my blood rushes
into my cheeks, and I appear a perfect full-blown rose; in short,
I am commonly known by the appellation of "The Bashful Man." The
consciousness of this unhappy failing, made me formerly avoid that
social company, I should otherwise have been ambitious to appear in:
till at length becoming possessed of an ample fortune, by the death of
a rich old uncle, and vainly supposing that "money makes the man," I
was now determined to shake off my natural timidity, and join in the
gay throng: with this view I accepted of an invitation to dine with
one, whose open easy manner left me no room to doubt of a cordial
welcome. Sir Thomas Friendly, an intimate friend of my late uncle's,
with two sons and five daughters, all grown up, and living with their
mother and a maiden sister of Sir Thomas's. Conscious of my unpolished
gait, I for some time took private lessons of a professor, who teaches
"grown gentlemen to dance." Having by this means acquired the art
of walking without tottering, and learning to make a bow, I boldly
ventured to obey the baronet's invitation to a family dinner, not
doubting but my new acquirements would enable me to see the ladies
with tolerable intrepidity but, alas! how vain are all the hopes of
theory, when unsupported by habitual practice. As I approached the
house, a dinner-bell alarmed my fears, lest I had spoiled the dinner
by want of punctuality; impressed with this idea, I blushed the
deepest crimson, as my name was repeatedly announced by the several
livery-servants, who ushered me into the library, hardly knowing what
or whom I saw. At my first entrance, I summoned all my fortitude,
and made my new-learnt bow to Lady Friendly; but, unfortunately, in
bringing my left foot to the third position, I trod upon the gouty
toe of poor Sir Thomas, who had followed close to my heels, to be
the nomenclator of the family. The confusion this occasioned in me
is hardly to be conceived, since none but bashful men can judge of
my distress; and of that description, the number, I believe, is very
small. The baronet's politeness, by degrees, dissipated my concern,
and I was astonished to see how far good breeding could enable him
to support his feelings, and to appear with perfect ease, after so
painful an accident.
The cheerfulness of her ladyship, and the familiar chat of the young
ladies, insensibly led me to throw off my reserve and sheepishness,
till, at length, I ventured to join in conversation, and even to
start fresh subjects. The library being richly furnished with books
in elegant bindings, and observing an edition of Xenophon, in sixteen
volumes, which (as I had never before heard of) greatly excited my
curiosity. I rose up to examine what it could be; Sir Thomas saw what
I was about, and, as I suppose, willing to save me the trouble, rose
to take down the book, which made me more eager to prevent him; and
hastily laying my hand on the first volume, I pulled it forcibly; but,
lo! instead of books, a board, which by leather and gilding had been
made to look like sixteen volumes, came tumbling down, and unluckily
pitched upon a Wedgewood inkstand on the table, under it. In vain did
Sir Thomas assure me, there was no harm; I saw the ink streaming from
an inlaid table on the Turkey carpet, and, scarce knowing what I did,
I attempted to stop its progress with my cambric handkerchief. In the
height of this confusion, we were informed that dinner was served up,
and I with joy perceived that the bell, which at first had so alarmed
my fears, was only the half-hour dinner-bell.
In walking through the hall and suite of apartments to the
dining-room, I had time to collect my scattered senses, and was
desired to take my seat between Lady Friendly and her eldest
daughter, at the table. Since the fall of the wooden Xenophon, my
face had been continually burning, like a firebrand; and I was just
beginning to recover myself, and to feel comfortably cool, when an
unlooked-for accident rekindled all my heat and blushes. Having set my
plate of soup too near the edge of the table, in bowing to Miss Dinah,
who politely complimented the pattern of my waistcoat, I tumbled the
whole scalding contents into my lap. In spite of an immediate supply
of napkins to wipe the surface of my clothes, my black silk breeches
were not stout enough to save me from the painful effects of this
sudden fomentation, and for some minutes my legs and thighs seemed
stewing in a boiling caldron; but recollecting how Sir Thomas had
disguised his torture, when I trod upon his toe, I firmly bore my pain
in silence, and sat with my lower extremities parboiled, amidst the
stifled giggling of the ladies and servants.
I will not relate the several blunders which I made during the first
course, or the distress occasioned by my being desired to carve
a fowl, or help to various dishes that stood near me, spilling a
sauce-boat, and knocking down a salt-cellar; rather let me hasten to
the second course, "where fresh disasters overwhelmed me quite."
I had a piece of rich sweet pudding on my fork, when Miss Louisa
Friendly begged to trouble me for a pigeon that stood near me. In
my haste, scarcely knowing what I did, I whipped the pudding into
my mouth, hot as a burning coal; it was impossible to conceal my
agony--my eyes were starting from their sockets. At last, in spite of
shame and resolution, I was obliged to drop the cause of my torment on
my plate. Sir Thomas and the ladies all compassionated my misfortune,
and each advised a different application; one recommended oil, another
water, but all agreed that wine was the best for drawing out fire,
and a glass of sherry was brought me from the side-board, which I
snatched up with eagerness: but, oh! how shall I tell the sequel?
whether the butler by accident mistook, or purposely designed to drive
me mad, he gave me the strongest brandy, with which I filled my mouth,
already flayed and blistered. Totally unused to ardent spirits, with
my tongue, throat, and palate as raw as beef, what could I do? I could
not swallow; but clapping my hands upon my mouth, the cursed liquor
squirted through my nose and fingers like a fountain, over all the
dishes; and I, crushed by bursts of laughter from all quarters. In
vain did Sir Thomas reprimand the servants, and Lady Friendly chide
her daughters; for the measure of my shame and their diversion was not
yet complete. To relieve me from the intolerable state of perspiration
which this accident had caused, without considering what I did, I
wiped my face with that ill-fated handkerchief, which was still wet
from the consequences of the fall of Xenophon, and covered all my
features with streaks of ink in every direction. The baronet himself
could not support this shock, but joined his lady in the general
laugh; while I sprung from the table in despair, rushed out of the
house, and ran home in an agony of confusion and disgrace, which the
most poignant sense of guilt could have excited.
Thus, without having deviated from the path of moral rectitude, I am
suffering torments like a "goblin damned." The lower half of me has
been almost boiled, my tongue and mouth grilled, and I bear the mark
of Cain upon my forehead; yet these are but trifling considerations,
to the everlasting shame which I must feel, whenever this adventure
shall be mentioned. Perhaps, by your assistance, when my neighbors
know how much I feel on the occasion, they will spare a bashful man,
and, as I am just informed my poultice is ready, I trust you will
excuse the haste in which I retire.
THE MATTER-OF-FACT MAN.--_Anon._
I am what the old women call an "Odd Fish." I do nothing under heaven
without a motive--never. I attempt nothing, unless I think there is a
probability of my succeeding. I ask no favors when I think they are
not deserved; and finally, I don't wait upon the girls when I think my
attentions would be disagreeable. I am a matter-of-fact man, I am. I
do every thing seriously. I once offered to attend a young lady home;
I did it seriously; that is, I meant to wait on her home if she wanted
me. She accepted my offer; I went home with her, and it has ever
since been an enigma with me whether she wanted me or not. I bade her
good night, and she said not a word. I met her next morning, and I
said not a word. I met her again, and she gave me two hours' talk. It
struck me as curious. She feared I was offended, she said, and could
not, for the life of her, conceive why. She begged me to explain, but
would not give me a chance to do so. She said she hoped I wouldn't be
offended, asked me to call, and it has ever since been a mystery to me
whether she wanted me or not.
Once I saw a lady at her window. I thought I would call. I did. I
inquired for the lady, and was told she was not at home. I expected
she was, I went away thinking so. I rather think so still. I met
her again--she was offended--said I had not been neighborly. She
reproached me for my negligence; said she thought I had been unkind.
And I've ever since wondered whether she thought so or not.
A lady once said to me that she should like to be married if she could
get a good, congenial husband who would make her happy, or at least
try to. She was not difficult to please, she said. I said I should
like to get married, too, if I could find a wife that would try to
make me happy. She said Umph, and looked as if she meant what she
said. She did. For when I asked her if she thought she could not be
persuaded to marry me, she said she would rather be excused. I have
often wondered why I excused her.
A good many things of this kind have happened to me, that are
doubtful, wonderful, mysterious. What is it, then, that causes doubt
and mystery to attend the ways of men? It is the want of fact. This is
a matter-of-fact world, and in order to act well in it, we must deal
in a matter-of-fact way.
RICH AND POOR.--_Joseph Barber._
"Men are born equal;" Jefferson, the Sage,
Upon our history's initial page,
Inscribed that dictum;
But we who live in later times amend
The "declaration" of our patriot friend
With a _postscriptum_.
We deem, like him, swart Labor's son and heir,
And wealth's soft bantling, of _one earthenware_,
But mark the sequel:
One's meanly clothed in threadbare suit forlorn,
The other flaunts in velvet, lace, and lawn;
Are they then equal?
Five thousand children in New York, each year,
Gasp for bare life, in cellars damp and drear,
'Neath the street level.
Deprived of sunshine, chill'd with vapor-blights,
Say what are _their_ "inalienable rights,"
Social and civil?
The right to starve, the right to beg, to float
Among the city's scum--perchance to vote
Some day as "freemen."
Ah! yes, the _polls_ their sovereignty declare,
Not so--in sordid chains they're oft led there
By Faction's Demon.
"The rich and poor are equal," says the State,
But the strong laws of destiny and fate,
O'erride its polity.
Both have a right to _seek_ for "happiness;"
But, with such different chances of success,
Where's the _equality_?
Here wealth like a Colossus doth bestride
With legs of gold, the sorrow-troubled tide
Of Want and Squallor.
Nay, more, Law, Justice, oft becomes the tool
Of that bright tyrant, callous, calm, and cool,
Almighty Dollar!
"All men are equal," where? Why, in their dust,
Your worm cares little for your "upper crust!"
(What impropriety!)
And heaven receives alike all spirits pure,
On equal terms, and heaven is therefore sure
Of good society.
SEEING THE ECLIPSE.--_Anon._
[To be spoken without gesture, as if the speaker were
telling a friend his experience.]
Did you ever see an eclipse? No? Well, you _did_ miss a sight, got up
for the especial benefit of darkies, perhaps, but every white man, of
good _standing_, could enjoy it--_if_ he was up. I'll tell you _my_
experience, and you may judge what you have lost by not seeing the
eclipse.
Well, I got up at three o'clock Wednesday morning. Looked for the sun,
but couldn't find it. Concluded that I was up too early. Went to bed.
Got up again at half-past five. Saw something they called the sun.
Looked red. Went down town. Sun looked whiter and bright as a tin pan.
Thought I would go home and get breakfast. Noticed the breakfast-room
looked dark. Opened the blinds when it looked lighter.
Seven o'clock. Went down town again. Sun shining very bright. Tried
to look at it but couldn't. Thought I would take a glass. Took one.
Smoked it. Thought that I could see better, but wasn't satisfied.
Didn't see any eclipse.
Eight o'clock. Took another glass, thinking it might be a better one.
Smoked. Could see a patch on the sun's face. Grew bigger. Took another
glass--smoked. Looked first-rate.
Half-past eight. Things didn't look right, but could see something.
Thought the trouble might be in the last glass. Took another. Saw the
biggest kind of an eclipse. Saw the sun and moon. Took another glass
and looked again. Saw two suns. Smoked and took another glass. Saw two
suns and two moons. Took another glass. Five or six suns and ten or
fifteen moons all mixed up and seemed to be drunk.
Nine o'clock. Couldn't see much of any thing. Concluded I must be
sun-struck. Thought I would go home. Saw an omnibus, and thought I
would get in. Turned out to be one of Swartz's what-d'ye-call-it.
Tried another, and got in. Went home in a coal cart. Think eclipses
are humbugs, besides making people have headaches.
THE BEAUTIES OF THE LAW.
[Recited in the character of Counsellor Quirk.]
Farmer A. and Farmer B. were good neighbors. Farmer A. was seized or
possessed of a white bull; Farmer B. was seized or possessed of, or
otherwise well entitled to, a ferry-boat. Farmer B. having made his
boat fast to a post on shore, by means of a piece of hay, twisted
rope-fashion, or, as we say, _vulgato vocto_, a hayband, went up to
town to get his dinner, which was also very natural for a hungry man
to do. In the mean time Farmer A.'s white bull came down to the town
to look for his dinner, which was also very natural for a hungry bull
to do; the said white bull, discovering, seeing, and spying out, some
turnips in the bottom of the ferry-boat, the bull scrambled into the
ferry-boat aforesaid, eat up the turnips, and, to make an end of his
meal, fell to work upon the hay-band. The ferry-boat being ate from
its moorings, floated down the river with the white bull in it: it
struck against a rock, which beat a hole in the bottom of the boat,
and tossed the bull overboard; whereupon, the owner of the bull
brought his action against the boat, for running away with the bull.
