The brazen clang of the tremulous bell,—
"Old-old, weary and old ;-

The heart grows old; for the world is cold,”—
Solemnly sighs the far-spent knell.

The dark pines mingle in pale starlight,
Like the phantom-forms of a fearful night;
Tossing their branches to and fro,

Like the nodding plumes of a funeral show,
The sighing night-winds come and go,
And seem to say,

In a mystic way,

As they whisper together, soft and low,-
"Way-worn and weary,

The heart grows cold; for life is dreary,".
Whisper the night-winds, soft and low.

Gray willows bend above the stones,
The old church wraps in her solemn shade:
Sepulchral stones, that tell of moans,-
Of broken hearts and dying groans,-
Where perished hopes are laid.

And the stony lips of the marble say,
In a dismal and unloving way,

That chills my bounding heart within me,—

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Way-worn and weary,

The heart grows cold, for life is dreary:
Come, wanderer,—come!

Earth hath no home

Where grief and tears shall not o'ertake thee."

Ex. CCXXXI.-THE PRESENT AGE.

CHANNING.

THE Present Age. In these brief words what a world of thought is comprehended! what infinite movements! what joys and sorrows! what hope and despair! what faith and doubt! what silent grief and loud lament! what fierce conflicts and subtle schemes of policy! what private and public revolutions! In the period through which many of us have passed, what thrones have been shaken! what hearts have bled! what millions have been butchered by their fellow

creatures! what hopes of philanthropy have been blighted! and at the same time what magnificent enterprises have been achieved! what new provinces won to science and art! what rights and liberties secured to nations! It is a privilege to have lived in an age so stirring, so pregnant, so eventful. It is an age never to be forgotten. Its voice of warning and encouragement is never to die. Its impression on history is indelible. Amidst its events, the American revolution, the first distinct, solemn assertion of the rights of men, and the French revolution, that volcanic force which shook the earth to its center, are never to pass from men's minds. Over this age the night will, indeed, gather more and more, as time rolls away; but in that night two forms will appear, Washington and Napoleon, the one a lurid meteor, the other a benign, serene, and undecaying star. Another American name will live in history, your Franklin; and the kite which brought lightning from heaven, will be seen sailing in the clouds by remote posterity, when the city where he dwelt may be known only by its ruins. There is, however, something greater in the age than its greatest men; it is the appearance of a new power in the world, the appearance of the multitude of men on the stage where as yet the few have acted their parts alone. This influence is to endure to the end of time. What more of the present is to survive? Perhaps much, of which we now take no note. The glory of an age is often hidden from itself. Perhaps some word has been spoken in our day which we have not deigned to hear, but which is to grow clearer and louder through all ages. Perhaps some silent thinker among us is at work in his closet whose name is to fill the earth. Perhaps there sleeps in his cradle some reformer who is to move the church, and the world, who is to open a new era in history, who is to fire the human soul with new hope and new daring. What else is to survive the age? That which the age has little thought of, but which is living in us all; I mean the soul, the immortal spirit of this all ages are the unfoldings, and it is greater than all. We must not feel, in the contemplation of the vast movements in our own and former times, as if we ourselves were nothing. I repeat it, we are greater than all. We are to survive our age, to comprehend it, and to pronounce its

sentence.

Ex. CCXXXII-THE WRECK.

ALL night the booming minute gun
Had pealed along the deep,
And mournfully the rising sun

Looked o'er the tide-worn steep.
A bark from India's coral strand,
Before the raging blast,

Had vailed her topsails to the sand,
And bowed her noble mast.

MRS. HEMANS.

The queenly ship! brave hearts had striven,

And true ones died with her;

We saw her mighty cable riven,

Like floating gossamer.

We saw her proud flag struck that morn,
A star once o'er the seas,

Her anchor gone, her deck uptorn,

And sadder things than these.

We saw her treasures cast away;
The rocks with pearls were sown,
And, strangely sad, the ruby's ray
Flashed out o'er fretted stone.

