With our own hands we shall tear down the stately edifice of our glory.-We shall die by self-inflicted wounds.- -But we will not talk of things like these. We will not think of failure, dishonor, and despair. On this day we will not admit the possibility of being untrue to our fathers and ourselves. We will elevate our minds to the contemplation of our high duties and the great trust committed to us. We will resolve to lay the foundation of our prosperity on that rock of private virtue, which can not be shaken, until the laws of the moral world are reversed. From our own breasts shall flow the salient springs of national increase. Then our success, our happiness, our glory, will be as inevitable as the inferences of mathematics. We may calmly smile at all the croakings of the ravens, whether of native or foreign breed. The whole will not grow weak by the increase of its parts. Our growth will be like that of the mountain oak; which strikes its roots more deeply into the soil, and clings to it, with a closer grasp, as its lofty head is exalted, and its broad arms stretched out.

The loud burst of joy and gratitude, which is on this day breaking from the full hearts of a mighty people, will never cease to be heard. No chasm of sullen silence will interrupt its course; no discordant notes of sectional madness, will mar the general harmony.-Year after year will increase it, by tributes from now unpeopled solitudes. The furthest West shall hear it, and rejoice. The Oregon shall swell with the voice of its waters: the Rocky Mountains shall fling back the glad sound from their snowy crests.

Ex. CCXXI.-THE LAUNCHING OF THE SHIP.

ALL is finished! and at length

Has come the bridal day

Of beauty and of strength.

To-day the vessel shall be launched!

With fleecy clouds the sky is blanched,
And o'er the bay,

Slowly, in all his splendors dight,

The great sun rises to behold the sight.

LONGFELLOW.

He waits impatient for his bride.

There she stands,

With her foot upon the sands,

Decked with flags and streamers gay,

In honor of her marriage day,

Her snow-white signals fluttering, blending,

Round her like a vail descending,

Ready to be

The bride of the gray, old sea.

She starts,—she moves,—she seems to feel
The thrill of life along her keel,

And, spurning with her foot the ground,
With one exulting, joyous bound,

She leaps into the ocean's arms!

And lo! from the assembled crowd

There rose a shout, prolonged and loud,
That to the ocean seemed to say,

"Take her, O bridegroom, old and gray;
Take her to thy protecting arms,
With all her youth and all her charms."

How beautiful she is! how fair
She lies within those arms, that press
Her form with many a soft caress
Of tenderness and watchful care!
Sail forth into the sea, O ship!

Through wind and wave, right onward steer!
The moistened eye, the trembling lip,

Are not the signs of doubt or fear.

Sail forth into the sea of life,
O gentle, loving, trusting wife,
And safe from all adversity,
Upon the bosom of that sea
Thy comings and thy goings be!
For gentleness, and love, and trust,
Prevail o'er angry wave and gust;
And in the wreck of noble lives,
Something immortal still survives!

Thou, too, sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity, with all its fears,

With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!
We know what Master laid thy keel,
What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel,
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope,
What anvils rang, what hammers beat,
In what a forge, and what a heat,
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope.

Fear not each sudden sound and shock;
'Tis of the wave, and not the rock;
'Tis but the flapping of the sail,
And not a rent made by the gale.
Spite of rock and tempest roar,
In spite of false lights on the shore,
Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea:

Our hearts, our hopes, are all with thee.

Our hearts, our hopes, our prayers, our tears, Our faith triumphant o'er our fears,

Are all with thee-are all with thee.

Ex. CCXXII.-WASHINGTON'S PREPARATORY TRAINING FOR PUBLIC STATION.

C. W. UPHAM.

AMONG the mountain passes of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies, a youth is seen employed in the manly and invigorating occupations of a surveyor, and awakening the admiration of the hardy backwoodsmen and savage chieftains, by the strength and endurance of his frame, and the resolution and energy of his character. In his stature and conformation he is a noble specimen of a man. In the various exercises of muscular power, on foot, and in the saddle, he excels all competitors. His admirable physical traits are in perfect accordance with the properties of his mind and heart; and over all, crowning all, is a beautiful, and, in one so young, a strange dignity of manners and of mien, a calm seriousness, a sublime self-control, which at once compels the veneration, attracts the confidence, and secures the favor of all who behold him. That youth is the leader whom Heaven is preparing to conduct America through her approaching trial.

As we see him voluntarily relinquishing the enjoyments, and luxuries, and ease, of the opulent refinement in which he was born and bred, and choosing the perils and hardships. of the wilderness; as we follow him, fording swollen streams, climbing rugged mountains, breasting the forest storms, wading through snow-drifts, sleeping in the open air, living upon the coarse food of hunters and of Indians, we trace, with devout admiration, the Divinely-appointed education he was receiving, to enable him to meet and endure the fatigues, exposures, and privations of the war of Independ

ence.

Soon he is called to a more public sphere of action, on the same theater; and we again follow him, in his romantic adventures, as he traversed the far-off western wilderness, a special messenger to the French commander on the Ohio, and afterwards when he led forth the troops of Virginia in the same direction, or accompanied the ill-starred Braddock to the blood-stained banks of the Monongahela. Every where we see the hand of God conducting him into danger, that he might extract from it the wisdom of an experience not otherwise to be attained, and develop those heroic qualities by which alone danger and difficulty can be surmounted, but all the while covering him, as with a shield.

When we think of him, at midnight and in mid-winter,

thrown from a frail raft into the deep and angry waters of a wide and rushing western river, thus separated from his only companion through the wilderness, with no human aid for miles and leagues around him, buffeting its rapid current, and struggling through driving cakes of ice,-when we behold the stealthy savage, whose aim, against all other marks, is unerring, pointing his rifle deliberately at him, and firing, over and over again,-when we see him riding through showers of bullets on Braddock's fatal field, and reflect that never, during his whole life, was he wounded, or even touched, by a hostile force, do we not feel that he was guarded by an Unseen Hand? Yes, that sacred person was guarded by an unseen hand, warding off every danger. No peril by flood or by field was permitted to extinguish a life consecrated to the hopes of humanity, and to the purposes of Heaven.

For more than sixteen years he rested from his warfare, amid the shades of Mount Vernon, ripening his mind by reading and reflection, increasing his knowledge of practical affairs, entering into the whole experience of a citizen, at home, on his farm, and as a delegate to the Colonial Assembly; and when, at last, the war broke out, and the unanimous voice of the Continental Congress invested him, as the exigency required, with almost unbounded authority, as their commander-in-chief, he blended, although still in the prime of his life, in the mature bloom of his manhood, the attributes of a sage with those of a hero. A more perfectly fitted and furnished character has never appeared on the theater of human action, than when, reining up his war-horse, beneath the majestic and venerable elm, still standing at the entrance of the old Watertown road upon Cambridge Common, GEORGE WASHINGTON unsheathed his sword, and assumed the command of the gathering armies of American liberty.

Ex. CCXXIII.—E U LOGY ON WEBSTER.

CHOATE.

BUT it is time that the eulogy was spoken. My heart goes back into the coffin there with him, and I would pause. I went, it is a day or two since, alone, to see again the home