The owner of the boat brought his action against the bull, for running
away with the boat; and thus notice of the trial was given, Bullum
_versus_ Boatum--Boatum _versus_ Bullum. Now the counsel for the bull
began with saying: "Your Honor, and you, Gentlemen of the Jury, we
are counsel in this cause for the bull. We are indicted for running
away with the boat. Now, your Honor, your Honor may have heard of
running horses, but never of running bulls before. Now, your Honor,
I humbly submit to your Honor, the bull could no more have run away
with the boat, than a man in a coach may be said to run away with
the horses; therefore, your Honor, how can an action be maintained
against that which is not actionable? How can we punish what is not
punishable? How can we eat what is not eatable? Or, how can we drink
what is not drinkable? Or, as the law says, how can we think on what
is not thinkable? Therefore, your Honor, as we are counsel in this
cause for the bull, if the jury should bring the bull in guilty, the
jury will be guilty of a bull." The learned counsel for the boat, in
the cross-action of Bullum _versus_ Boatum, observed, that the bull
should be nonsuited, because, in his declaration, he had omitted to
state or specify what color he was; for thus wisely and thus learnedly
spoke the counsel: "My Lord, if the bull was of no color he must be of
some color; and if he was not of any color, what color could the bull
be?" I overruled this motion myself, by observing the bull was a white
bull, and that white is no color: besides, as I told my brethren,
they should not trouble their heads to talk of color in the law, for
the law can color any thing. The cause being afterwards left to a
reference, upon the award, both bull and boat were acquitted, it being
proved that the tide of the river carried them both away; upon which
I gave it, as my opinion, that as the tide of the river carried both
bull and boat away, both bull and boat had a good action against the
water-bailiff. My opinion being taken, an action was issued, and, upon
the traverse, this point of law arose: how, wherefore, and whether,
why, when, and whatsoever, whereas, and whereby, as the boat was not
a _compos mentis_ evidence, how could an oath be administered? That
point was soon settled by Boatum's attorney declaring, that for his
client he would swear any thing. The water-bailiff's charter was then
read, taken out of the original law Latin, which set forth in their
declaration, that they were carried away either by the tide of flood,
or the tide of ebb, the charter of the water-bailiff was as follows:
Aquæ bailiffi est magistratus in choisi, sapor omnibus, fishibus,
qui haberunt finnos et scalos, claws, shells, et talos, qui surmare
in freshibus, vel saltibus riveris, lakos, pondis, canalibus et well
boats, sive oysteri, shrimpini, catinos, sturgeoni, shadini, herringi,
crabi, snaperini, flatini, sharkus; that is, not flat-fish alone, but
flats and sharps both together. But now comes the nicety of the law,
the law is as nice as a new-laid egg, and not to be understood by
addle-headed people. Bullum and Boatum mentioned both ebb and flood
to avoid quibbling, but it being proved that they were carried away,
neither by the flood, nor by the tide of ebb, but exactly upon the
top of high water, they were consequently nonsuited; but such was the
lenity and perfection of our laws, that upon their paying all the
costs, they were allowed to begin again, _de novo_.
GE-LANG! GIT UP!--_New Orleans Delta._
The drops of rain were falling fast,
When up through Camp-street quickly pass'd,
An omnibus, whose driver sung,
In accents of the Celtic tongue--
Ge-lang! git up!
His mules were lank, his whip was long;
He touch'd them with a biting thong,
And as they switch'd their threadbare tails,
This sound the listening ear assails--
Ge-lang! git up!
Along the street, on every side,
Were damp ones waiting for a ride;
They call'd, they yell'd, they raised a fuss,
But cried the driver of the 'bus.
Ge-lang! git up!
"Hold on! hold on!" an old man said,
And waved his hand above his head;
Crack went the whip, and all could hear
A sharp sound echoing on the ear--
Ge-lang! git up!
"Stop, driver, stop!" a maiden call'd
"Stop, stop!" a dozen voices bawl'd
The driver look'd on neither side,
But still in clarion voice replied--
Ge-lang! git up!
Far up the street a sound was heard,
And through the distance came a word
That fell on many a waiting soul
Like Hope's lugubrious funeral toll--
Ge-lang! git up!
That night the driver went to bed;
All through his troubled sleep he said
The same strange words which he had flung
All day from his Jehuic tongue--
Ge-lang! git up!
THE RATS OF LIFE.--_Charles T. Congdon._
Rats! rats! rats!
Pen-and-ink rats in their holes on high,
Writing libels for fools to buy;
Squabbling ever--the same old tune--
The hinted lie, or the broad lampoon!
Rats whose virtue can never fail,
Though each one carries his price on his tail;
Some bite like scorpions--some like gnats;
Know ye the names of the Editor Rats?
Rats! rats! rats!
Rats that the belfried churches nurse,
Drearily drawling chapter and verse;
Offering ever for human ills
Only the barren letter that kills;
Gnawing the Ark of the Covenant through,
From velvet cushion to padded pew;
Beating the dust to blind the flats!
Know ye the names of the Reverend Rats?
Rats! rats! rats!
Rats in ermine holding moot,
With law in parcels at prices to suit;
Shaping, inventing to cover the case,
Precedent musty or dictum base,
Gad! how they gibber to suitors below:
"If so be it thus, why then thus be it so!"
_Leges non curant--verhum sat!_
Know ye the name of the Legal Rat?
Rats! rats! rats!
Rats in the ancient Temple of Mind--
Mumbling maggots and munching rind!
Scrubbing and patching, splicing and jointing,
With particles Greek and with Hebrew pointing.
Proving virtue itself a sin,
By a comma left out or a colon left in;
Of guesses and glosses the autocrats:
Know ye the names of the Learned Rats?
Rats! rats! rats!
By beds where the dying pant for life!
How snug they stand with lancet and knife;
While the vampyre tugs at the fluttering heart,
How they jabber jargon of middle-aged art!
Soothing pain when 'tis savage and strong
By naming it something Latin and long!
A grain of this and a scruple of that!--
Know ye the name of the Medical Rat?
Rats! rats! rats!
Rats that run in the month of May
Rats of reform and right are they!
Rats who believe the hottest of speeches
Soonest the shame and sorrow reaches;
Generous rats whose chiefest delight
Is to set the order of Providence right;
Lean, or hairy, or greasy, or fat,
Know ye the name of the Platform Rat?
Rats! rats! rats!
Oh, Truth and Justice, and Common-Sense
When will you drive this rat-tribe hence?
Bait 'em and beat 'em! hurry 'em! skurry 'em!
With satire and scorn and laughter flurry 'em!
In hole and corner and cranny to hide,
The Flunkey Rat, and the Rat of Pride,
Selfishness, Pedantry, Cant, and all that,
Till nobody hears of a single Rat!
"THE CREOWNIN' GLORY OF THE UNITED STATES."--_Knickerbocker Magazine._
My Hearers:--My text ain't in Worcester's Pictorial, nor Webster's
big quarto; but it is in the columns of the Bunkum Flagstaff and
Independent Echo--"_Edication is the Creownin' Glory of the United'n
States'n._" Thar ain't a feller in all this great and glorious
Republic but has studed readin', ritin', and 'rithmetic. Thar ain't a
youngster so big that you couldn't drown him in a spit-box but what
has read Shakspeare's gogerphy, and knows that all the world is a
stage, with two poles instead of one like a common stage; and that
it keeps goin' reound and reound on its own axis, not axin' nothin'
o' nobody; for "_Edication is the Creownin' Glory of the United'n
States'n_." Who was it that, durin' the great and glorious Revolution,
by his eloquence quenched the spirit of Toryism? An American citizen.
Who was it that knocked thunder out of the clouds, and took a streak
o' greased lightnin' for a tail to his kite? An American citizen. Who
was it that invented the powder that will kill a cockroach, if you put
a little on its tail and then tread on it? Who was it that discovered
the Fat Boy, and captured the wild and ferocious _What Is It?_ An
American citizen! Oh, it's a smashin' big thing to be an American
citizen! King David would have been an American citizen, and the Queen
of Sheba would have been naturalized, if it could a bin did; for
"_Edication is the Creownin' Glory of the United'n States'n_." When
you and I shall be no more; when this glorious Union shall have gone
to etarnal smash; when Barnum shall have secured his last curiosity at
a great expense; then will the historian dip his pen in a georgious
bottle of blue-black ink, and write--"_Edication was the Creownin'
Glory of the United'n States'n_."
THREE FOOLS.--_C. H. Spurgeon._
I will show you three fools. One is yonder soldier, who has been
wounded on the field of battle--grievously wounded, well-nigh unto
death. The soldier asks him a question. Listen, and judge of his
folly! What question does he ask? Does he raise his eyes with eager
anxiety and inquire if the wound be mortal, if the practitioner's
skill can suggest the means of healing, or if the remedies are within
reach and the medicine at hand? No, nothing of the sort. Strange to
tell, he asks: "Can you inform me with what sword I was wounded, and
by what Russian I have been thus grievously mauled? I want," he adds,
"to learn every minute particular respecting the origin of my wound."
The man is delirious, his head is affected! Surely such questions at
such a time are proof enough that he is bereft of his senses.
There is another fool. The storm is raging, the ship is flying
impetuously before the gale, the dark scud moves swiftly overhead,
masts are creaking, the sails are rent to rags, and still the
gathering tempest grows more fierce. Where is the captain? Is he
busily engaged on the deck, is he manfully facing the danger, and
skillfully suggesting means to avert it? No, sir, he has retired to
his cabin; and there, with studious thoughts and crazy fancies, he
is speculating on the place where this storm took its rise. "It is
mysterious, this wind; no one ever yet," he says, "has been able
to discover it." And so, reckless of the vessel, the lives of the
passengers, and his own life, he is careful only to solve his curious
question. The man is mad, sir; take the rudder from his hand; he is
clean gone mad!
The third fool I shall doubtless find among yourselves. You are sick
and wounded with sin, you are in a storm and hurricane of Almighty
vengeance, and yet the question which you would ask of me this morning
would be: "Sir, what is the origin of evil?" You are mad, sir,
spiritually mad; that is not the question you would ask if you were
in a sane and healthy state of mind. Your question would be: "How can
I get rid of the evil?" Not, "How did it come into the world?" but,
"How am I to escape from it?" Not, "How is it that fire descended from
heaven upon Sodom?" but, "How may I, like Lot, escape out of the city
to a Zoar?" Not, "How is it that I am sick?" but, "Are there medicines
that will heal me? Is there a physician to be found that can restore
my soul to health?" Ah! you trifle with subtleties, while you neglect
certainties.
WASHINGTON.--_Hon. Thomas S. Bocock, Feb. 22d, 1860._
As certain vegetable products are the natural growth of particular
soils, at particular times, so some men spring almost necessarily out
of certain forms of civilization, and stand as the representatives of
the times and countries in which they live.
Pericles, able, accomplished, magnificent, was the representative man
of Athens in the time of her highest civilization and prosperity.
Richard I. was the representative man of England in the days of
chivalry, and Charles II. in the days of gallantry. These men could
scarcely have lived in any other age or clime. So Washington could
scarcely have had his existence in any other time or country. He could
no more have been an Italian of the middle ages, than Machiavelli
could have been an American, or Cæsar Borgia an Englishman: no more
than the Parthenon could have been a Gothic cathedral, or Westminster
Abbey a Grecian temple. He was at once the offspring and the type
of American civilization at his time. He was our great forest-bred
cavalier, with all the high honor of his ancestral stock of De
Wessingtons, with all the hardy firmness of a pioneer, and with
all the kindly courtesy of his native State. Among the Adamses and
Hancocks, the Lees and Henrys, the Sumpters and Rutledges of that
day, he stood forth prominently as the representative man, and as
the exemplar of our Revolution, just as that triplex monstrosity of
Danton, Marat, and Robespierre, was the exemplar of the French.
He was a man of firm adherence to principle. We fought for principle
in the revolutionary struggle. He was a man of signal moderation. Such
was the spirit of our contest. He had great self-control. Unlike other
revolutions, ours advanced not one step beyond the point proposed.
Having reached that, it subsided as easily, as gracefully, and as
quietly as though the voice of Omnipotence itself had spoken to the
great deep of our society, saying: "_Peace, be still._"
Could he have lived in ancient days, the strains of immortal verse
would have told his deeds, and fond adherents would have numbered him
among the gods.
Those days are past; but we have yet hearts to admire, and pens
to record, and tongues to praise his private virtues and his
public worth. And when century after century shall have rolled by,
bearing its fruits into the bosom of the past; even when men shall
look back to this time, through the haze and mist of a remote and
far-off antiquity, if this shall still be a land of freemen, this
day shall still be fondly cherished as the anniversary of the birth
of Washington; increased reverence shall attend his character, and
thickening honors shall cluster around his name.
Upon this representative and similitude of the great and honored
dead, which we this day put forth before the world, the winds shall
blow, the rains shall fall, and the storms shall beat, but it shall
stand unhurt amid them all. So shall it be with the fame of him whose
image it is. The breath of unfriendly criticism may blow upon it; the
storms that betoken moral or social change may break upon it; but it
shall stand firmly fixed in the hearts and memories of every true and
honest and liberty-loving man who inhabits our land or cherishes our
institutions.
