prospects of a future state, and bound across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. I see them now, scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route; and now driven in fury before the raging tempest, on the high and giddy wave. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging; the laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats, with deadening, shivering weight, against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed, at last, after a five months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth, weak and weary from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes. Shut, now, the volume of history, and tell me, on any principle of human probability, what shall be the fate of this handful of adventurers? Tell me, man of military science, in how many months were they all swept off by the thirty savage tribes enumerated within the early limits of New England? Tell me, politician, how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and treaties had not 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 recol· lection 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! Ex. CCXI.-EDUCATION OF THE YOUNG. HORACE MANN. FROM her earliest colonial history, the policy of Massachusetts has been to develop the minds of all her people, and to imbue them with the principles of duty. To do this work most effectually, she has begun with the young. If she would continue to mount higher and higher towards the summit of prosperity, she must continue the means by which her present elevation has been gained. In doing this, she will not only exercise the noblest prerogative of government, but will cooperate with the Almighty in one of his sublimest works. The Greek rhetorician, Longinus, quotes from the Mosaic account of the creation what he calls the sublimest passage ever uttered: "God said, 'Let there be light,' and there was light." From the center of black immensity effulgence burst forth. Above, beneath, on every side, its radiance streamed out, silent, yet making each spot in the vast concave brighter than the line which the lightning pencils upon the midnight cloud. Darkness fled as the swift beams spread onward and outward, in an unending circumfusion of splendor. Onward and outward still they move to this day, glorifying, through wider and wider regions of space, the infinite Author from whose power and beneficence they sprang. But not only in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, did he say, "Let there be light." Whenever a human soul is born into the world, its Creator stands over it, and again pronounces the same sublime words, "Let there be light." Magnificent, indeed, was the material creation, when, suddenly blazing forth in mid space, the new-born sun dispelled the darkness of the ancient night. But infinitely more magnificent is it when the human soul rays forth its subtler and swifter beams; when the light of the senses irradiates all outward things, revealing the beauty of their colors, and the exquisite symmetry of their proportions and forms; when the light of reason penetrates to their invisible properties and laws, and displays all those hidden relations that make up all the sciences; when the light of conscience illuminates the moral world, separating truth from error, and virtue from vice. The light of the newly-kindled sun, indeed, was glorious. It struck upon all the planets, and waked into existence their myriad capacities of life and joy. As it rebounded from them, and showed their vast orbs all wheeling, circle beyond circle, in their stupendous courses, the sons of Ged shouted for joy. That light sped onward, beyond Sirius, beyond the pole-star, beyond Orion and the Pleiades, and is still spreading onward into the abysses of space. But the light of the human soul flies swifter than the light of the sun, and outshines its meridian blaze. It can embrace not only the sun of our system, but all suns and galaxies of suns; aye! the soul is capable of knowing and of enjoying Him who created the suns themselves: and when these starry lusters that now glorify the firmament shall wax dim, and fade away like a wasted taper, the light of the soul shall still remain; nor time, nor cloud, nor any power but its own perversity, shall ever quench its brightness. Again I would say, that whenever a human soul is born into the world, God stands over it, and pronounces the same sublime fiat, "Let there be light!" and may the time soon come, when all human governments shall co-operate with the divine government in carrying this benediction and baptism into fulfillment ! Ex. CCXII-SPEAK GENTLY. SPEAK gently: it is better far Speak gently; let no harsh words mar Speak gently: love doth whisper low Speak gently to the little child, Teach it in accents soft and mild,— It may not long remain. Speak gently to the young; for they Speak gently to the aged one, Grieve not the careworn heart; ANON. Speak gently, kindly to the poor; Speak gently to the erring:-know Speak gently! He who gave his life Speak gently: 'tis a little thing Ex. CCXIII.—AMBITION. H. GREELEY WE need a loftier ideal to nerve us for heroic lives. To know and feel our nothingness without regretting it,-to deem fame, riches, personal happiness, but shadows of which human good is the substance, to welcome pain, privation, ignominy, so that the sphere of human knowledge, the em pire of virtue, be thereby extended,-such is the soul's temper in which the heroes of the coming age shall be cast. When the stately monuments of mightiest conquerors shall have become shapeless and forgotten ruins, the humble graves of earth's Howards and Frys shall still be freshened by the tears of fondly admiring millions, and the proudest epitaph shall be the simple entreaty, 66 Write me as one who loved his fellow-men." Say not that I thus condemn and would annihilate ambition. The love of approbation, of esteem, of true glory, is a noble incentive, and should be cherished to the end. But the ambition which points the way to fame over torn_limbs and bleeding hearts, which joys in the Tartarean smoke of the battle-field, and the desolating tramp of the war-horse, — - that ambition is worthy only of "arch-angel ruined." To make one conqueror's reputation, at least one hundred thousand bounding, joyous, sentient beings must be transformed into writhing and hideous fragments, must perish untimely by deaths of agony and horror, leaving half a million widows and orphans to bewail their loss in anguish and destitution. This is too mighty, too awful a price to be paid for the fame of any hero, from Nimrod to Wellington. True fame demands no such sacrifices of others; it requires us to be reckless of the outward well-being of but one. It exacts no hecatomb of victims for each triumphal pile; for the more who covet and seek it, the easier and more abundant is the success of each and all. With souls of the celestial temper, each human life might be a triumph, which angels would lean from the skies delighted to witness and admire. Ex. CCXIV.-AMERICA. C. M. CLAY. I MAY be an enthusiast; but I can not but give utterance to the conceptions of my own mind. When I look upon the special developments of European civilization; when I contemplate the growing freedom of the cities, and the middle class which had sprung up between the pretenders to divine rule on the one hand, and the abject serf on the other; when I consider the Reformation, and the invention of the press, and see, on the southern shore of the continent, an humble individual, amidst untold difficulties and repeated defeats, pursuing the mysterious suggestions which the mighty deep poured unceasingly upon his troubled spirit, till, at last, with great and irrepressible energy of soul, he discovered that there lay in the far western ocean a continent open for the infusion of those elementary principles of liberty which were dwarfed in European soil,—I have conceived that the hand of destiny was there! When I saw the immigration of the Pilgrims from the chalky shores of England, in the night fleeing from their native home, so dramatically and ably pictured by Mr. Webster in his celebrated oration,-when father, mother, brother, wife, sister, lover, were all lost, by those melancholy wanderers "stifling," in the language of one who is immortal in the conception, "the mighty hunger of the heart," and land |