smiled, languish on the distant coast? Student of history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements, the abandoned adventures, of other times, and find the parallel of this! Was it the winter's storm, beating upon the houseless heads of women and children? was it hard labor and spare meals? was it disease? was it the tomahawk? was it the deep malady of a blighted hope, a ruined enterprise, and a broken heart, aching, in its last moments, at the recollection of the loved and left, beyond the sea? was it some, or all of these united, that hurried this forsaken company to their melancholy fate? And is it possible that neither of these causes, that not all combined, were able to blast this bud of hope! Is it possible that from a beginning so feeble, so frail, so worthy, not so much of admiration as of pity, there has gone forth a progress so steady, a growth so wonderful, an expansion so ample, a reality so important, a promise, yet to be fulfilled, so glorious! GLORIOUS NEW ENGLAND. S. S. PRENTISS. GLORIOUS New England! thou art still true to thy ancient fame, and worthy of thy ancestral honors. We, thy children, have assembled in this far distant land to celebrate thy birthday. A thousand fond associations throng upon us, roused by the spirit of the hour. On thy pleasant valleys rest, like sweet dews of morning, the gentle recollections of our early life; around thy hills and mountains cling, like gathering mists, the mighty memories of the Revolution; and far away in the horizon of thy past gleam, like thy own bright northern lights, the awful virtues of our pilgrim sires! But while we devote this day to the remembrance of our native land, we forget not that in which our happy lot is cast. We exult in the reflection, that though we count by thousands the miles which separate us from our birth-place, still our country is the same. We are no exiles meeting upon the banks of a foreign river, to swell its waters with our home-sick tears. Here floats the same banner which rustled above our boyish heads, except that its mighty folds are wider, and its glittering stars increased in number. The sons of New England are found in every state of the broad republic! In the East, the South, and the unbounded West, their blood mingles freely with every kindred current. We have but changed our chamber in the paternal mansion; in all its rooms we are at home, and all who inhabit it are our brothers. To us the Union has but one domestic hearth; its household gods are all the same. Upon us, then, peculiarly devolves the duty of feeding the fires upon that kindly hearth; of guarding with pious care those sacred household gods. We cannot do with less than the whole Union; to us it admits of no division. In the veins of our children flows Northern and Southern blood; how shall it be separated? who shall put asunder the best affections of the heart, the noblest instincts of our nature? We love the land of our adoption; so do we that of our birth. Let us ever be true to both; and always exert ourselves in maintaining the unity of our country, the integrity of the republic. Accursed, then, be the hand put forth to loosen the golden cord of union! thrice accursed the traitorous lips which shall propose its severance! But no! the Union cannot be dissolved;, its fortunes are too brilliant to be marred; its destinies too powerful to be resisted. Here will be their greatest triumph, their most mighty development. then And when, a century hence, this Crescent City* shall have filled her golden horns; - when within her broad-armed port shall be gathered the products of the industry of a hundred millions of freemen; when galleries of art and halls of learning shall have made classic this mart of trade; may the sons of the Pilgrims, still wandering from the bleak hills of the north, stand up on the banks of the Great River, and exclaim, with mingled pride and wonder,-Lo! this is our country; when did the world ever behold so rich and magnificent a city-so great and glorious a republic! PERPETUITY OF OUR LIBERTIES. L. BEECHER. I AM aware that our ablest patriots are looking out on the deep, vexed with storms, with great forebodings and failings of heart, for fear of the things that are coming upon us; and I perceive a spirit of impatience rising, and distrust, in respect to the perpetuity of our republic; and I am sure that these fears are well founded, and am glad that they exist. It is the *New Orleans. star of hope in our dark horizon. Fear is what we need, as the ship needs wind on a rocking sea, after a storm, to prevent foundering. But when our fear and our efforts shall correspond with our danger, the danger is past. For it is not the impossibility of self-preservation that threatens us; nor is it the unwillingness of the nation to pay the price of the preservation, as she has paid the price of the purchase, of our liberties. It is inattention and inconsideration, protracted till the crisis is past, and the things which belong to our peace are hid from our eyes. And blessed be God, that the tokens of a national waking up, the harbinger of God's mercy, tiplying upon us! are mulThere is at the West an enthusiastic feeling on the subject of education, and nothing has so inspired us with hope, as to witness the susceptibleness of the East on the same subject, and the national fraternal benevolence with which you are ready to put forth a helping hand. We have been sad, but now we are joyful. We see, we feel, that East and West, and North and South, are waking up on this subject; a redeeming spirit is rising which will save the nation. We did not, in the darkest hour, believe that God had brought our fathers to this goodly land to lay the foundation of religious liberty, and wrought such wonders in their preservation, and raised their descendants to such heights of civil and religious prosperity, only