The inhabitants of this city, as they behold this statue, day after
day, will look upon it as the Palladium of their privileges, and
the silent guardian of their prosperity. And the thousands and tens
of thousands, that from every nation, kingdom, and tongue, yearly
go forth to gaze upon and admire the wonders of the earth, when
they shall come up to this "Mecca of the mind," shall pause with
reverential awe, as they gaze upon this similitude of the mighty
Washington.
Year after year shall that dumb image tell its eloquent story of
patriotism, devotion, and self-sacrifice; year after year shall it
teach its holy lesson of duty and of faith; with generation after
generation shall it plead for institutions founded in wisdom, and a
country bought with blood. To the clouds and storms that gather over
and break upon it, it will tell of the clouds and storms through which
its great antitype did pass, in his devoted course on earth; and when
the great luminary of the heavens, descending with his golden shower
of beams like imperial Jove, shall wrap it in its warm embrace, it
shall tell the sun that He who gave him his beams and bade him shine,
has decreed that one day the darkness of eternal night shall settle on
his face; but then the spirit of the mighty Washington, basking in an
eternal sunlight above, shall still
"A darkening universe defy,
To quench his immortality,
Or shake his trust in God."
THE SAME.
Think, then, of the eminent statesmen whose talents have illustrated
and qualities ennobled their age and country. I will not attempt to
name them; but who is there among them all who, having the wisdom
always to perceive, Lad, at the same time, the sense of duty to carry
out, the best interests of the country? Consider, if you please, how
Richelieu lived, and how Wolsey died; and tell me, then, if these
were such as Washington. I will not equal him with the Scripture
patriarchs. It would be wrong so to do. What of mere mortality could
equal the firmness of Moses, as he came down from Sinai, his face
all glowing from the presence of his God? What could equal the faith
of Abraham, as he tracked his lonely pilgrimage through the plains
of Shinar, seeking a land that he knew not of? These pictures have a
far-off, haze-enveloped, oriental background. They are drawn with the
pencil of inspiration, and colored with the hues of heaven. I could
not say that they correctly represent Washington in any phase of his
character. But I will say that, in duty and in faith, he approached
them more nearly than any other hero-statesman of whom I have any
knowledge. I would not deal in any exaggeration, but I desire to be
just.
Washington may have had ambition, but it was not of that stamp that
made the angels fall. He loved popularity, but not to gratify a vulgar
vanity. His ambition was for his country's good. He took office to
achieve a great end. When that was accomplished, he withdrew gladly to
that retirement which was ever grateful to his heart, and which, in
all circumstances and conditions in which he might be placed, always
stretched out before him, in the future, as the calm and peaceful
haven of his hopes. Had he been less a good man, he would not thus
have desired retirement, for none but a good man could so love the
calm delights of privacy and the pure joys of the domestic circle and
the family fireside. Had he been not so much a great one, he would
never have left his home.
Strange decree of fate! that in this Western world, but recently known
to civilization, and only partially reclaimed from the savages; over
which the dull oblivion of unnumbered centuries had not yet ceased to
brood; without literature, without polite arts, without settled social
organization, without position among nations--that in such a land,
almost unknown and utterly uncared for, there should have arisen a man
who was destined to equal, in the estimation of the virtuous and the
good, all ancient glory and all modern fame.
The verdict of the French philosopher, Guizot, pronounced in view of
his whole record, was, that "of all great men he was the most virtuous
and the most fortunate--in this world God has no higher favors to
bestow;" while the great English orator, jurist, and statesman, Lord
Brougham, has declared that "until time shall be no more, will a
test of the progress which our race has made in wisdom and virtue be
derived from the veneration paid to the immortal name of Washington."
THE SAME.
Had Washington never lived, what would have been the result of our
revolutionary struggle? Had he died immediately after the close of the
war, what would have been the fate of our governmental experiment?
These are speculations which it will never be allowed us, in this
life, to solve. As, in the one case, we can not say that the struggle
would not ultimately have ended triumphantly, so, in the other, we
do not know that our present form of government would not have been
successfully established. For myself, I doubt the latter proposition
fully as much as the former. Under another man, as first President,
the fury of party strife would have been far greater, and sectional
discord much stronger. Insurrectionary movements would have been more
numerous and difficult of suppression, and foreign jealousy more bold
and effective.
Though the ship of state may have ultimately made the port, it is
certain that she would have encountered more adverse currents, and
been tossed upon more tempestuous seas. The political tempest which
was passing over the country at the time of his death, gives some
faint idea of what might have been expected, without him, in the
earlier and more unsettled state of our institutions. The immortal
legacy which, in his "_Farewell Address_," he gave to the country
on his final retirement, has already exhausted eulogy. The patriot
heart has often kindled over it in the past, and will do so forever
in the future. It will go down to the remotest posterity which shall
inhabit this land of liberty, as an inestimable compend of whatever is
true in wisdom, holy in patriotism, and far-seeing in statesmanship.
Would that its doctrines were not only infused into every mind, but
engraved upon every heart! Would that its lesson of "_equal laws_"
involving equal burdens and equal benefits, equal duties and equal
protection, and of strict regard for constitutional limitation in all
cases, was made the basis of all our political action! Then, indeed,
would party feuds and sectional animosities be allayed. A spirit of
mutual respect and fraternal concord would fill the land with the
fruits of peace, prosperity, and happiness. With all our fertile soil,
salubrious climate, skillful industry, and enriching trade, this only
is needed to usher in, amid shouts of triumph and songs of rejoicing,
the political millennium of our land.
Now, though withdrawn from public position, his controlling sense
of duty made Washington still anxious for his country, and ready to
render any service which might appear incumbent on him. So, when it
seemed that a war with France was inevitable, old man as he was,
enshrined as he was in the hearts of his countrymen, with nothing more
of fame to attain, and nothing more of glory to covet, from a pure
sense of duty, he agreed to take charge of the armies of the nation,
and to imperil life, reputation, every thing, for his country's good.
The occasion for his services did not arise; but the certainty that it
would not was scarcely manifest, when death came to summon him to the
"mansions of eternal rest."
It is allowed to few men to carry on a revolution, and to see it
successfully terminated in the independence of a nation. Fewer still,
perhaps, are permitted to inaugurate a new government, and witness its
firm establishment in the freedom of the people. Washington had the
singular good fortune to do both, and to die at last at home and in
the bosom of his family.
Hero! Patriot! Sage! If there be one title more pure, more lofty, more
noble than all others, by that title I would name him. To whom shall
we liken him, or with whom shall he be compared? There is the long
list of military heroes, in ancient and modern times. Let them pass
in solemn procession across the stage, each bearing the light of his
past life, like the solemn procession of torch-bearers in the sacred
mysteries of Eleusis. Gaze on them as they pass! Great, illustrious,
resplendent! There are Alexander and Hannibal, Scylla and Cæsar,
Charlemagne and Marlborough, Bonaparte and Wellington. Which one of
them all that has not a record marked by some weakness, or marred by
some crime? Love of glory, lust of dominion, or greed of gain, is
written by the pen of history upon the escutcheon of all.
OUR GREAT INHERITANCE.--_John J. Crittenden, 1860._
We have the greatest country on the face of the earth. Let not our
minds be so distracted by mere party strife and confusion that we
shall see our government fall to pieces before our eyes, and sacrifice
our country to our party instead of being ready at all times to
sacrifice our party to our country. After we become the slave of
party, we dare not, in the presence of any danger to the country, turn
our backs to our parties, and say that we have a country that demands
our services, and to it will we give them. Are we now unable to do
this? Have we lost this spirit? has it gone from among us?
Providence has given this great country to us. Our wise and valiant
forefathers gave us liberty and established a government for us. Let
us take care of it--take care of the Constitution and the Union.
That is all we require. We have before us the prospect of a glory
unknown to other nations--a prospect in which our land will become
the glory of the earth. Neither Rome nor any of the great empires of
antiquity or of modern times can compare with what we shall be at
no distant day. We are now thirty millions strong, yet we have been
but eighty years in existence as a free nation. From the year 1776
down to the present time, God Almighty has blessed us above all other
people and all other nations. Where shall we be thirty years hence,
if such prosperity attend us? A great nation of one hundred million
souls, with not enough then to develop all our resources. Every man
free to think, free to speak, free to act, free to work. What must
this mighty freedom produce with this mighty concurrence of hearts,
of heads, of hands! What navies, what armies, what cities! Let us
lift ourselves to the contemplation of what our children will be.
Shall we not leave them a legacy as great as that our fathers left
us? Let the contemplation of the mighty destinies involved in our
Confederacy engage us until we absorb the genius of this Republic and
its Constitution. Let it enter into all our motives of public action,
that we may no longer be the tools and slaves of parties, of party
platforms, and of party conventions.
EULOGIUM ON HENRY CLAY.--_Lincoln, 1852._
On the 4th day of July, 1776, the people of a few feeble and oppressed
colonies of Great Britain, inhabiting a portion of the Atlantic coast
of North America, publicly declared their National Independence, and
made their appeal to the justice of their cause, and to the God of
battles, for the maintenance of that declaration. That people were
few in numbers, and without resources, save only their wise heads and
stout hearts. Within the first year of that declared independence, and
while its maintenance was yet problematic--while the bloody struggle
between those resolute rebels and their haughty would-be masters, was
still waging, of undistinguished parents, and in an obscure district
of one of those colonies, Henry Clay was born. The infant nation and
the infant child began the race together. For three-quarters of a
century they have traveled hand in hand. They have been companions
ever. The nation has passed its peril, and is free, prosperous, and
powerful. The child has reached his manhood, his middle age, his old
age, and is dead. In all that has concerned the nation the man ever
sympathized, and now the nation mourns for the man.
But do we realize that Henry Clay is dead? Who can realize that
never again that majestic form shall rise in the council-chamber of
his country, to beat back the storms of anarchy which may threaten,
or pour the oil of peace upon the troubled billows, as they rage
and menace around? Who can realize that the workings of that mighty
mind have ceased--that the throbbings of that gallant heart are
stilled--that the mighty sweep of that graceful arm will be felt no
more, and the magic of that eloquent tongue, which spake as spake no
other tongue besides, is hushed--hushed forever? Who can realize that
freedom's champion--the champion of a civilized world, and of all
tongues and kindred and people, has indeed fallen? Alas! in those dark
hours of peril and dread which our land has experienced, and which she
may be called to experience again--to whom now may her people look
up for that counsel and advice, which only wisdom and experience and
patriotism can give, and which only the undoubting confidence of a
nation will receive?
But Henry Clay is dead. His long and eventful life is closed. Our
country is prosperous and powerful; but could it have been quite all
it has been, and is, and is to be, without Henry Clay? Such a man the
times have demanded, and such, in the Providence of God, was given us.
But although his form is lifeless, his name will live and be loved and
venerated in both hemispheres. For it is
"One of the few, the immortal names,
That were not born to die."
OHIO.--_Bancroft's Oration at Cleveland, Sept. 10th, 1860._
Ohio rises before the world as the majestic witness to beneficent
reality of the democratic principle. A commonwealth younger in years
than he who addresses you, not long ago having no visible existence
but in the emigrant wagons, now numbers almost as large a population
as that of all England when it gave birth to Raleigh, and Bacon,
and Shakspeare, and began, its continuous attempts at colonizing
America. Each one of her inhabitants gladdens in the fruit of his
own toil. She possesses wealth that must be computed by thousands
of millions; and her frugal, industrious, and benevolent people, at
once daring and prudent, unfettered in the use of their faculties,
restless in enterprise, do not squander the accumulations of their
industry in vain show, but ever go on to render the earth more
productive, more beautiful, and more convenient to man; mastering for
mechanical purposes the unwasting forces of nature; keeping exemplary
good faith with their public creditors; building in half a century
more churches than all England has raised since this continent was
discovered; endowing and sustaining universities and other seminaries
of learning. Conscious of the dynamic power of mind in action as
the best of fortresses, Ohio keeps no standing army but that of her
school-teachers, of whom she pays more than 20,000; she provides a
library for every school-district; she counts among her citizens more
than 300,000 men who can bear arms, and she has more than twice that
number of children registered as students in her public schools. Here
the purity of domestic morals is maintained by the virtue and dignity
of woman.
In the heart of the temperate zone of this continent, in the land of
the corn, of wheat, and the vine, the eldest daughter of the Ordinance
of 1787, already the young mother of other commonwealths, that bid
fair to vie with her in beauty, rises in her loveliness and glory,
crowned with cities, and challenges the admiration of the world.
Hither should come the political skeptic, who, in his despair, is
ready to strand the ship of state; for here he may learn how to guide
it safely on the waters. Should some modern Telemachus, heir to an
island empire, touch these shores, here he may observe the vitality
and strength of the principle of popular power; take from the book of
experience the lesson that in public affairs great and happy results
follow in proportion to faith in the efficacy of that principle,
and learn to rebuke ill-advised counselors who pronounce the most
momentous and most certain of political truths a delusion and a
failure.
