warped on every occasion, by the violence of his passion. When a philosopher contemplates character and manners, in his closet, the general abstract view of the objects leave the mind so cold and unmoved, that the sentiments of nature have no room to play, and he scarce feels the difference between vice and virtue. History keeps in a just medium betwixt these extremes, and places the objects in their true point of view. The writers of history, as well as the readers, are sufficiently interested in the characters and events, to have a lively sentiment of blame or praise; and at the same time, have no particular interest or concern to pervert their judgment.

CLAIMS OF LITERATURE UPON AMERICANS.

INDEPENDENCE and liberty, the great political objects of all communities, have been secured to us by our glorious ancestors. In these respects, we are only required to preserve and transmit unimpaired to our posterity, the inheritance which our fathers bequeathed to us. To the present and to the following generations, is left the easier task of enriching, with arts and letters, the proud fabric of our national glory. Our Sparta is indeed a noble one. Let us then do our best for it.

Let me not, however, be understood to intimate, that the pursuits of literature or the finer arts of life, have been, at any period of our history, foreign to the people of this country. The founders of the Colonies, the Winthrops, the Smiths, the Raleighs, the Penns, the Oglethorpes, were among the most accomplished scholars and elegant writers, as well as the loftiest and purest spirits of their time. Their successors have constantly sustained, in this respect, the high standard established by the founders. Education and Religion,-the two great cares of intellectual and civilized men,-were always with them the foremost objects of attention. The principal statesmen of the Revolution were persons of high literary cultivation; their public documents were declared, by Lord Chatham, to be equal to the finest specimens of Greek and Roman wisdom. In every generation, our country has contributed its full proportion of eminent writers. Need

economy,

I mention names in proof of this? Recollect your Franklin, instructing the philosophers of the elder world in the deepest mysteries of science; her statesmen in political her writers in the forms of language. In the present generation, your Irvings, your Coopers, your Bryants, with their distinguished contemporaries, form, perhaps, the brightest constellation that remains in the literary hemisphere, since the greater lights to which I have already pointed your attention were eclipsed; while the loftier heights of mathematical, moral and political science are occupied with not inferior distinction, by your Bowditches, your Adamses, your Channings, your Waylands and your Websters.

You

In this respect then, our fathers did their part; our friends of the present generation are doing theirs, and doing it well. But thus far the relative position of England and the United States has been such, that our proportional contribution to the common literature was naturally a small one. England, by her great superiority in wealth and population, was of course the head-quarters of science and learning. All this is rapidly changing. are already touching the point when your wealth and population will equal those of England. The superior rapidity of your progress will, at no distant period, give you the ascendency. It will then belong to your position to take the lead in arts and letters, as in policy, and to give the tone to the literature of the language. Let it be and study not to show yourselves unequal to this high calling, to vindicate the honor of the new world in this generous and friendly competition with the old. You will perhaps be told that literary pursuits will disqualify you for the active business of life. Heed not the idle assertion. Reject it as a mere imagination, inconsistent with principle, unsupported by experience. Point out to those who make it, the illustrious characters who have reaped in every age the highest honors of studious and active exertion. Show them Demosthenes, forging by the light of the midnight lamp those thunderbolts of eloquence, which

"Shook the arsenal and fulmined over Greece-
To Macedon and Artaxerxes's throne."

your care

Ask them if Cicero would have been hailed with rapture

as the father of his country, if he had not been its pride and pattern in philosophy and letters. Inquire whether Cæsar, or Frederic, or Bonaparte, or Wellington, or Washington, fought the worse, because they knew how to write their own commentaries. Remind them of Franklin, tearing at the same time the lightning from heaven, and the sceptre from the hands of the oppressor. Do they say to you that study will lead you to scepticism? Recall to their memory the venerable names of Bacon, Milton, Newton and Locke. Would they persuade you that devotion to learning will withdraw your steps from the paths of pleasure? Tell them they are mistaken. Tell them that the only true pleasures are those which result from the diligent exercise of all the faculties of body, and mind, and heart, in pursuit of noble ends by noble means. Repeat to them the ancient apologue of the youthful Hercules, in the pride of strength and beauty, giving up his generous soul to the worship of virtue. Tell them your choice is also made. Tell them, with the illustrious Roman orator, you would rather be in the wrong with Plato, than in the right with Epicurus. Tell them that a mother in Sparta would have rather seen her son brought home from battle a corpse upon his shield, than dishonored by its loss. Tell them that your mother is America, your battle the warfare of life, your shield the breastplate of Religion.

