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THE PRICE OF ELOQUENCE.

We see him again, when the tempest comes on, hurrying to the least frequented parts of the Piræus or Phalerus, and while the deafening thunders roar around him, and the deep and stirring eloquence of many waters expands and fills his soul, lifting his feeble and stammering voice, and essaying to give it compass, and flexibility, and power, while he "talks with the thunder as friend to friend, and weaves his garland of the lightning's wing."

We see this ardent Athenian youth again, amidst the profoundest solitudes of nature, holding communion with high and ennobling thoughts, stirred within his bosom by the spirit of the great and godlike, the sublime and beautiful, from every object of nature and of plastic art around him.

At length, day after day and night after night, for months, he is seen entering a solitary cave. How is he busied in that subterranean chamber? With his head half shaven, that he may not be tempted to appear too early in society or in public, we find him poring over the tomes of rhetoricians, historians, philosophers, and poets; with his pen, also, eight times transcribing Thucydides, that he may make his own, some portion of the terseness, energy, and fire of that historian.

After all this educational training of the greatest and best masters, living and dead-after all this self-imposed discipline of intellect and spirit, and when he has reached the age of ripe manhood, we go to witness his first effort in forensic eloquence.

The hisses of his fastidious auditory stifle and repress for a time the kindling energy and fervor of his soul, and his still embarrassed and stammering enunciation seems to jeopardize the cause he is pleading. At length he rises in a conscious mastery of his subject and of himself, and, with the self-sustained dignity of the true orator, conciliates, convinces, moves, persuades, by the clearness, fitness, and force of his arguments, and the thrilling pathos and pungency of his appeals.

This is eloquence-the eloquence of the Athenian Demosthenes -the triumph of educational skill and self-discipline, united, indeed, with great powers, and with a lofty and indomitable force of will.

The meed which the concurrent suffrages of more than two thousand years, in every civilized nation of the globe, have awarded to this great orator, we readily concede to him. But in

A LEGEND OF BREGENZ.

417

our admiration of the power of his eloquence, we are too willing to forget the laborious and pains-taking efforts of study and discipline by which he attained his unrivalled eminence in oratorical power.

A LEGEND OF BREGENZ.-ADELAIDE PROCTER.

GIR

IRT round with rugged mountains the fair Lake Constance
lies;

In her blue heart reflected shine back the starry skies;
And, watching each white cloudlet float silently and slow,
You think a piece of heaven lies on our earth below!

Midnight is there and Silence, enthroned in heaven, looks down
Upon her own calm mirror, upon a sleeping town:

For Bregenz, that quaint city upon the Tyrol shore,

Has stood above Lake Constance a thousand years and more.

Her battlements and towers, from off their rocky steep,
Have cast their trembling shadow for ages on the deep:
Mountain, and lake, and valley a sacred legend know,

Of how the town was saved, one night, three hundred years ago.

Far from her home and kindred a Tyrol maid had fled,
To serve in the Swiss valleys, and toil for daily bread;

And every year that fleeted so silently and fast,

Seemed from her to bear farther the memory of the past.

She served kind, gentle masters, nor asked for rest or change;

Her friends no more seemed new ones, their speech no more seemed strange;

And when she led her cattle to pasture every day,

She ceased to look and wonder on which side Bregenz lay.

She spoke no more of Bregenz with longing and with tears;
Her Tyrol home seemed faded in a deep mist of years;
She heeded not the rumors of Austrian war and strife;
Each day she rose contented to the calm toils of life.

Yet, when her master's children would clustering round her stand,
She sang them ancient ballads of her own dear native land;

418

A LEGEND OF BREGENZ.

And when at morn and evening she knelt before God's throne,
The accents of her childhood rose to her lips alone.

And so she dwelt: the valley more peaceful year by year;
When suddenly strange portents of some great deed seemed near.
The golden corn was bending upon its fragile stalk,

While farmers, heedless of their fields, paced up and down in talk.

The men seemed stern and altered,-with looks cast on the ground;

With anxious faces, one by one, the women gathered round;
All talk of flax, or spinning, or work, was put away;
The very children seemed afraid to go alone to play.