OLIVER HAZARD PERRY.--_Ibid._
This anniversary of the great action of Oliver Hazard Perry is set
apart for inaugurating a monument to his fame. Who has not heard how
gallantly, forty-seven years ago, the young hero, still weak from a
wasting fever, led his squadron to battle? As if shielded by a higher
power, he encountered death on his right hand, and death on his left,
ever in advance, almost alone for two hours fighting his ship, till it
became a wreck, so that but one of its guns could be used any longer,
and more than four-fifths of his crew lay around him wounded or
killed; then unharmed, standing as beseemed his spirit, he passed in
a boat to the uninjured Niagara, unfurled his flag, bore down within
pistol-shot of his enemy, poured into them broadsides starboard and
broadsides port, and while the sun was still high above the horizon,
left no office to be done but that of mercy to the vanquished. If the
comparison does not seem fanciful, I will call his conduct during
those eventful hours a complete lyric poem, perfect in all its parts.
Though he was carried away and raised above himself by the power with
which he was possessed, the passion of his inspiration was tempered by
the serene self-possession of his faultless courage; his will had the
winged rapidity of fiery thought, and yet observed with deliberateness
the combinations of harmony and the proportions of measured order.
Nor may you omit due honors to the virtues of the unrecorded dead;
not as mourners who require consolation, but with a clear perception
of the glory of their end. The debt of nature all must pay. To die,
if need be, in defense of the country is a common obligation; it is
granted to few to exchange life for a victory so full of benefits to
their fellow-men. These are the disinterested, unnamed martyrs, who,
without hope, or fame, or gain, gave up their lives in testimony to
the all pleading love of country, and left to our statesmen the lesson
to demand of others nothing but what is right, and to submit to no
wrong.
"We have met the enemy," were Perry's words as he reported the result
of the battle. And who was that enemy? A nation speaking another
tongue? A state abandoned to the caprices of despotism? A people
inimical to human freedom? No! they were the nation from whom most of
us sprung, using the same copious language, cherishing after their
fashion the love of liberty, enjoying internally the freest government
that the world had known before our own. But the external policy of
their government has been less controlled by regard for right than
their domestic administration; and a series of wanton aggression, upon
us, useless to England, condemned by her own statesmen and judges as
violations of the law of nature and the law of nations, forced into a
conflict two peoples whose common sympathies should never have been
disturbed. And is this aggressive system forever to be adventured by
her rulers? How long is the overshadowing aristocratic element in her
government to stand between the natural affections of kindred nations.
OUR DOMAIN.--_Ibid._
Even now a British minister, whose past career gave hope of a greater
fairness, is renewing the old system of experiments on the possible
contingency of the pusillanimity, the indifference, or the ignorance
of some future American administration, and disputes our boundary
in the Northwest, though the words of the treaty are too plain to
be perverted, and though the United States claims no more than the
British secretary of state, who offered the treaty, explained as
its meaning before it was signed. British soldiers are now encamped
on part of our territory which bears the name of Washington. With
a moderation that should have commanded respect, the United States
waived their better claim to Vancouver, and even to any part of
it, thinking it conducive to peace to avoid two jurisdictions on
different parts of the same island; and in return for this forbearance
the British Minister, yielding perhaps to some selfish clamor of a
trading company, as much against British interests as against American
rights, reproduces on an American island the inconvenience of divided
occupation, which it was the very purpose of the treaty to avoid.
If the hum of the American seaboard is in part the echo of sentiments
from abroad, here the unmixed voice of America may be heard, as it
pronounces that it is too late to wrest territory from the United
States by prevarication, by menace, or by force. From the English
dockyards it is a long voyage to San Juan; the only good land route
across the continent lies south of Lake Superior; in a few years there
will be three Ohios on the shores of the Pacific. It is England's
interest as well as duty to give effect to the treaty as it was
interpreted by her own minister to ours. Your voices on this memorable
day give the instruction to our own Government to abide by the treaty
faithfully, on the condition that Britain will do the same; but the
treaty must bind neither party or both--must be executed in good faith
or canceled. The men who honor the memory of Perry will always know
how to defend the domain of their country.
Has any European statesman been miscounting the strength of this
nation, by substituting a reminiscence of our feeble confederation
for the present efficient and almost perfect organism of the body
politic? Has any foreign ruler been so foolish as to listen with
credulity to the tales of impending disunion? Every man of the people
of Ohio, this great central highway of national travel, will, without
one exception, tell the calumniator or the unbeliever that the
voices of discontent among us are but the evanescent vapor of men's
breath; that our little domestic strifes are no more than momentary
disturbances on the surface, easily settled among ourselves; that
the love of Union has wound its cords indissolubly round the whole
American people.
So, then, our last word shall be for the Union. The Union will guard
the fame of its defenders, and ever more protect our entire territory;
it will keep alive for mankind, the beacon lights of popular liberty
and power; it will dissuade nations in a state of unripeness from
attempting to found republican governments before they spring up
naturally by an inward law; and its mighty heart will throb with
delight at every true advance in any part of the world, toward
republican happiness and freedom.
SYSTEMS OF BELIEF.--_Rev. W. H. Milburn, 1860._
Pleasure is right, and right is pleasure; and hence comes the system
of Epicurus. Epicurus fasted because it gave him an exquisite
taste and enjoyment of his meal; Epicurus slept not unduly because
with his waking he found his intellect balanced and his _physique_
refreshed. He awaked and remained awake, in order that his slumber
might bring him quiet and repose. Thus starting from his condition we
come very naturally to the luxury of the Sybarite, where the crimson
wine sparkles and obscenity riots, and where the forms of vice and
beastly debauchery flourish, in the saloons, the gambling-houses,
and drinking-shops of this city. In all the forms of impurity and
sensuality you have the practical life of this Epicurean philosophy:
virtue is pleasure; therefore, pleasure is virtue, and wherever there
is wrong done to our nature, by the gratification of our animal
passions; wherever God's law is degraded and man's nature reduced
to the level of the brute--you have the practical exposition of the
tenets of the system.
Upon the other hand, the system of Zeno seems to stand in direct
opposition, in antipodal relations to that of Epicurus. Virtue
sufficeth, says Zeno. Virtue is the law of the universe; the universe
is law, law and law only. Dead, mechanical force, iron necessity;
the sweep of fatalism in its terrific circle; this, and nothing
more. No pulse of pity; no heart of tenderness; no thought of God
in all the sweep of imagination or circle of reason. I, man, am a
microcosm, a synopsis of all the laws and facts of the universe; I am
not only part and parcel of it, but an image and reflection of it;
virtue is resident in the mind, and has nothing to do with pain or
pleasure. Pain and pleasure are of the senses and are wholly alien
to the understanding, says Zeno. I am to be master of all suffering.
What care I for infirmity? I stand here the noblest being in the
whole creation; may I not be master of that creation? The brutes
may writhe in their ecstasy of pain, they may shriek in the fearful
spasms of their suffering; but I, a man, that seem to be a mirror of
creation, may I not be master of these agonies, and stand, with folded
arms, disdainful of every sort of sorrow, of all pangs of pity, or
tenderness, or affection? of what is called friendship, love? These
things are the whimpering sentimentalities of women and children, and
I have nothing to do with them. The folded arms, the clenched fist,
the tightly drawn lips, be mine; and if pain become too strong for
suffering there is a portal which my own hand can open; it swings
apart obedient to my poignard, and suicide is my resort; therefore
apathy is the perfection of human character; a deadness of sentiment,
a hardihood of courage, a noble daring, a port of pride, a disdainful
mien--these are what become the intellect as the master of the earth.
Therefore, my brain is to be all crystal, my heart of adamant. Such is
the Stoical system. In both there was much of beauty and ingenuity, of
philosophical insight and depth, largeness of conception, fullness and
admirableness of treatment. But they both, in common with all other
systems, aside and apart from our holy faith, lacked one master-power;
the great power of the heart, which appeals to the heart of the whole
earth.
I might convince your understanding of the propriety of Epicureanism,
of the grandeur and nobleness of Stoicism; I might warm you in this
direction; I might chill you in that; but when I speak to that part
of your nature which is deeper and nobler than the intellect; when I
come to ask the suffrage of a simple human nature, I must be armed
with a sublimer word than the language of either. Take Christianity
in comparison with them; it teaches that there is consistency and
coherency between virtue and pleasure, but that I am to be loyal to
virtue. It unites the opposite systems of Epicurus and Zeno; it takes
their half-truths and solidifies and unites them in one complete
full-orbed and rounded whole.
THE INDIAN CHIEF.
[The following poem is founded on a traditionary story which
is common on the borders of the great Falls of Niagara,
although differing in some unimportant particulars.]
The rain fell in torrents, the thunder roll'd deep,
And silenced the cataract's roar;
But neither the night, nor the tempest could keep
The warrior chieftain on shore.
The war-shout has sounded, the stream must be cross'd
Why lingers the leader afar?
'Twere better his life than his glory be lost;
He never came late to the war.
He seized a canoe as he sprang from the rock,
But fast as the shore fled his reach,
The mountain wave seem'd all his efforts to mock,
And dash'd the canoe on the beach.
"Great Spirit," he cried "shall the battle be given,
And all but their leader be there?
May this struggle land me with them or in heaven!"
And he push'd with the strength of despair.
He has quitted the shore, he has gained the deep;
His guide is the lightning alone!
But he felt not with fast, irresistible sweep,
The rapids were bearing him down!
But the cataract's roar with the thunder now vied;
"Oh, what is the meaning of this?"
He spoke, and just turn'd to the cataract's side,
As the lightning flash'd down the abyss.
All the might of his arm to one effort was given,
At self-preservation's command;
But the treacherous oar with the effort was riven,
And the fragment remain'd in his hand.
"Be it so," cried the warrior, taking his seat,
And folding his bow to his breast;
"Let the cataract shroud my pale corpse with its sheet,
And its roar lull my spirit to rest.
"The prospect of death with the brave I have borne,
I shrink not to bear it alone;
I have often faced death when the hope was forlorn,
But I shrink not to face him with none."
The thunder was hush'd, and the battle-field stain'd,
When the sun met the war-wearied eye,
But no trace of the boat, or the chieftain remain'd,
Though his bow was still seen in the sky.
THE INDEPENDENT FARMER.--_W. W. Fosdick._
Let sailors sing the windy deep,
Let soldiers praise their armor.
But in my heart this toast I'll keep,
The Independent Farmer:
When first the rose, in robe of green,
Unfolds its crimson lining,
And round his cottage porch is seen
The honeysuckle twining;
When banks of bloom their sweetness yield,
To bees that gather honey,
He drives his team across the field,
Where skies are soft and sunny.
The blackbird clucks behind his plow,
The quail pipes loud and clearly;
Yon orchard hides behind its bough
The home he loves so dearly;
The gray, old barn, whose doors enfold
His ample store in measure,
More rich than heaps of hoarded gold,
A precious, blessed treasure;
But yonder in the porch there stands
His wife, the lovely charmer,
The sweetest rose on all his lands--
The Independent Farmer.
To him the spring comes dancing gay,
To him the summer blushes;
The autumn smiles with mellow ray,
His sleep old winter hushes.
He cares not how the world may move,
No doubts or fears confound him;
His little flock are link'd in love,
And household angels round him;
He trusts in God and loves his wife,
Nor grief nor ill may harm her,
He's nature's noble man in life--
The Independent Farmer.
MRS. GRAMMAR'S BALL.--_Anon._
Mrs. Grammar she gave a ball
To the nine different parts of Speech,--
To the big and the tall,
To the short and the small,
There were pies, plums, and puddings for each.
And first, little Articles came,
In a hurry to make themselves known--
Fat A, An, and The,
But none of the three
Could stand for a minute alone.
Then Adjectives came to announce
That their dear friends the Nouns were at hand.
Rough, Rougher, and Roughest,
Tough, Tougher, and Toughest,
Fat, Merry, Good-natured, and Grand.
The Nouns were, indeed, on their way--
Ten thousand and more, I should think;
For each name that we utter--
Shop, Shoulder, and Shutter--
Is a Noun: Lady, Lion, and Link.
The Pronouns were following fast
To push the Nouns out of their places,--
I, Thou, You, and Me,
We, They, He, and She,
With their merry, good-humor'd old faces.
Some cried out--"Make way for the Verbs!"
A great crowd is coming in view--
To Bite and to Smite,
And to Light and to Fight,
To Be, and to Have, and to Do.
The Adverbs attend on the Verbs,
Behind them as footmen they run;
As thus:--"To fight Badly,
They run away Gladly,"
Shows how fighting and running were done.
Prepositions came--In, By, and Near,
With Conjunctions, a poor little band,
As--"Either you Or me,
But Neither them Nor he"
They held their great friends by the hand.