PROGRESS OF POESY.

AWAKE, Æolian lyre, awake,

And give to rapture all thy trembling strings.
From Helicon's harmonious springs

A thousand rills their mazy progress take:
The laughing flowers, that round them blow,
Drink life and fragrance as they flow.
Now the rich stream of music winds along,

Deep, majestic, smooth, and strong,

Through verdant vales, and Ceres golden reign:
Now rolling down the steep amain,

Headlong, impetuous, see it pour;

The rocks and nodding groves rebellow to the roar.

O! sovereign of the willing soul,
Parent of sweet and solemn-breathing airs,
Enchanting shell! the sullen cares,

And frantic passions, hear thy soft control.
On Thracia's hills the lord of war
Has curbed the fury of his car,

And drooped his thirsty lance at thy command,
Perching on the sceptred hand

Of Jove, thy magic lulls the feathered king,
With ruffled plume, and falling wing:
Quenched in dark clouds of slumber lie
The terror of his beak, and lightning of his eye.
Thee the voice, the dance, obey,

Tempered to thy warbled lay:

O'er Idalia's velvet green

The rosy-crowned loves are seen
On Cytherea's day;

With antic sports and blue-eyed pleasures,
Frisking light in frolic measures;

Now pursuing, now retreating,

Now in circling troops they meet:

To brisk notes in cadence beating,

Glance their many twinkling feet.

Slow-melting strains their Queen's approach declare: Where'er she turns, the Graces homage pay.

Man's feeble race, what ills await,

Labor, and penury, the racks of pain,

Disease, and sorrow's weeping train,

And death, sad refuge from the storms of fate!

The fond complaint, my song, disprove,

And justify the laws of Jove."

Say, has he given in vain the heavenly muse?

Night, and all her sickly dews,

Her spectres wan, and birds of boding cry,

He gives to range the dreary sky;

Till down the eastern cliffs afar,

Hyperion's march they spy, and glittering shafts of war.

In climes beyond the solar road,

Where shaggy forms o'er ice-built mountains roam,
The muse has broke the twilight gloom,

To cheer the shivering native's dull abode.

And oft, beneath the odorous shade

Of Chili's boundless forests laid,

She deigns to hear the savage youth repeat,
In loose numbers wildly sweet,

Their feather-cinctured chiefs, and dusky loves,
Her track, where'er the goddess roves,

Glory pursues, and generous shame,

Th' unconquerable mind, and Freedom's holy flame.
Woods, that wave o'er Delphi steep,
Isles, that crown th' Egean deep,
Fields that cool Ilissus laves,
Or where Mæander's amber waves
In lingering labyrinths creep,
How do your tuneful echoes languish,
Mute, but to the voice of anguish ?
Where each old poetic mountain
Inspiration breathed around,
Every shade and hallowed fountain
Murmured deep a solemn sound:
Till the sad nine, in Greece's evil hour,

Left their Parnassus, for the Latin plains.
Alike they scorn the pomp of tyrant power,

And coward vice, that revels in their chains. When Latium had her lofty spirit lost,

They sought, oh Albion! next thy sea-encircled coast.
Far from the sun and summer gale,

In thy green lap was nature's* darling laid,
What time, where lucid Avon strayed:

To him the mighty mother did unveil
Her awful face; the dauntless child
Stretched forth his little arms and smiled.
This pencil take, she said, whose colors clear,
Richly paint the vernal year:

Thine too these golden keys, immortal boy!
This can unlock the gates of joy;

Of horror that, and thrilling fears,

Or ope the sacred source of sympathetic tears.
Nor second he,† that rode sublime

Upon the seraph wings of ecstacy:
The secrets of the abyss to spy,

He passed the flaming bounds of place and time.
The living throne, the sapphire blaze,

Where angels tremble while they gaze,