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absurdity, of our phrases and actions, shooting or drowning (it matters not which) becomes the practice of the national school.

3. It is not a trifling question that a man puts to himself when he asks, What is the amount of my contribution to this detestable practice? It is by individual contributions to the public notions respecting it that the practice is kept up. Men do not fire at one another because they are fond of risking their own lives or other men's, but because public notions are such as they are. Nor do I think any deduction can be more manifestly just than that he who contributes to the misdirection of these notions is responsible for a share of the evil and the guilt.

4. When some offence has given probability to a duel, every man acts immorally who evinces any disposition to coolness with either party until he has resolved to fight; and if, eventually, one of them falls, he is a party to his destruction. Every word of unfriendliness, every look of indifference, is positive guilt; for it is such words and such looks that drive men to their pistols. It is the same after a victim has fallen. "I pity his family, but they have the consolation of knowing that he vindicated his honor," is equivalent to urging another and another to fight. Every heedless gossip who asks," Have you heard of this affair of honor?" and every reporter of news who relates it as a proper and necessary procedure, participates in the general crime.

JONATHAN DYMOND.

CLV. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

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1. HIS PREDOMINANT TRAITS. His predominant passion seems to have been the love of the useful. The useful was to him the summum bonum, the supremely fair, the sublime and beautiful, which it may not, perhaps, be extravagant to believe he was in quest of every week for half a century. No department was too plain or humble for him to occupy himself in for this purpose; and, in affairs of the most unambitious order, this was still systematically his object. Whether in the construction of chimneys or of constitutions, lecturing on the saving of candles or on the economy of national revenues, he was still intent on the same end; the question always being how to obtain the most of solid, tangible advantage, by the plainest and easiest means.

There has rarely been a mortal of high intelligence and flattering fame on whom the pomps of life were so powerless. On him were completely thrown away the oratorical and poetical heroics about glory, of which heroics it was enough that he easily

perceived the intention or effect to be, to explode all sober truth and substantial good, and to impel men, at the very best of the matter, through some career of vanity, but commonly through mischief, slaughter, and devastation, in mad pursuit of what amounts at last, if attained, to some certain quantity of noise, and empty show, and intoxicated transient elation. He was

so far an admirable spirit for acting the Mentor to a young republic.

It will not be his fault if the citizens of America shall ever become so servile to European example as to think a multitude of supernumerary places, enormous salaries, and a privileged order, a necessary security or decoration of that political liberty which they enjoy in preeminence above every other nation on earth. In the letters of their patriarch and philosopher, they will be amply warned, by repeated and emphatic representations, of the desperate mischief of a political system in which the public resources shall be expended in a way to give the government both the interest and the means to corrupt the people. — John Foster.

2. HIS COLLOQUIAL POWERS. His cheerfulness and his colloquial powers spread around him a perpetual spring. Of Franklin no one ever became tired. There was no ambition of eloquence, no effort to shine, in anything which came from him. There was nothing which made any demand either upon your allegiance or your admiration. His manner was as unaffected as infancy. It was nature's self. He talked like an old patriarch; and his plainness and simplicity put you at once at your ease, and gave you the full and free possession and use of all your faculties. His thoughts were of a character to shine by their own light, without any adventitious aid. They required only a medium of vision like his pure and simple style to exhibit, to the highest advantage, their native radiance and beauty. His cheerfulness was unremitting. It seemed to be as much the effect of the systematic and salutary exercise of the mind as of its superior organization.

His wit was of the first order. It did not show itself merely in occasional coruscations; but, without any effort or force on his part, it shed a constant stream of the purest light over the whole of his discourse. Whether in the company of commons or nobles, he was always the same plain man; always most perfectly at his ease, his faculties in full play, and the full orbit of his genius forever clear and unclouded. And then the stores of his mind were inexhaustible. He had commenced life with an attention BO vigilant that nothing had escaped his observation, and a judg ment so solid that every incident was turned to advantage. His

youth had not been wasted in idleness, nor overcast by intemper ance. He had been all his life a close and deep reader, as well as thinker; and, by the force of his own powers, had wrought up the raw materials, which he had gathered from books, with such exquisite skill and felicity, that he had added a hundred-fold to their original value, and justly made them his own. - Wm. Wirt.

3. TRIBUTES TO HIS MEMORY. - Brave, benevolent, wonderful old man! Well did our Congress declare of him, in the resolutions adopted on his death, on motion of James Madison, that "his native genius was not more an ornament to human nature, than his various exertions of it have been precious to science, to freedom, and to his country." Well, too, was it said by that matchless French orator, Mirabeau, in announcing the event to the National Assembly of France, which went into mourning on the occasion, that "antiquity would have raised altars to this mighty genius, who, to the advantage of mankind, compassing in his mind the heavens and the earth, was able to restrain alike thunderbolts and tyrants."- R. C. Winthrop.

CLVI. A STORM ON THE MOUNTAINS.

1. THE sky is changed!

and such a change! O, night.
And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong,
Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light
Of a dark eye in woman! far along,

From peak to peak, the rattling crags among,
Leaps the live thunder! not from one lone cloud,
But every mountain now hath found a tongue,
And Jura answers, through her misty shroud,
Back to the joyous Alps, who call to her aloud!
2. And this is in the night: : - Most glorious night!

Thou wert not sent for slumber! let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight,
A portion of the tempest and of thee!
How the lit lake shines, a phosphoric sea,
And the big rain comes dancing to the earth!
And now again 't is black, and now, the glee
Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth
As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth.

3. The morn is up again, the dewy morn,

With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom
Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn,
And living as if earth contained no tomb.-

And glowing into day: we may resume
The march of our existence: and thus I,
Still on thy shores, fair Leman! may find room
And food for meditation, nor pass by

Much that may give us pause, if pondered fittingly.

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1. GIVE me, O, indulgent Fate, Give me, yet before I die,

A sweet but absolute retreat,

'Mong paths so lost, and trees so high,
That the world may ne'er invade,
Through such windings and such shade,
My unshaken liberty!

2. No intruders thither come,

Who visit but to be from home, -
None who their vain moments pass,
Only studious of their glass!
Be no tidings thither brought!
But, silent as a midnight thought,
Where the world may ne'er invade,
Be those windings and that shade'

3. Courteous Fate! afford me there
A table spread without my care
With what the neighboring fields impart,
Whose cleanliness be all its art.

Fruits, indeed (would Heaven bestow),
All that did in Eden grow

(All but the forbidden tree)

Would be coveted by me;

Grapes, with juice so crowded up,

As breaking through their native cup;

Cherries, with the downy peach,·

All within my easy reach!

Whilst, creeping near the humble ground,

Should the strawberry be found,

Springing wheresoe'er I strayed,

Through those windings and that shade !

4. Give me there (since Heaven has shown
It was not good to be alone)

A partner suited to my mind,
Solitary, pleased, and kind;

Who, partially, may something see,
Preferred to all the world, in ine;

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She

This lady, whose maiden name was Anne Kingsmill, died in 1720. was the friend of Pope, who complimented her highly in some of his verses Wordsworth says of her, that she is "one of the very few original observers of nature who appeared in an artificial age.”

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