Then, with Hip, Hip, Hurra!
Hushed Interjections uproarious--
"Oh, dear! Well-a-day!"
When they saw the display,
"Ha! ha!" they all shouted out, "Glorious!"
But, alas, what misfortunes were nigh!
While the fun and the feastings pleased each,
There pounced in at once
A monster--a Dunce,
And confounded the Nine parts of Speech!
Help, friends! to the rescue! on you
For aid Noun and Article call,--
Oh, give your protection
To poor Interjection,
Verb, Adverb, Conjunction, and all!
HOW THE MONEY COMES.
Queer John has sung, how money goes,
But how it comes, who knows? Who knows?
Why every Yankee mother's son
Can tell you how "the thing" is done.
It comes by honest toil and trade;
By wielding sledge and driving spade,
And building ships, balloons, and drums;
And that's the way the money comes.
How does it come? Why, as it goes,
By spinning, weaving, knitting hose,
By stitching shirts and coats for Jews,
Erecting churches, renting pews,
And manufacturing boots and shoes;
For thumps and twists, and cuts and hues,
And _heads_ and _hearts_, tongues, lungs, and thumbs
And that's the way the money comes.
How does it come? The way is plain--
By raising cotton, corn, and _cane_;
By wind and steam, lightning and rain;
By guiding ships across the main;
By building bridges, roads, and dams,
And sweeping streets, and digging clams,
With whistles, hi's! ho's! and hums!
And that's the way the money comes.
The money comes--how did I say?
Not _always_ in an _honest_ way.
It comes by _trick_ as well as toil,
But how is that? why, slick as oil,--
By putting peas in coffee-bags;
By swapping watches, knives, and nags,
And peddling _wooden clocks_ and _plums_;
And that's the way the money comes.
How does it come?--wait, let me see,
It very seldom comes to me;
It comes by _rule_ I guess, and _seale_,
Sometimes by riding on a _rail_,
But oftener, that's the way it goes
From silly belles and fast young beaux;
It comes in big, nay, _little sums_,
Ay! that's the way the money comes.
THE FUTURE OF THE FASHIONS.--_Punch._
There was a time when girls wore hoops of steel,
And with gray powder used to drug their hair,
Bedaub'd their cheeks with rouge; white lead, or meal,
Added, to stimulate complexions fair;
Whereof by contrast to enhance the grace,
Specks of court-plaster deck'd the female face.
That fashion pass'd away, and then were worn
Dresses whose skirts came scarce below the knee,
With waists girt round the shoulder-blades, and scorn,
Now pointed at the prior finery,
When here and there some antiquated dame
Still wore it, to afford her juniors game.
Short waists departed; Taste awhile prevail'd
Till ugly Folly's reign return'd once more,
And ladies then went draggle-tail'd;
And now they wear hoops also, as before.
Paint, powder, patches, nasty and absurd,
They'd wear as well, if France had spoke the word.
Young bucks and beauties, ye who now deride
The reasonable dress of other days;
When time your forms shall have puffed out or dried,
Then on your present portraits you will gaze,
And say what dowdies, frights, and guys you were,
With their more precious figures to compare.
Think, if you live till you are lean or fat,
Your features blurred, your eyes bedimm'd with age,
Your limbs have stiffen'd; feet grown broad and flat:
You may see other garments all the rage,
Preposterous as even that attire
Which you in mirrors now so much admire.
LOYALTY TO LIBERTY OUR ONLY HOPE.--_Bishop Whipple, of Minnesota._
The love of country is the gift of God--it can not dwell in homes of
sin, it has no abiding place in saloons of vice or dens of infamy,
it belongs not to infidel clubs or fanatical conventions, they would
tear down the sacred edifice which they have never loved; they are
impatient for change, for in the seething caldron of rebellion they
are brought to the surface. With nothing to lose, they have no fear
of the days of terror; their only dread is in the majesty of the law.
The love of country belongs to a God-fearing people; it is seen in
the purity of private life, in the privacy of Christian homes, in the
devotions of the closet, in the manliness of Christian character. The
church is its nursing mother. Loyalty to God and to His institutions
is her first and last lesson; it is the earnest cry of her loyal
children "that peace and happiness, truth and justice, religion and
piety may be established among us for all generations." The love of
country belongs to loyal men. The power of self-government depends
upon a loyal people.
The protection of the nation depends not on the wisdom of its
senators, not on the vigilance of its police, not on the strong arm
of standing armies: but the loyalty of a united people. Other nations
have equaled us in all the arts of civilization, in discoveries, in
science, in skill, and in invention; they have kept even step with
us and often surpassed us in philosophy and literature; they have
been brave in war and wise in council; they have clustered around
their homes all that art can lavish of beauty--but ripe scholarship,
cunning in art, or skill in invention, never gave to the people a
constitution. This is the outgrowth of a manly spirit of loyalty. It
teaches men _duty_--a right manly word for right manly men. Loyalty
was God's gift to our fathers; it was learned in the hard school
of adversity, and by self-denial and suffering inwrought into the
nation's life; it grew up in the sheltered valleys and on the rocky
hillsides of New England, it was cradled in Virginia, in New York, in
the Carolinas, among the patricians of Virginia; it gave to the world
a Washington, and from the shop, the store, the farm, and professional
life there sprung up from the people many who shared his spirit to
become the founders of the Republic.
OUR COUNTRY FIRST, LAST, AND ALWAYS.--_Ibid._
The first defense to any people is in the love of country. The nation
is one great family, with one common interest, welfare, and destiny;
a nation dwelling together in love must be a happy people. Kindness
begets kindness, and love awakens love; this is that magic touch
which makes the world of kin. A confederacy like ours can not be held
together by the strong arm of a central government; if the band of
unity is gone, such a union is no whit better than a rope of sand.
The danger which besets us is not in individual sins which fasten
on the body politic--we may labor with forbearance and firmness for
their removal. Our danger lies in that spirit of selfishness and
self-will which forgets brotherhood and God. In a nation like ours,
with its countless differing interests of rival productions, its
conflicts of trade and sectional rivalries of commerce, we must differ
on questions of public policy; but it may be the manly difference of
manly men. Never did men differ more widely than the fathers of the
republic, never did earnest hearts battle with more zeal for their
rival interests, nor contend more fiercely inch by inch in political
struggles. Never did the rallying cry of parties take a deeper hold
on its liege-men, or braver shouts of triumph herald in its victory.
But there was a deeper love of country, which made the brotherhood of
a nation, and a charity which more respected the opinions of those
from whom they differ. The Christian patriot dare not close his eye
to the evils which mar the nation; for their removal he will work and
pray, but never with rash hand tear down the sacred edifice of the
Constitution, because some stains deface its walls. The query may well
arise whether we are not fast reaching the time when the question is
not of the right or wrong of this or that legislation, the benefit
of this or that public policy, but whether this or that party shall
divide the spoils of office among their political camp followers. We
hear of angry words and fierce invectives, of rumors of corruption, of
bribery in public office; they belong to no one party, they are not
ranked under any one leader; these things came because the people have
lost sight, in the strifes of men for office, of that great destiny
which God offers to Americans. I believe the love of country dwells
in the people's hearts. The honest-hearted sons of toil will be true
to the country and its constitution. That love may have slumbered for
a time, but the great heart of the country _will_ be true to itself.
Its love _can not_ be hedged in by the paling of any man's door-yard.
It _will_ sweep away every barrier of strife, and keep us one united
people.
BRITISH INFLUENCE.--_John Randolph._
Imputations of British influence have been uttered against the
opponents of this war. Against whom are these charges brought? Against
men who, in the war of the Revolution, were in the Councils of the
Nation, or fighting the battles of your country! And by whom are these
charges made? By runaways, chiefly from the British dominions, since
the breaking out of the French troubles. The great autocrat of all
the Russias receives the homage of our high consideration. The Dey of
Algiers and his divan of pirates are very civil, good sort of people,
with whom we find no difficulty in maintaining the relations of peace
and amity. "Turks, Jews, and Infidels,"--Melimelli or the Little
Turtle,--barbarians and savages of every clime and color, are welcome
to our arms. With chiefs of banditti, negro or mulatto, we can treat
and can trade. Name, however, but England, and all our antipathies are
up in arms against her. Against whom? Against those whose blood runs
in our veins; in common with whom we claim Shakspeare, and Newton, and
Chatham, for our countrymen; whose form of government is the freest
on earth, our own only excepted; from whom every valuable principle
of our own institutions has been borrowed,--representation, jury
trial, voting the supplies, writ of habeas corpus, our whole civil and
criminal jurisprudence;--against our fellow-Protestants, identified in
blood, in language, in religion, with ourselves.
In what school did the worthies of our land--the Washingtons, Henrys,
Hancocks, Franklins, Rutledges, of America--learn those principles
of civil liberty which were so nobly asserted by their wisdom and
valor? American resistance to British usurpation has not been more
warmly cherished by these great men and their compatriots,--not
more by Washington, Hancock, and Henry,--than by Chatham, and his
illustrious associates in the British Parliament. It ought to be
remembered, too, that the heart of the English people was with us. It
was a selfish and corrupt ministry, and their servile tools, to whom
_we_ were not more opposed than _they_ were. I trust that none such
may ever exist among us; for tools will never be wanting to subserve
the purposes, however ruinous or wicked, of kings and ministers of
state. I acknowledge the influence of a Shakspeare and a Milton upon
my imagination; of a Locke, upon my understanding; of a Sidney, upon
my political principles; of a Chatham, upon qualities which would to
God I possessed in common with that illustrious man! of a Tillotson, a
Sherlock, and a Porteus, upon my religion. This is a British influence
which I can never shake off.
DEFENSE OF THOMAS JEFFERSON.--_Henry Clay._
Next to the notice which the opposition has found itself called
upon to bestow upon the French emperor, a distinguished citizen of
Virginia, formerly President of the United States, has never for a
moment failed to receive their kindest and most respectful attention.
An honorable gentleman from Massachusetts, of whom I am sorry to
say, it becomes necessary for me, in the course of my remarks, to
take some notice, has alluded to him in a remarkable manner. Neither
his retirement from public office, his eminent services, nor his
advanced age, can exempt this patriot from the coarse assaults of
party malevolence. No, sir! In 1801, he snatched from the rude hand
of usurpation the violated Constitution of his country,--and _that_
is his crime. He preserved that instrument, in form, and substance,
and spirit, a precious inheritance for generations to come,--and
for _this_ he can never be forgiven. How vain and impotent is party
rage, directed against such a man! He is not more elevated by his
lofty residence, upon the summit of his own favorite mountain, than
he is lifted, by the serenity of his mind and the consciousness of
a well-spent life, above the malignant passions and bitter feelings
of the day. No! his own beloved Monticello is not less moved by the
storms that beat against its sides, than is this illustrious man,
by the howlings of the whole British pack, let loose from the Essex
kennel! When the gentleman to whom I have been compelled to allude
shall have mingled his dust with that of his abused ancestors,--when
he shall have been consigned to oblivion, or, if he lives at all,
shall live only in the treasonable annals of a certain junto,--the
name of Jefferson will be hailed with gratitude, his memory honored
and cherished as the second founder of the liberties of the people,
and the period of his administration will be looked back to as one of
the happiest and brightest epochs of American history!
NATIONAL HATREDS ARE BARBAROUS.--_Rufus Choate._
That there exists in this country an intense sentiment of nationality;
a cherished energetic feeling and consciousness of our independent and
separate national existence; a feeling that we have a transcendent
destiny to fulfil, which we mean to fulfil; a great work to do, which
we know how to do, and are able to do; a career to run, up which
we hope to ascend, till we stand on the steadfast and glittering
summits of the world; a feeling, that we are surrounded and attended
by a noble historical group of competitors and rivals, the other
nations of the earth, all of whom we hope to overtake, and even to
distance;--such a sentiment as this exists, perhaps, in the character
of this people. And this I do not discourage, I do not condemn. But,
sir, that among these useful and beautiful sentiments, predominant
among them, there exists a temper of hostility towards this one
particular nation, to such a degree as to amount to a habit, a trait,
a national passion,--to amount to a state of feeling which "is to be
regretted," and which really threatens another war,--this I earnestly
and confidently deny. I would not hear your enemy say this. Sir, the
indulgence of such a sentiment by the people supposes them to have
forgotten one of the counsels of Washington. Call to mind the ever
seasonable wisdom of the Farewell Address: "The nation which indulges
toward another an habitual hatred, or an habitual fondness, is, in
some degree, a slave. It is a slave to its animosity, or to its
affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its
duty and its interest."