to reverse the analogy of his providence, and abandon his work; and though now there be clouds, and the sea roaring, and men's hearts failing, we believe there is light behind the cloud, and that the imminence of our danger is intended, under the guidance of Heaven, to call forth and apply a holy, fraternal fellowship between the East and West, which shall secure our preservation, and make the prosperity of our nation durable as time, and as abundant as the waves of the sea. I would add, as a motive to immediate action, that if we do fail in our great experiment of self-government, our destruction will be as signal as the birth-right abandoned, the mercies abused, and the provocation offered to beneficent Heaven. The descent of desolation will correspond with the past elevation. No punishments of Heaven are so severe as those for mercies abused; and no instrumentality employed in their infliction is so dreadful as the wrath of man. No spasms are like the spasms of expiring liberty, and no wailings such as her convulsions extort. It took Rome three hundred years to die; and our death, if we perish, will be as much more terrific as our intelligence and free institutions have given to us more bone, and sinew, and vitality. May God hide me from the day, when the dying agonies of my country shall begin! O, thou beloved land, bound together by the ties of brotherhood and common interest and perils, live forever, undivided! -- one and ANCIENT AND MODERN PRODUCTIONS. C. SUMNER. -- THE classics possess a peculiar charm, from the circumstance that they have been the models, I might almost say the masters, of composition and thought in all ages. In the contemplation of these august teachers of mankind, we are filled with conflicting emotions. They are the early voice of the world, better remembered and more cherished still, than all the intermediate words that have been uttered, as the lessons of childhood still haunt us when the impressions of later years have been effaced from the mind. But they show with most unwelcome frequency the tokens of the world's childhood, before passion had yielded to the sway of reason and the affections. They want the highest charm of purity, of righteousness, of elevated sentiments, of love to God and man. It is not in the frigid philosophy of the Porch and the Academy that we are to seek these; not in the marvellous teachings of Socrates, as they come mended by the mellifluous words of Plato; not in the resounding line of Homer, on whose inspiring tale of blood Alexander pillowed his head; not in the animated strain of Pindar, where virtue is pictured in the successful strife of an athlete at the Isthmian games; not in the torrent of Demosthenes, dark with self-love and the spirit of vengeance; not in the fitful philosophy and intemperate eloquence of Tully; not in the genial libertinism of Horace, or the stately atheism of Lucretius. No; these must not be our masters; in none of these are we to seek the way of life. For eighteen hundred years the spirit of these writers has been engaged in weaponless contest with the Sermon on the Mount, and those two sublime commandments on which hang all the law and the prophets. The strife is still pending. Heathenism, which has possessed itself of such siren forms, is not yet exorcised. It still tempts the young, controls the affairs of active life, and haunts the meditations of age. Our own productions, though they may yield to those of the ancients in the arrangement of ideas, in method, in beauty of form, and in freshness of illustration, are immeasurably superior in the truth, delicacy, and elevation of their sentiments above all, in the benign recognition of that great Christian revelation, the brotherhood of man. How vain are eloquence and poetry, compared with this heaven-descended truth! Put in one scale that simple utterance, and in the other the lore of antiquity, with its accumulating glosses and commentaries, and the last will be light and trivial in the balance. Greek poetry has been likened to the song of the nightingale as she sits in the rich, symmetrical crown of the palm-tree, trilling her thick-warbled notes; but even this is less sweet and tender than the music of the human heart. THE ANCIENT AND MODERN WORLD. J. MARTINEAU. THE difference between the ancient and modern world is. this that in the one the great reality of being was now; in the other, it is yet to come. If you would witness a scene characteristic of the popular life of old, you must go to the amphitheatre of Rome, mingle with its eighty thousand spectators, and watch the eager faces of senators and people; observe how the masters of the world spend the wealth of conquest, and indulge the pride of power; see every wild creature that God has made to dwell, from the jungles of India to the mountains of Wales, from the forests of Germany to the deserts of Nubia, brought hither to be hunted down in artificial groves by thousands in an hour; behold the captives of war, noble perhaps and wise in their own land, turned loose amid yells of insult, more terrible for their foreign tongue, to contend with brutal gladiators trained to make death the favorite amusement, and present the most solemn of individual realities as a wholesale public sport; mark the light look with which the multitude, by uplifted finger, demands that the wounded combatant be slain before their eyes; notice the troop of Christian martyrs awaiting, hand in hand, the leap from the tiger's den; and when the day's spectacle is over, and the blood of two thousand victims stains the ring, follow the giddy crowd as it streams from the vomitaries into the streets; trace its lazy course into the forum, and hear it there scrambling for the bread of private indolence doled out by the purse of public corruption; and see how it suns itself to sleep in the open ways, or crawls into foul dens, |