One day, out in the meadow, with strangers from the town,
Some secret plan discussing, the men walked up and down.
Yet now and then seemed watching a strange, uncertain gleam,
That looked like lances 'mid the trees that stood below the stream.

At eve they all assembled, then care and doubt were fled;
With jovial laugh they feasted; the board was nobly spread.
The elder of the village rose up, his glass in hand,
And cried, "We drink the downfall of an accursed land!

"The night is growing darker; ere one more day is flown,
Bregenz, our foemen's stronghold, Bregenz shall be our own!"
The women shrank in terror, yet pride, too, had her part,
But one poor Tyrol maiden felt death within her heart.

Before her stood fair Bregenz; once more her towers arose;
What were the friends beside her? only her country's foes!
The faces of her kinsfolk, the days of childhood flown,
The echoes of her mountains, reclaimed her as their own.

Nothing she heard around her, though shouts rang forth again;
Gone were the green Swiss valleys, the pasture, and the plain;
Before her eyes one vision, and in her heart one cry,
That said, "Go forth, save Bregenz, and then, if need be, die!"

With trembling haste and breathless, with noiseless step, she sped; Horses and weary cattle were standing in the shed;

A LEGEND OF BREGENZ.

419

She loosed the strong, white charger, that fed from out her hand,
She mounted, and she turned his head toward her native land.
Out-out into the darkness-faster, and still more fast;
The smooth grass flies behind her, the chestnut wood is past;
She looks up; clouds are heavy; why is her steed so slow ?-
Scarcely the wind beside them can pass them as they go.

"Faster!" she cries, "O faster!" eleven the church-bells chime:
"O God," she cries, "help Bregenz, and bring me there in time!"
But louder than bells' ringing, or lowing of the kine,
Grows nearer in the midnight the rushing of the Rhine.

Shall not the roaring waters their headlong gallop check?
The steed draws back in terror,-she leans upon his neck
To watch the flowing darkness; the bank is high and steep;
One pause-he staggers forward, and plunges in the deep.

She strives to pierce the blackness, and looser throws the rein;
Her steed must breast the waters that dash above his mane.
How gallantly, how nobly, he struggles through the foam;
And see-in the far distance shine out the lights of home!

Up the steep bank he bears her, and now they rush again
Toward the heights of Bregenz, that tower above the plain.
They reach the gate of Bregenz just as the midnight rings,
And out come serf and soldier to meet the news she brings.

Bregenz is saved! Ere daylight her battlements are manned;
Defiance greets the army that marches on the land.
And if to deeds heroic should endless fame be paid,
Bregenz does well to honor the noble Tyrol maid.

Three hundred years are vanished; and yet upon the hill
An old stone gateway rises, to do her honor still.
And there, when Bregenz women sit spinning in the shade,
They see in quaint old carving the Charger and the Maid.

And when, to guard old Bregenz, by gateway, street, and tower,
The warder paces all night long and calls each passing hour;
Nine," "ten," "eleven," he cries aloud, and then O crown of
Fame!

66

When midnight pauses in the skies, he calls the maiden's name!

420

DON'T SLOP OVER.

DON'T SLOP OVER.

ON'T slop over," the old man said,

"DON

As he placed his hand on the young man's head: "Go it by all means-go it fast;

Go it while leather and horse-shoes last;
Go it while hide and hair on horse

Will hold together. Oh, go it, of course;
Go it as fast as ever you can,

But don't slop over, my dear young man.

"Don't slop over! You'll find some day
That keeping an eye to win'ard will pay.
A horse may run a little too long;
A preacher may preach a fraction too strong;
A poet who pleases the world with rhymes
May write, and regret it in after-times;
Keep the end of the effort ever in view,
And don't slop over, whatever you do.

"Don't slop over! The wisest men
Are bound to slop over now and then;
And the wisest, at work or at feast,
Are the very ones that blunder the least.
Those that for spilt milk never wail,
Are the ones that carry the steadiest pail.
Wherever you go, go in for the fat,
But don't slop over,-and freeze to that.

"Don't slop over! Distrust yourself,
Nor always reach to the highest shelf;
The next to the highest will generally do,
And answer the need of such as you.
Climb, of course, but always stop
And take your breath this side of the top;
And you will reach it in
Without slopping over.

wind, and strong,
This ends my song."