No, sir! no, sir! We are above all this. Let the Highland clansman,
half-naked, half-civilized, half-blinded by the peat-smoke of his
cavern, have his hereditary enemy and his hereditary enmity, and keep
the keen, deep, and precious hatred, set on fire of hell, alive, if
he can; let the North American Indian have his, and hand it down
from father to son, by Heaven knows what symbols of alligators, and
rattlesnakes, and war-clubs smeared with vermilion and entwined with
scarlet; let such a country as Poland,--cloven to the earth, the armed
heel on the radiant forehead, her body dead, her soul incapable to
die,--let her remember the "wrongs of days long past;" let the lost
and wandering tribes of Israel remember theirs--the manliness and the
sympathy of the world may allow or pardon this to them;--but shall
America, young, free, prosperous, just setting out on the highway of
heaven, "decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just begins
to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and joy,"
shall she be supposed to be polluting and corroding her noble and
happy heart, by moping over old stories of stamp act, and tea tax, and
the firing of the Leopard upon the Chesapeake in a time of peace? No,
sir! no, sir! a thousand times, no! Why, I protest I thought all that
had been settled. I thought two wars had settled it all. What else was
so much good blood shed for, on so many more than classical fields
of Revolutionary glory? For what was so much good blood more lately
shed, at Lundy's Lane, at Fort Erie, before and behind the lines at
New Orleans, on the deck of the Constitution, on the deck of the Java,
on the lakes, on the sea, but to settle exactly these "wrongs of past
days?" And have we come back sulky and sullen from the very field of
honor? For my country, I deny it.
MURDER WILL OUT.--_Daniel Webster._
An aged man, without an enemy in the world, in his own house, and in
his own bed, is made the victim of a butcherly murder, for mere pay.
The fatal blow is given! and the victim passes, without a struggle or
a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death! It is the
assassin's purpose to make sure work. He explores the wrist for the
pulse. He feels for it, and ascertains that it beats no longer! It is
accomplished. The deed is done. He retreats, retraces his steps to the
window, passes out through it as he came in, and escapes. He has done
the murder;--no eye has seen him, no ear has heard him. The _secret_
is his own,--and it is safe!
Ah! gentlemen, that was a dreadful mistake. Such a secret can be safe
nowhere. The whole creation of God has neither nook nor corner where
the guilty can bestow it, and say it is safe. Not to speak of that eye
which glances through all disguises, and beholds every thing as in the
splendor of noon, such secrets of guilt are never safe from detection,
even by men. True it is, generally speaking, that "murder will out."
True it is, that Providence hath so ordained, and doth so govern
things, that those who break the great law of heaven, by shedding
man's blood, seldom succeed in avoiding discovery. Especially, in a
case exciting so much attention as this, discovery must come, and will
come, sooner or later. A thousand eyes turn at once to explore every
man, every thing, every circumstance, connected with the time and
place; a thousand ears catch every whisper; a thousand excited minds
intensely dwell on the scene, shedding all their light, and ready to
kindle the slightest circumstance into a blaze of discovery. Meantime,
the guilty soul can not keep its own secret. It is false to itself;
or, rather, it feels an irresistible impulse of conscience to be true
to itself. It labors under its guilty possession, and knows not what
to do with it. The human heart was not made for the residence of such
an inhabitant. It finds itself preyed on by a torment, which it dares
not acknowledge to God nor man. A vulture is devouring it, and it
can ask no sympathy or assistance, either from heaven or earth. The
secret which the murderer possesses soon comes to possess him; and,
like the evil spirits of which we read, it overcomes him, and leads
him whithersoever it will. He feels it beating at his heart, rising to
his throat, and demanding disclosure. He thinks the whole world sees
it in his face, reads it in his eyes, and almost hears its workings in
the very silence of his thoughts. It has become his master. It betrays
his discretion, it breaks down his courage, it conquers his prudence.
When suspicions from without, begin to embarrass him, and the net of
circumstance to entangle him, the fatal secret struggles, with still
greater violence, to burst forth. It _must_ be confessed;--it _will_
be confessed;--there is no refuge from confession but suicide--and
suicide is confession!
STRIVE FOR THE BEST.
'Tis better to give a kindly word
Than ever so hard a blow,
To know we have by kindness stirr'd
The man who was our foe;
To feel we have a good intent,
Whatever he may feel--
That gentleness with us is meant
To make the old wounds heal.
'Tis better to give our wealth away
Than let our neighbors want,
To help them in their needful day,
While they are weak and gaunt;
A kindly deed brings kindly thought
In hamlet and in city;
A little help, we have been taught,
Is worth a world of pity.
'Tis better to work and slave and toil,
Than lie about and rust;
An idle man upon the soil
Is one of the very worst.
He eats the bread that others earn,
And lifts his head so high,
As if it was not his concern
How others toil'd, or why.
'Tis better to have an humble heart,
Living in faith and trust,
To act an ever upward part,
Remembering we are dust;
To let the streams of life run past,
Beloved and lovingly,
Until we reach in joy at last
The great eternal sea.
EARLY RISING.--_John G. Saxe._
"God bless the man who first invented sleep!"
So Sancho Panza said, and so say I;
And bless him, also, that he didn't keep
His great discovery to himself; or try
To make it--as the lucky fellow might--
A close monopoly by "patent right!"
Yes--bless the man who first invented sleep
(I really can't avoid the iteration);
But blast the man, with curses loud and deep,
Whate'er the rascal's name, or age, or station,
Who first invented, and went round advising
That artificial cut-off--Early Rising!
"Rise with the lark, and with the lark to bed,"
Observes some solemn, sentimental owl.
Maxims like these are very cheaply said;
But ere you make yourself a fool or fowl,
Pray, just inquire about the rise--and fall,
And whether larks have any bed at all!
The "time for honest folks to be in bed,"
Is in the morning, if I reason right;
And he who can not keep his precious head
Upon his pillow till 'tis fairly light,
And so enjoys his forty morning winks,
Is up to knavery; or else--he drinks!
Thomson, who sung about the "Seasons," said
It was a glorious thing to _rise_ in season;
But then he said it--lying--in his bed
At 10 o'clock, A. M.--the very reason
He wrote so charmingly. The simple fact is,
His preaching wasn't sanctioned by his practice.
'Tis, doubtless, well to be sometimes awake--
Awake to duty and awake to truth--
But when, alas! a nice review we take
Of our best deeds and days, we find, in sooth,
The hours that leave the slightest cause to weep,
Are those we pass'd in childhood, or--asleep!
'Tis beautiful to leave the world awhile,
For the soft visions of the gentle night;
And free at last from mortal care or guile,
To live, as only in the angels' sight,
In sleep's sweet realms so cosily shut in,
Where, at the worst, we only _dream_ of sin!
So, let us sleep, and give the Maker praise.
I like the lad who, when his father thought
To clip his morning nap by hackney'd phrase
Of vagrant worm by early songster caught,
Cried: "Served him right! it's not at all surprising--
The worm was punish'd, sir, for early rising!"
DEEDS OF KINDNESS.
Suppose the little cowslip
Should hang its golden cup,
And say: "I'm such a tiny flower,
I'd better not grow up;"
How many a weary traveler
Would miss its fragrant smell!
How many a little child would grieve
To lose it from the dell!
Suppose the glistening dew-drops
Upon the grass should say:
"What can a little dew-drop do?
I'd better roll away;"
The blade on which it rested,
Before the day was done,
Without a drop to moisten it,
Would wither in the sun.
Suppose the little breezes,
Upon a summer's day,
Should think themselves too small to cool
The traveler on his way;
Who would not miss the smallest
And softest ones that blow,
And think they made a great mistake
If they were talking so?
How many deeds of kindness
A little child may do,
Although it has so little strength,
And little wisdom, too!
It wants a loving spirit
Much more than strength, to prove
How many things a child may do
For others by his love.
THE GATES OF SLEEP.--_Dr. John Henry._
There are two gates of Sleep, the poet says:
Of polished ivory one, of horn the other;
But I, besides these gates, to blessed Sleep
Three other gates have found which thus I count:
First the star-spangled arch of deep midnight,
When labor ceases, every sound is hush'd,
And Nature, drowsy, nods upon her throne.
Pale-visaged Specters round this gate keep watch,
And Fears and Horrors vain, and beyond these
Rest, balmy Sweat, and dim Forgetfulness,
Relieved, at dawn of day, by buoyant Hope,
Fresh Strength and ruddy Health and calm Composure
And daring Enterprise and Self-reliance.
The second gate is wreathed, sideposts and lintel,
With odorous trailing hop, and poppy-stalks;
The shadowy gateway paved with poppy-heads,
And there, all day and night, keeps watch sick Fancy
Haggard and trembling, and Delirium wild,
And Impotence with drunken glistening eye,
And Idiocy, and, in the background, Death.
The third gate is of lead, and there sits, ever
Humming her tedious tune, Monotony,
Tired of herself; about her on the ground
Sermons and psalms and hymns lie numerous strew'd,
To the same import all, and all almost
In the same words varied in form and order
To cheat, if possible, the weary sense,
And different seem, where difference is none.
At th' opposite doorpost, on her knees, Routine
Keeps turning over still the well-thumbed leaves
Of the same prayer-book, reading prayers, not praying;
Behind them waiting stand Conformity
And Uniformity, Oneness of faith,
Oneness of laws and customs, arts and manners,
And Self-development's unrelenting foe,
Centralization; and behind these still,
Far in the portal's deepest gloom ensconced,
A perfect, unimprovable Paradise
Of mere, blank naught, unchangeable forever--
These, as _I_ count them, are the Gates of Sleep.
THE BUGLE.--_Tennyson._
The splendor falls on castle walls,
And snowy summits old in story;
The long light shines across the lake,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying;
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
Oh, hark! oh, hear! how thin and clear,
And thinner, clearer, farther going;
Oh, sweet and far, from cliff and spar,
The horns of Elf-land faintly blowing.
Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying;
Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.
Oh, love, they die in yon rich sky;
They faint on field, or hill, or river;
Our echoes roll from soul to soul,
And grow forever and forever.
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying
And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.
A HOODISH GEM.
The little snarling, caroling "babies,"
That break our nightly rest,
Should be packed off to "Baby"-lon,
To "Lapland," or to "Brest."
From "Spit"-head, "Cooks" go o'er to "Greece,"
And while the "Miser" waits
His passage to the "Guinea" coast,
"Spendthrifts" are in the "Straits."
"Spinsters" should to the "Needles" go,
"Wine-bibbers" to "Burgundy;"
"Gourmands" should lunch at "Sandwich Isles,"
"Wags" at the Bay of "Fun"-dy.
"Bachelors" flee to the "United States,"
"Maids" to the "Isle of Man;"
Let "Gardeners" go to "Botany" Bay,
And "Shoe-blacks" to "Japan."
Thus emigrate, and misplaced men
Will they no longer vex us;
And all who ain't provided for
Had better go to "Texas."
PURITY OF THE AMERICAN STRUGGLE.
_By Hon. Henry Wilson. 1859._
While the exalted heroism of the illustrious men who, in the Cabinet
and field, defied and baffled the whole power of the British empire,
excites the admiration of mankind, the consciousness that the founders
of American Independence were not allured into that deadly struggle
by the lust of dominion and power, by the seductions of interest and
ambition, or by the dazzling dreams of glory and renown, excites far
higher and holier emotions. Theirs was not a contest of interest,
of ambition or of glory,--theirs was a contest for principle, for
the inherent and indefeasible rights of humanity. They accepted the
bloody issues of civil war, rather than surrender the liberties of
the people. When the terrific struggle began, which was not to be
closed until the power of England on the North American continent
was broken, they reverently "appealed to the supreme Ruler of the
universe for the rectitude of their intentions;" and when it closed
with the Independence of America achieved, they avowed to mankind in
the sincerity of profound conviction that they "had contended for the
rights of human nature." They "deduced from universal principles," in
the words of the brilliant and philosophic Bancroft, "a bill of rights
as old as creation and as wide as humanity." They embodied in this
bill of rights, the promulgation of which made this day immortal in
history, these sublime ideas: "all men are created equal;" "endowed
by their creator with the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness;" "to secure these rights, governments are
instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent
of the governed;" and "whenever any form of government becomes
destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter
or abolish it." The embodiment of these ideas, these self-evident
truths, which "are as old as creation, and as wide as humanity," into
the organic law of Independent America, associated the names of the
founders of national independence with the general cause of human
liberty, development and progress. They were champions of American
Independence,--they were, also, the champions of the sacred rights
of human nature, and mankind proudly claims them, in the words of
Mirabeau, "as the heroes of humanity."
OLD AGE.--_Theodore Parker._
The old man loves the sunshine and fire--the arm-chair and the shady
nook. A rude wind would jostle the full-grown apple from its bough,
full ripe, full colored, too. The internal characteristics correspond.
General activity is less. Salient love of new things and of persons,
which hit the young man's heart, fades away. He thinks the old is
better. He is not venturesome; he keeps at home. Passion once stung
him into quickened life; now, that gadfly is no more buzzing in his
ears.
Madame de Stael finds compensation in silence for the decay of the
passion that once fired her blood; heathen Socrates, seventy years
old, thanks the gods that he is now free from that "ravenous beast"
which has disturbed his philosophic meditations for many years.
