What can ennoble sots, or slaves, or cowards ?
Alas! not all the blood of all the Howards.

Who builds a church to God, and not to fame,
Will never mark the marble with his name.

All are but parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body nature is, and God the soul; That, changed through all, and yet in all the same, Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame, Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees, Lives through all life, extends through all extent, Spreads undivided, operates unspent; Breathes in our soul, informs our mortal part, As full, as perfect, in a hair as heart; As full, as perfect, in vile man that mourns As the rapt seraph that adores and burns: To him no high, no low, no great, no small; He fills, he bounds, connects, and equals all.

Know, then, this truth, -enough for man to know:“ Virtue alone is happiness below.”

All nature is but art, unknown to thee;
All chance, direction which thou canst not see;
All discord, harmony not understood;
All partial evil, universal good.
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, - Whatever is, is right.

'Tis with our judgments as our watches: none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

A little learning is a dangerous thing!
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

True wit is nature to advantage dressed,
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.

Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,
All but the page prescribed, their present state ;
From brutes what men, from men what spirits, know:
Or who could suffer being here below?
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play ?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given,
That each may fill the circle marked by Heaven:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world.

Good nature and good sense must ever join;
To err is human, to forgive, divine.

Order is heaven's first law.

'Tis education forms the common mind, And as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined.

Who shall decide when doctors disagree,
And soundest casuists doubt like you and me?

'Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar.
When Ajax strives some rock's vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow:
Not so when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o'er the unbending corn, and skims along the

main.

Know, then, thyself — presume not God to scan:
The proper study of mankind is man.

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

By foreign hands thy dying eyes were closed,
By foreign hands thy decent limbs composed,
By foreign hands thy humble grave adorned,
By strangers honored, and by strangers mourned!
Yet shall thy grave with rising flowers be dressed,
And the green turf lie lightly on thy breast:
There shall the morn her earliest tears bestow;
There the first roses of the year shall blow;
While angels with their silver wings o'ershade
The ground now sacred by thy relics made.

For forms of government let fools contest; Whate'er is best administered is best : For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight; His can't be wrong whose life is in the right: In faith and hope the world will disagree, But all mankind's concern is charity: All must be false that thwart this one great end; And all of God that bless mankind or mend.

Hope springs eternal in the human breast :
Man never is, but always to be blest.
The soul, uneasy and confined, from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.
Lo! the poor Indian, whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky-way;
Yet simple nature to his hope has given
Behind the cloud-topped hill a humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold.
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire;
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

That mercy I to others show,

That mercy show to me. 1 “I have often wondered,” says wrote The Dunciad should have Cowper, “that the same poet who I written these lines."

V.-BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

LIFE AND WORKS.

It is no wonder that the colonial period of our country's history was one of comparative literary barrenness. Our forefathers were too busily engaged in subduing the wilderness, and in laying the foundations of states, to occupy themselves much with writing books.

Accordingly it was to the mother-country that they looked for intellectual food; and as regards learning, culture, art, and literature, the six generations of colonists were in a state of almost absolute dependence on England. The books and pamphlets of a political nature that came from the press were elicited by local causes, and possessed but transient interest; while the few sallies in "belles-lettres” were feeble imitations of the English poets and essayists of the eighteenth century.

In the midst of this provincial dependence and intellectual sterility stands out in sharp relief the luminous figure of Franklin,—the first truly great original literary man of America, the first American in whom the inarticulate genius of our country found prophetic voice.

The father of this illustrious man, about the year 1685, emigrated from Old England to New England, and established himself in Boston as a tallow-chandler and soap-boiler. He lived in a little house in Milk Street, opposite the Old South Church; and here was