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Rejoiced, when he came, in the morning's flame,
In the morning's flame burns now.

And the moon's cold light, as it lay that night
On the hill-side and the sea,

Still lies where he laid his houseless head;-
But the pilgrim-where is he?

The pilgrim fathers are at rest:

When Summer's throned on high,

And the world's warm breast is in verdure dressed,
Go, stand on the hill where they lie.
The earliest ray of the golden day

On that hallowed spot is cast;

And the evening sun, as he leaves the world,
Looks kindly on that spot last.

The pilgrim spirit has not fled:

It walks in noon's broad light;

And it watches the bed of the glorious dead,
With the holy stars, by night.

It watches the bed of the brave who have bled,

And shall guard this ice-bound shore,

Till the waves of the bay, where the May-Flower lay, Shall foam and freeze no more.

LESSON CXIV.

Character of the Puritan Fathers of New England.-
GREENWOOD.

ONE of the most prominent features, which distinguished our forefathers, was their determined resistance to oppres sion. They seemed born and brought up, for the high and special purpose of showing to the world, that the civil and religious rights of man, the rights of self-government, of conscience and independent thought, are not merely things to be talked of, and woven into theories, but to be adopted with the whole strength and ardour of the mind, and felt in the profoundest recesses of the heart, and carried out into the general life, and made the foundation of practical usefulness, and visible beauty, and true nobility.

Liberty, with them, was an object of too serious desire and stern resolve, to be personified, allegorized and enshrin

ed. They made no goddess of it, as the ancients did; they had no time nor inclination for such trifling; they felt that liberty was the simple birthright of every human creature; they called it so; they claimed it as such; they reverenced and held it fast as the unalienable gift of the Creator, which was not to be surrendered to power, nor sold for wages.

It was theirs, as men; without it, they did not esteem themselves men; more than any other privilege or possession, it was essential to their happiness, for it was essential to their original nature; and therefore they preferred it above wealth, and ease, and country; and, that they might enjoy and exercise it fully, they forsook houses, and lands, and kindred, their homes, their native soil, and their fathers' graves.

They left all these; they left England, which, whatever it might have been called, was not to them a land of freedom; they launched forth on the pathless ocean, the wide, fathomless ocean, soiled not by the earth beneath, and bounded, all round and above, only by heaven; and it seemed to them like that better and sublimer freedom, which their country knew not, but of which they had the conception and image in their hearts; and, after a toilsome and painful voyage, they came to a hard and wintry coast, unfruitful and desolate, but unguarded and boundless; its calm silence interrupted not the ascent of their prayers; it had no eyes to watch, no ears to hearken, no tongues to report of them; here again there was an answer to their souls' desire, and they were satisfied, and gave thanks; they saw that they were free, and the desert smiled.

I am telling an old tale; but it is one which must be told, when we speak of those men. It is to be added, that they transmitted their principles to their children, and that, peopled by such a race, our country was always free. So long as its inhabitants were unmolested by the mother country in the exercise of their important rights, they submitted to the form of English government; but when those rights were invaded, they spurned even the form away.

This act was the revolution, which came of course, and spontaneously, and had nothing in it of the wonderful or unforeseen. The wonder would have been, if it had not occurred. It was indeed a happy and glorious event, but by no means unnatural; and I intend no slight to the revered actors in the revolution, when I assert, that their fathers before them were as free as they,-every whit as free.

The principles of the revolution were not the suddenly

acquired property of a few bosoms; they were abroad in the land in the ages before; they had always been taught, like the truths of the Bible; they had descended from father to son, down from those primitive days, when the pilgrim, established in his simple dwelling, and seated at his blazing fire, piled high from the forest which shaded his door, repeated to his listening children the story of his wrongs and his resistance, and bade them rejoice, though the wild winds and the wild beasts were howling without, that they had nothing to fear from great men's oppression and the bishops' rage.

Here were the beginnings of the revolution. Every settler's hearth was a school of independence; the scholars were apt, and the lessons sunk deeply; and thus it came that our country was always free; it could not be other than free.