Romance is the child of passion and imagination--the sudden father
that, the long-protracting mother this. Old age has little romance.
Only some rare man, like Wilhelm Von Humboldt, keeps it still fresh in
his bosom.
In intellectual matters, the old man loves to recall the old time, to
review his favorite old men--no new ones half so fair. So in Homer,
Nestor, who is the oldest of the Greeks, is always talking of the
olden times, before the grandfathers of the men then living had come
into being; "not such as living had degenerate days." Verse-loving
John Quincy Adams turns off from Byron and Shelley, and Wieland and
Goethe, and returns to Pope. * * * Elder Brewster expects to hear St.
Martin's and Old Hundred chanted in heaven. To him heaven comes in the
long-used musical tradition.
The middle-aged man looks around at the present; he hopes less and
works more. The old man looks back on the field he has trod: "this is
the tree I planted--this is my footstep;" and he loves his old home,
his old carriage, cat, dog, staff and friend.
In lands where the vine grows, I have seen an old man sit all day
long, a sunny Autumn day, before his cottage-door, in a great
arm-chair, his old dog lay couched at his feet, in the genial sun. The
autumn winds played in the old man's venerable hairs. Above him on the
wall, purpling in the sunlight, hung the full clusters of the grapes,
ripening and maturing yet more. The two were just alike--the wind
stirred the vine-leaves and they fell, stirred the old man's hairs and
they whitened yet more--both were waiting for the spirit in them to be
fully ripe.
The young man looks forward--the old man looks back. How long the
shadows lie in the setting sun--the steeples, a mile long, reaching
across the plain, as the sun stretches out the hills in grotesque
dimensions! So are the events of life in the old man's consciousness.
BEAUTIFUL, AND AS TRUE AS BEAUTIFUL.
[Paul Denton, a celebrated itinerant Methodist preacher and
missionary, in the early days of Texas, when the State,
then a Mexican province, was the outlaw's home, collected
a large crowd at a barbecue where he promised there should
be plenty to drink of the best of liquors. Denton did this
to collect a crowd that he might preach to them. After the
barbecue was over, one of the boldest told Paul that he
lied. "Where is your liquor?" said he. Drawing himself up
to his full height, Paul thus broke forth in a strain that
remains unsurpassed:]
"There--there is the liquor which God, the Eternal, brews for his
children.
"Not in the simmering still, over smoking fires choked with poisonous
gases, and surrounded with stench of sickening odors and rank
corruption doth your Father in Heaven prepare that precious essence of
life, pure cold water. Both in the green shade and grassy dell, where
the red deer wanders and the child loves to play, there God brews it;
and down, low down in the deepest valleys, where the fountains murmur
and the rills sing; and high up on the mountain tops, where the naked
granite glitters like gold in the sun; where hurricanes howl music;
where big waves roar the chorus, sweeping the march of God--there, he
brews it, that beverage of life, health-giving water.
"And everywhere it is a thing of beauty; gleaming in a dew-drop;
singing in the summer rain, shining in the ice-gem, till the trees
seem turning to living jewels, spreading a golden vail over the
setting sun; or white gauze round the midnight moon; sporting in the
glacier; dancing in the hail-shower; folding bright snowy curtains
softly above the wintry world, and weaving the many-colored iris,
that seraph's zone of the sky, whose warp is the rain of earth, whose
woof is the sunbeam of heaven, all checkered o'er with celestial
flowers by the mystic hand of refraction--still always beautiful; that
blessed cold water. No poison bubbles on its brink; its foam brings
not madness and murder; no blood stains its liquid glass; pale widows
and starving orphans weep not burning tears in its clear depths; no
drunkard's shrieking from the grave curses it in words of despair!
Speak out, my friends, would you exchange it for the demon's drink,
alcohol?"
THE DELUGE.
The judgment was at hand. Before the sun
Gathered tempestuous clouds, which, blackening, spread
Until their blended masses overwhelmed
The hemisphere of day: and, adding gloom
To night's dark empire, swept from zone to zone--
Swept the vast shadow, swallowing up all light,
And covering the encircled firmament
As with a mighty pall! Low in the dust
Bowed the affrighted nations, worshiping.
Anon the o'ercharged garners of the storm
Burst with their growing burden; fierce and fast
Shot down the ponderous rain, a sheeted good,
That slanted not before the baffled winds,
But, with an arrowy and unwavering rush,
Dashed hissing earthward. Soon the rivers rose,
And roaring fled their channels; and calm lakes
Awoke exulting from their lethargy,
And poured destruction on their peaceful shores.
The lightning flickered in the deluged air,
And feebly through the shout of gathering waves
Muttered the stifled thunder. Day nor night
Ceased the descending streams; and if the gloom
A little brightened when the lurid morn
Rose on the starless midnight, 'twas to show
The lifting up of waters. Bird and beast
Forsook the flooded plains, and wearily
The shivering multitudes of human doomed
Toiled up before the insatiate element.
Oceans were blent, and the leviathan
Was borne aloft on the ascending seas
To where the eagles nestled. Mountains now
Were the sole landmarks, and their sides were clothed
With clustering myriads, from the weltering waste
Whose surges clasped them, to their topmost peaks
Swathed in the stooping cloud. The hand of Death
Smote millions as they climbed; yet denser grew
The crowded nations, as the encroaching waves
Narrowed their little world.
And in that hour,
Did no man aid his fellow. Love of life
Was the sole instinct; and the strong-limbed son,
With imprecations smote the palsied sire
That clung to him for succor. Women trod
With wavering steps the precipice's brow,
And found no arm to grasp on the dread verge
O'er which she leaned and trembled. Selfishness
Sat like an incubus on every heart,
Smothering the voice of Love. The giant's foot
Was on the stripling's neck: and oft despair
Grappled the ready steel, and kindred blood
Polluted the last remnant of that earth
Which God was deluging to purify.
Huge monsters from the plains, whose skeletons
The mildew of succeeding centuries
Has failed to crumble, with unwieldy strength
Crushed through the solid crowds; and fiercest birds,
Beat downward by the ever-rushing rain,
With blinded eyes, drenched plumes, and trailing wings,
Staggered unconscious o'er the trampled prey.
THE WORM OF THE STILL.
I have found what the learned seemed so puzzled to tell--
The true shape of the Devil, and where is his Hell;
Into serpents, of old, crept the Author of Ill,
But Satan works now as a worm of the still.
Of all his migrations, this last he likes best:
How the arrogant reptile here raises his crest!
His head winding up from the tail of his plan,
Till the worm stands erect o'er the prostrated man.
Here, he joys to transform, by his magical spell,
The sweet milk of the Earth to an Essence of Hell;
Fermented our food, and corrupted our grain,
To famish the stomach and madden the brain.
By his water of life, what distraction and fear;
By the gloom of its light, what pale spectres appear!
A Demon keeps time on his fiddle finance,
While his Passions spring up in a horrible dance!
Then prone on the earth, they adore in the dust,
A man's baser half, raised, in room of his bust.
Such orgies the nights of the drunkard display,
But how black with ennui, how benighted his day!
With drams it begins, and with drams must it end;
A dram is his country, his mistress, his friend;
Till the ossified heart hates itself at the last,
And the dram nerves his hand for a death-doing blast.
Mark that monster, that mother, that shame and that curse;
See the child hang dead-drunk at the breast of its nurse!
As it drops from her arm, mark her stupefied stare!
Then she wakes with a yell, and a shriek of despair.
Drink, Erin! drink deep from this crystalline round,
Till the tortures of self-recollection be drowned;
Till the hopes of thy heart be all stiffened to stone--
Then sit down in the dirt like a queen on her throne.
No phrensy for Freedom to flash o'er the brain;
Thou shalt dance to the musical clank of the chain;
A crown of cheap straw shall seem rich to thine eye
And peace and good order shall reign in the sky!
Nor boast that no track of the viper is seen,
To stain thy pure surface of Emerald green:
For the Serpent will never want poison to kill,
While the fat of your fields feeds the worm of the still!
MAN'S CONNECTION WITH THE INFINITE.
That is to every thing created pre-eminently useful, which enables
it rightly and fully to perform the functions appointed to it by its
Creator. Therefore, that we may determine what is chiefly useful to
man, it is necessary first to determine the use of man himself.
Man's use and function is to be the witness of the glory of God,
and to advance that glory by his reasonable obedience and resultant
happiness.
Whatever enables us to fulfill this function is, in the pure and first
sense of the word, useful to us. Pre-eminently, therefore, what sets
the glory of God more brightly before us. But things that only help
us to exist are, in a secondary and mean sense, useful, or rather, if
they be looked for alone, they are useless and worse, for it would
be better that we should not exist, than that we should guiltily
disappoint the purposes of existence.
And yet people speak in this working age, when they speak from their
hearts, as if houses, and lands, and food, and raiment were alone
useful; and as if sight, thought, and admiration were all profitless,
so that men insolently call themselves Utilitarians, who would turn,
if they had their way, themselves and their race into vegetables:
men who think that the meat is more than the life, and the raiment
than the body; who look to the earth as a stable, and to its fruit as
fodder; vine-dressers as husbandmen, who love the corn they grind, and
the grapes they crush, better than the gardens of the angels upon the
slopes of Eden; hewers of wood and drawers of water, who think that
the wood they hew and the water they draw, are better than the pine
forests that cover the mountains like the shadow of God, and than the
great rivers that move like his eternity. And so comes upon us that
woe of the preacher, that, though God "hath made every thing beautiful
in his time, also he hath set the world in their hearts, so that no
man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the
end."
This Nebuchadnezzar curse, that sends us to grass like oxen, seems
to follow but too closely on the excess or continuance of national
power and peace. In the perplexities of nations, in their struggles
for existence, in their infancy, their impotence, or even their
disorganization, they have higher hopes and nobler passions. Out
of the suffering comes the serious mind; out of the salvation, the
grateful heart; out of the endurance, the fortitude; out of the
deliverance, the faith; but now, when they have learned to live under
providence of laws, and with decency and justice and regard for each
other, and when they have done away with violent and external sources
of suffering, worse evils seem rising out of their rest--evils that
vex less and mortify more, that suck the blood though they do not
shed it, and ossify the heart though they do not torture it. And deep
though the causes of thankfulness must be to every people at peace
with others and at unity in itself, there are causes of fear also, a
fear greater than the sword and sedition: that dependence on God may
be forgotten, because the bread is given and the water is sure; that
gratitude to him may cease, because his constancy of protection has
taken the semblance of a natural law; that heavenly hope may grow
faint amidst the full fruition of the world; that selfishness may take
place of undemanded devotion, compassion be lost in vainglory, and
love in dissimulation; that innovation may succeed to strength, apathy
to patience, and the noise of jesting words and foulness of dark
thoughts, to the earnest purity of the girded loins and the burning
lamp.--_Ruskin._
THE LANGUAGE OF THE EAGLE.
It is one of the difficulties of those who undertake to make public
speeches, that sometimes they are embarrassed about the heads of their
discourses; and so I am somewhat troubled at finding the inferior
position of the American eagle, inasmuch as he has but one head, while
the Russian eagle has two. I suppose that the explanation of this
ornithological difference arises from the necessity of the Russian
eagle having one head to watch over his large possessions in Asia, and
the other head to look after his small property in Europe. I feel a
good deal of confidence in speaking of the American eagle in contrast.
I can see that if the American eagle has but one head, it embodies
therein the national sentiment now prevailing, of one country and one
people. It is very true that our brethren of the South--for I still
call them our brethren--have been under the impression that ours was
a double-headed eagle, with a Northern and a Southern head, with this
distinction over the Russian; that the Southern was the larger and
more important head of the two, and we are now engaged in the somewhat
expensive and troublesome task of correcting that mistake in natural
history. There is a good deal that is appropriate, and sometimes
something that is suggestive, in these national symbols. The lion, for
instance, is a very hungry beast, and the large portion of the globe
which he has got into his possession shows the appropriateness of the
selection of the symbol. The cock, as we know, is a very boisterous
and demonstrative bird, who never does anything that he does not
make a noise about. And certainly the Gallic neighbor of the English
lion has never been distinguished for his modesty whenever he has
accomplished any thing in arts or in arms. The eagle is a high-soaring
bird, and I had better bring before you what an English poet says of
him:
He clasps the crag with hooked hands,
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ringed in an azure world he stands;
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls,
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.
If the illustration had been carried further we might be content with
this English authority that the eagle, as typical of Russia and of
the United States, is to be armed with that thunderbolt which the
Greeks thought to be the prerogative of Jupiter. The American eagle
has been distinguished for the quickness of his flight; and I do not
think that our bitterest enemies can ever bring against us the charge
of slowness. There are some points of resemblance between the United
States and Russia. Russia, like us, is made up of many nationalities:
and we have had recently the most satisfactory evidence that the
Russian eagle is soaring in the same quarter as we are--soaring beyond
the crowing of the cock or the roaring of the lion.