And gold was strown the wet sands o'er,
Like ashes by a breeze,

And gorgeous robes: but oh! that shore
Had sadder things than these.

We saw the strong man still and low,
A crushed reed thrown aside;

Yet, by that rigid lip and brow,

Not without strife he died.

And near him, on the sea-weed lay:
Till then we had not wept,

But well our gushing hearts might say
That there a mother slept.

For her pale arms a babe had pressed,
With such a wreathing grasp,
Billows had dashed o'er that fond breast,
Yet not undone the clasp.

Her very tresses had been flung,

To wrap the fair child's form,

Where still their wet, long streamers clung,
All tangled by the storm.

And beautiful, 'mid that wild scene,
Gleamed up the boy's dead face,
Like slumbers, trustingly serene,
In melancholy grace.

Deep in her bosom lay his head,
With half shut violet eye:

He had known little of her dread,—
Naught of her agony.

Oh, human love! whose yearning heart,
Through all things vainly true,

So stamps upon thy mortal part
Its passionate adieu.-

Surely thou hast another lot,

There is some home for thee,

Where thou shalt rest, remembering not
The moaning of the sea!

Ex. CCXXXIII.-FREEDOM AND PATRIOTISM.

DEWEY.

GOD has stamped upon our very humanity this impress of freedom. It is the unchartered prerogative of human nature. A soul ceases to be a soul, in proportion as it ceases to be free. Strip it of this, and you strip it of one of its essential and characteristic attributes. It is this that draws the footsteps of the wild Indian to his wide and boundless desertpaths, and makes him prefer them to the gay saloons and soft carpets of sumptuous palaces. It is this that makes it so difficult to bring him within the pale of civilization. Our roving tribes are perishing—a sad and solemn sacrifice upon the altar of their wild freedom. They come among us, and look with childish wonder upon the perfection of our arts, and the splendor of our habitations: they submit with ennui and weariness, for a few days, to our burdensome forms and restraints; and then turn their faces to their forest homes, and resolve to push those homes onward till they sink in the Pacific waves, rather than not be free.

It is thus that every people is attached to its country, just in proportion as it is free. No matter if that country be in the rocky fastnesses of Switzerland, amidst the snows of Tartary, or on the most barren and lonely island-shore; no matter if that country be so poor as to force away its children to other and richer lands, for employment and sustenance; yet when the songs of those free homes chance to fall upon the exile's ear, no soft and ravishing airs that wait upon the timid feastings of Asiatic opulence ever thrilled the heart with such mingled rapture and agony as those simple tones. Sad mementos might they be of poverty and want and toil; yet it was enough that they were mementos of happy freedom.

I have seen my countrymen, and I have been with them a fellow wanderer, in other lands; and little did I see or feel to warrant the apprehension, sometimes expressed, that foreign travel would weaken our patriotic attachments. One sigh for home-home, arose from all hearts. And why, from palaces and courts-why, from galleries of the arts, where the marble softens into life, and painting sheds an almost living presence of beauty around it-why, from the mountain's awful brow, and the lonely valleys and lakes touched with the sunset hues of old romance-why, from those venerable and touching ruins to which our very heart grows—why, from all these scenes, were they looking beyond the swellings of the Atlantic wave, to a dearer and holier spot of earth-their own, own country? Doubtless, it was in part because it is their country! But it was also, as every one's experience will testify, because they knew that there was no oppression, no pitiful exaction of petty tyranny; because that there, they knew, was no accredited and irresistible religious domination; because that there, they knew, they should not meet the odious soldier at every corner, nor swarms of imploring beggars, the victims of misrule; that there, no curse causeless did fall, and no blight, worse than plague and pestilence, did descend amidst the pure dews of heaven; because, in fine, that there, they knew, was liberty-upon all the green hills, and amidst all the peaceful villages--liberty, the wall of fire around the humblest home; the crown of glory, studded with her ever-blazing stars upon the proudest mansion!

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