As deeply seated as was the principle of liberty and resistance to arbitrary power, in the breasts of the Puritans, it was not more so than their piety and sense of religious obligation. They were emphatically a people, whose God was the Lord. Their form of government was as strictly theocratical, if direct communication be excepted, as was that of the Jews; insomuch that it would be difficult to say where there was any civil authority among them entirely distinct from ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

Whenever a few of them settled a town, they immediately gathered themselves into a church; and their elders were magistrates, and their code of laws was the Pentateuch. These were forms, it is true, but forms which faithfully indicated principles and feelings; for no people could have adopted such forms, who were not thoroughly imbued with the spirit, and bent on the practice, of religion.

God was their King; and they regarded him as truly and literally so, as if he had dwelt in a visible palace in the midst of their state. They were his devoted, resolute, humble subjects; they undertook nothing which they did not beg of him to prosper; they accomplished nothing without rendering to him the praise; they suffered nothing without carrying up their sorrows to his throne; they ate nothing which they did not implore him to bless.

Their piety was not merely external; it was sincere; it had the proof of a good tree, in bearing good fruit; it produced and sustained a strict morality. Their tenacious purity of manners and speech obtained for them, in the mother

* Pron. et.

country, their name of Puritans; which, though given in derision, was as honourable a one as was ever bestowed by

man on man.

That there were hypocrites among them, is not to be doubted; but they were rare; the men who voluntarily exiled themselves to an unknown coast, and endured there every toil and hardship for conscience' sake, and that they might serve God in their own manner, were not likely to set conscience at defiance, and make the service of God a mockery; they were not likely to be, neither were they, hypocrites. I do not know that it would be arrogating too much for them to say, that, on the extended surface of the globe, there was not a single community of men to be compared with them, in the respects of deep religious impressions, and an exact performance of moral duty.

LESSON CXV.

The same, concluded.

WHAT I would especially inculcate is, that, estimating as impartially as we are able the virtues and defects of our forefathers' character, we should endeavour to imitate the first, and avoid the last.

Were they tenderly jealous of their inborn rights, and resolved to maintain them, in spite of the oppressor? And shall we ever be insensible to their value, and part with the vigilance which should watch, and the courage which should defend them? Rather let the ashes of our fathers, which have been cold so long, warm and quicken in their graves, and return imbodied to the surface, and drive away their degenerate sons from the soil which their toils and sufferings purchased!

Rather let the beasts of the wilderness come back to a wilderness, and couch for prey in our desolate gardens, and bring forth their young in our marts, and howl nightly to the moon, amidst the grass-grown ruins of our prostrate cities! Rather let the red sons of the forest reclaim their pleasant hunting grounds, and rekindle the council fires which once threw their glare upon the eastern water, and roam over our hills and plains, without crossing a single track of the white man!

I am no advocate for war. I abominate its spirit and its cruelties. But to me there appears a wide and essential difference between resistance and aggression. It is aggression, it is the love of arbitrary domination, it is the insane thirst for what the world has too long and too indiscriminately called glory, which light up the flames of war and devastation.·

Without aggression on the one side, no resistance would be roused on the other, and there would be no war. And if all aggression was met by determined resistance, then, too, there would be no war; for the spirit of aggression would be humbled and repressed. I would that it might be the universal principle of our countrymen, and the determination of our rulers, never to offer the slightest injury, never to commit the least outrage, though it were to obtain territory, or fame, or any selfish advantage.

In this respect I would that the example which was sometimes set by our forefathers, might be altogether forsaken. But let us never forsake their better example of stern resistance; let us cherish and perpetuate their lofty sentiments of freedom; let us tread the soil which they planted for us as free as they did, or lie down at once beside them.

"The land we from our fathers had in truct

We to our children will transmit, or die.

This is our maxim, this our piety,

And God and nature say that it is just.

That which we would perform in arms, we must!
We read the dictate in the infant's eye,

In the wife's smile, and in the placid sky.

And at our feet, amid the silent dust

Of them that were before us.'

Our fathers were pious-eminently so. Let us forever venerate and imitate this part of their character. Wher the children of the pilgrims forget that Being, who was the pilgrim's Guide and Deliverer; when the descendants of the Puritans cease to acknowledge, and obey, and love that Being, for whose service the Puritans forsook all that men chiefly love, enduring scorn and reproach, exile and poverty, and finding at last a superabundant reward; when the sons of a religious and holy ancestry fall away from its high communion, and join themselves to the assemblies of the profane; they have stained the lustre of their parentage; they have forfeited the dear blessings of their inheritance; and they deserve to be cast out from this fair land without

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