In conclusion, the eagle was an old symbol. The Egyptians had it; the
Persians had it; the Romans, after trying four or five other animals,
took it, in the time, I think, of Marius. Therefore, as it is one of
the oldest illustrations of national importance, I indulge in the
sentiment that, as the eagle now represents the nations of Russia and
the United States, it may at least be one among the latest.--_Judge
Daly, of New York._
WASHINGTON.--_S. S. Cox._
All over the world examples may be found which are lessons to
us. Could you go to Naples, you will find beyond the Grotto of
Phisillippo, where the soft waves of the delightful Bay make their
music on the shore--the tomb of the great Latin poet--Virgil. Men from
every clime go thither to pay their homage to his tomb, although two
thousand years have gone since his Epic was given to the world. His
tomb is still the mausoleum of Genius. It is respected, protected and
honored. Some of you have seen the monuments Scotland has reared to
her gifted men. Some of you have seen the tomb of Walter Scott, at
Dryburg Abbey, and have not only admired its beauty and repose, but
have admired the vigilant care with which it is guarded and protected.
Go to Rome! Beneath St. Peter's Bascilica, you will find there the
tombs of the Apostles Peter and Paul. They are guarded ever by
priestly vigilance, and around them burn the ever-trimmed lamps of
religious veneration. At Paris, the great Napoleon sleeps, honored
in death beyond all human conquerors, in the _Hotel des Invalides_,
surrounded by a hundred banners, emblems of his victories and his
genius!
England has her Westminster Hall, wherein is enshrined her royal line,
and by a higher heritage a line of genius, from Chaucer, who sung the
dawn of English verse, to Macaulay, who illustrated her history in
the undying eloquence of his prose. France has her St. Denis, the last
abode of her kings, and Paris has its Pantheon, in whose vaults the
literary demigods are immortalized!
But I pass these reminiscences by. We have a tomb which, I trust, in
future, will be cared for and protected; and as long as woman is the
watcher, her faith and patience will guard it with vestal vigilance.
It is neither a trite nor an untrue saying, that if a man bears the
blade of patriotism, woman is the jewel in its hilt. She has and ever
will make that jewel shine, wherever there is a fair opportunity and
an ennobling civilization.
Why has this association of American women been formed? For the
purpose of purchasing, preserving, reclaiming and protecting that
spot we have just left, so sacred in our historic annals and in the
nation's memory. It is because the man who lies there buried is not
the mere hero of a novel--not the mere hero of to-day--not the mere
soldier who achieved with his own sword his own fortune--not your
Sultan Mohammed or Emperor Napoleon, who, with bloody ambition,
created an empire on the Bosphorus or a dynasty on the Seine. The
career of these heroes of the battle-field is as yonder blood-red
moon, just risen above the Potomac, compared with the bright
effulgence of the noonday sun, which shines with no borrowed light, as
an auriole around the memory of George Washington. He can be addressed
at this day, when he is so canonized in our hearts, only in the
language of that poetry which has likened him to the brightest imagery
which the material universe can furnish. He has been spoken of as the
illustrious but lost Pleiad in our American constellation.
AMERICA vs. ENGLAND.--_David Dudley Field._
It has been said that if a new dictionary were now to be published
in England, another definition of neutrality would have to be
given. Certain it is that much of what has taken place on the other
side of the ocean during this unhappy war comports little with our
previous understanding of the duties of neutrals. And yet strict
neutrality between belligerents is enjoined as much by philanthropy
as by national honor; for while it protects national independence it
restricts the limits of war. It is thus a rule alike of justice and
of prudence. It springs from principles which lie at the foundation
of international law; that is to say, the independence and the
equality of nations. But there is another rule which springs from
the same principles, and which is as old and as strong as that of
neutrality, and is sometimes confounded with it--that is, the duty
of every nation to abstain from any interference with the internal
concerns of another. To be neutral between two belligerents is to
help neither; to make, or help to make, two belligerents out of the
same nation is to interfere in its internal relations. If it be said
that this is but to recognize and declare a fact, I answer that the
nation itself, as it is equal and independent, is the sole judge of
the fact. The relation of the different parts with each other is
a domestic concern. To assume to recognize and declare relations
which it does not first recognize and declare, is, equally with the
violation of neutrality, a departure from that courtesy and deference
which are due from one nation to another. Both depend upon that public
law of the world which is as old as governments and as eternal as
equity. No nation is so ancient or mighty as to be above it; none so
young or weak as to be below it. Each, as it takes its place in the
family of nations, assumes it in all its plenitude. These rules the
Government of this country has followed at all times and under all
circumstances. Whatever may have been the sympathies of our people,
whatever may have been the moral aspects of the foreign wars on which
they have looked, and however much they have desired the success of
one party over the other, they have inflexibly refused to throw their
powers into the scale, or to allow any of their citizens to violate
the neutrality which the Government enjoined. From the administration
of Washington to the administration of Lincoln, through all the wars
of the French Republic and the French empire, through the struggles
of mastery in Eastern Europe, through the great civil wars in Poland,
in Hungary and in India, we have steadily asserted the policy of
non-interference, and maintained it in practice. And we have never
resorted to the paltry evasion of doing secretly what we professed
openly to avoid. What we said we meant, and what we meant we said. We
have held the obligation to be paramount and universal. We complain
of England and France, first for the proclamation or profession
of neutrality, and then for the violation of the neutrality thus
professed. This is not the place to enter upon the reasons which
justify these complaints. The loyal people of this country have made
up their opinions on both these subjects. They are convinced that
England and France have wronged them in both respects, and are just
as strongly convinced that Russia, whose naval officers are our
guests to-night, has acted differently; has done us no injury; has
conformed her conduct to the solemn injunctions of the law of nations,
in accounting us competent to manage our own affairs; treating the
established and recognized Government of the country as the only
lawful belligerent, and holding no relations whatever with the rebels.
It is impossible to mistake the settled convictions of the American
people. They will never forget, through all the changes of future
years, that in their mortal struggle the Czar has been true to them,
and in the exercise of his great office has been inflexible in his
adherence to the grand and salutary principles of public law. And
they will just as surely never cease to believe that the Governments
of England and France have desired the disruption of the republic,
and have hastened unjustly to lift the rebels into the condition of
legal belligerents; have offensively professed neutrality between
the lawful and the rebel forces, and, after all, have evaded that
professed neutrality by every species of indirect assistance which it
was possible to give short of engaging in hostilities. _These things
will never be forgotten so long as Americans can read and remember.
And, more than this, the men of this generation, who have smarted
under these wrongs, will not rest until some of them are righted._
We see the ground fresh with graves, half of which would never have
been opened but for the countenance which England and France have
given to the rebellion; and, whether it shall be procured from
their apprehension of the consequences, or their sense of justice,
_reparation must be made, or the seed which has been sown in these
three years will ripen into an iron harvest of future war, of which no
man can foresee the end_.
IF WE KNEW.--_By Ruth Benton._
If we knew the cares and crosses
Crowding round our neighbor's way,
If we knew the little losses,
Sorely grievous, day by day,
Would we then so often chide him
For his lack of thrift and gain--
Leaving on his heart a shadow,
Leaving on our life a stain?
If we knew the clouds above us,
Held by gentle blessings there,
Would we turn away all trembling,
In our blind and weak despair?
Would we shrink from little shadows,
Lying on the dewy grass,
While 'tis only birds of Eden,
Just in mercy flying past?
If we knew the silent story,
Quivering through the heart of pain,
Would our womanhood dare doom them
Back to haunts of guilt again?
Life hath many a tangled crossing;
Joy hath many a break of woe;
And the cheeks, tear-washed, are whitest;
This the blessed angels know.
Let us reach in our bosoms
For the key to other lives,
And with love toward erring nature,
Cherish good that still survives;
So that when our disrobed spirits
Soar to realms of light again,
We may say, "Dear Father, judge us
As we judged our fellow-men."
* * * * *
BEADLE'S
Dime Biographical Library.
This fine series of books has become a standard library with all
who desire such books. Each issue is 100 clearly-printed pages, in
clear-faced type, and contains the matter of an ordinary dollar book.
The subjects chosen embrace some of the most interesting and noted
characters in history. The biographies are all originally prepared
expressly for this series. The list embraces the following:
No. 1.--Life of GARIBALDI, the Washington of Italy.
No. 2.--Life of DANIEL BOONE, the Hunter of
Kentucky.
No. 3.--Life of KIT CARSON, the Rocky Mountain
Scout and Guide.
No. 4.--Life of ANTHONY WAYNE (Mad Anthony), the
Revolutionary Patriot and Indian Conqueror.
No. 5.--Life of Colonel DAVID CROCKETT, the
Celebrated Hunter, Wit and Patriot.
No. 6.--Life of WINFIELD SCOTT, with a full
account of his Brilliant Victories in Mexico.
No. 7.--Life of PONTIAC, the Conspirator, the
Chief of the Ottawas, together with a full account of the
Celebrated Siege of Detroit.
No. 8.--Life of JOHN C. FREMONT, the American
Pathfinder, with a full account of his Rocky Mountain
Explorations and Adventures.
No. 9.--Life of JOHN PAUL JONES, the Revolutionary
Naval Hero.
No. 10.--Life of Marquis DE LAFAYETTE, the Man of
Two Worlds.
No. 11.--Life of TECUMSEH, the Shawnee Chief.
No. 12.--Life of GEO. B. MCCLELLAN, Late
General-in-Chief, U. S. A.
No. 13.--PARSON BROWNLOW, and the Unionists of
East Tennessee.
MEN OF THE TIME.
This series embraces fine and authentic sketches of the leading
GENERALS OF THE WAR--each sketch being accompanied by a
portrait. The works are very popular, and will be found available for
reference and preservation.
No. 1.--Generals HALLECK, POPE,
SIEGEL, CORCORAN, PRENTISS,
KEARNEY, HATCH, and AUGUR.
No. 2.--Generals BUTLER, BANKS,
BURNSIDE, BAKER, STEVENS,
WILCOX, and WEBER.
No. 3.--Generals HOOKER, ROSECRANS,
GRANT, MCCLERNAND, and MITCHELL.
BEADLE & COMPANY, Publishers, 118 William St., N. Y.
BEADLE'S
DIME SCHOOL SERIES.
BEADLE AND COMPANY have now on their lists the following
highly desirable and attractive books, prepared expressly for schools,
families, etc., viz:--
SPEAKERS.
Dime American Speaker, [Speaker Series No. 1,]
Dime National Speaker, [ " No. 2,]
Dime Patriotic Speaker, [ " No. 3,]
Dime Comic Speaker, [ " No. 4.]
These books are replete with choice pieces for the Schoolroom, the
Exhibition, and for home declamation. They are mostly drawn from fresh
sources, on a variety of public and popular themes, which renders them
particularly _apropos_ to the times.
DIALOGUES.
Dime Dialogues, Number One,
Dime Dialogues, Number Two.
These volumes have been prepared with especial reference to their
_availability_ in _all_ schoolrooms. They are adapted to schools
with or without the furniture of a stage, and introduce a range of
characters suited to scholars of every grade, both male and female.
It is fair to assume that no volumes yet offered to schools, _at any
price_, contain so many absolutely _available_ and useful dialogues
and minor dramas, serious and comic.
Dime School Melodist, (Music and Words.)
This is adapted to schools of all grades and for scholars of all
ages. It contains the music and words of a great many popular and
beautiful melodies, with a preliminary chapter on musical instruction
especially adapted to children. The MELODIST will be found
very desirable and available.
Price but ten cents each. Each book contains from 80 to 100 pages.
For sale by all newsdealers, or will be sent singly or in packages
by mail, _post-paid_, on receipt of price. _Special terms made to
teachers._
(h) Catalogues of Beadle's Dime Publications sent free on application.
BEADLE AND COMPANY, General Dime Book Publishers,
118 William Street, New York.
* * * * *
Transcriber's Notes
Minor punctuation errors have been silently corrected.
Page 14: Changed "Whese" to "Whose."
(Orig: Whese sons you required, and left not any?)
Page 17: Changed "xindred" to "kindred."
(Orig: but their tie was only one of xindred;)
Page 32: Removed duplicate "the."
(Orig: Far beyond the the cattle-pasture, and the brick-yard)
Page 54: Retained author's use of lowercase in second sentence:
(Orig: Have we lost this spirit? has it gone from among us?)
Page 59: Changed "indifferenece" to "indifference."
(Orig: the indifferenece, or the ignorance of some future American)
Page 60: Changed "pefect" to "perfect."
(Orig: almost pefect organism of the body politic?)
Page 62: Changed "soidifies" to "solidifies."
(Orig: takes their half-truths and soidifies and unites them)
Page 63: Changed "bongh" to "bough."
(Orig: Yon orchard hides behind its bongh)
Last ad: (h) represents a pointing hand symbol.
*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Beadle's Dime National Speaker, Embodying Gems of Oratory and Wit, Particularly Adapted to American Schools and Firesides - Speaker Series Number 2, Revised and Enlarged Edition" ***
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