other portions of the continent) the poor, solitary Mayflower, so to say, has multiplied herself into the thousand vessels that bear the flag of the Union to every sea; has scattered her progeny through the land, to the number of nearly a quarter of a million for every individual in that drooping company of one hundred; and in place of the simple compact which was signed in her cabin, has exhibited to the admiration of mankind a constitution of republican government for all this growing family of prosperous States. But the work is in its infancy. It must extend throughout the length and breadth of the land, and what is not done directly by ourselves must be done by other governments and other races, by the light of our example.

The work, the work must go on. It must reach at the North to the enchanted cave of the magnet, within never-melting barriers of Arctic ice; it must bow to the lord of day on the altarpeaks of Chimborazo; it must look up and worship the Southern Cross. From the easternmost cliff on the Atlantic, that blushes in the kindling dawn, to the last promontory on the Pacific, which catches the parting kiss of the setting sun as he goes down to his pavilion of purple and gold, it must make the outgoings of the morning and evening to rejoice in the gladsome light of morals, and letters, and arts. Emperors, and kings, and parliaments-the oldest and the strongest governments in Europe-must engage in this work in some part or other of the continent, but no part of it shall be so faithfully and successfully performed as that which was undertaken by the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, on the spot where we are now gathered.

There are two master ideas, greatest of the spiritual images enthroned in the mind of man-the only ideas, comparatively speaking, which deserve a name among men, springs of all the grand beneficent movements of modern times-by whose influence the settlement of New England may be rationally explained. You have anticipated me, descendants of the Pilgrims: these great ideas are GOD and LIBERTY. It was these that inspired our fathers; by these that their weakness was clothed with power, that their simplicity was transmuted to wisdom; by these that the great miracle of their enterprise was wrought.

The Pilgrims were actuated by that principle, which, as I have just said, has given the first impulse to all the great movements

of the modern world-I mean profound religious faith. They had the frailties of humanity. This exalted principle itself was combined with human weakness. It was mingled with the prejudices and errors of age and country and sect; it was habitually gloomy; it was sometimes intolerant; but it was reverent, sincere, all-controlling. It did not influence, it possessed the soul. It steeled the heart to the delights of life; it raised the frame above bodily weakness; it enabled the humble to brave the frowns of power; it triumphed over cold and hunger, the prison and the scaffold; it taught uneducated men to speak with persuasive fervor; it gave manly strength and courage to tender and delicate women.

But, sir, our fathers embraced that second grand idea of civil liberty with not less fervor than the first. It was a kindred fruit of the same stock. They cherished it with a zeal not less intense and resolute. This is a topic for a volume, rather than the closing sentence of a speech. I will only say that the highest authorities in English history, Hume, Hallam, Macaulay, neither of them influenced by sympathy with the Puritans, concur in the opinion that England was indebted to them for the preservation of her liberties in that most critical period of her national existence. when the question between prerogative and law, absolute authority and constitutional government, was decided for ever.

In coming to this country, our fathers most certainly contemplated, not merely a safe retreat beyond the sea, where they could worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience, but a local government founded on popular choice. That their foresight stretched onward through the successive stages of colonial and provincial government which resulted in the establishment of a great republican confederacy, it would be extravagant to pretend. But from the primitive and venerable compact signed on the 11th of November, 1620, on board the Mayflower, while she yet nestled in the embrace of Princetown harbor, after her desolate voyage, like a weary child at even-song in its mother's arms, through every document and manifesto which bears on the question, there is a distinct indication of a purpose to establish civil government on the basis of republican equality. In a word, Mr. President, their political code united religion and liberty, morals and law, and it differed from the wild license which breaks away from these restraints, as the well-guided rail

way engine, instinct with mechanical life, conducted by a bold, but skilful and prudent hand, and propelled in safety towards its destination, with glowing axle, along its iron grooves, differs from the same engine when its speed is rashly urged beyond the point of safety, or when, driven by criminal recklessness or murderous neglect, it leaps madly from the track, and plunges with its crushed and shrieking train into the jaws of destruction.

THE USES OF ASTRONOMY.

EXTRACT FROM A DISCOURSE DELIVERED AT THE INAUGURATION OF DUDLEY OBSERVATORY, ALBANY, AUGUST 28, 1856.

In the first place, then, we derive from the observations of the heavenly bodies, which are made at an observatory, our only adequate measure of time and our only means of comparing the time of one place with the time of another. Our artificial timekeepers - clocks, watches, and chronometers - however ingeniously contrived and admirably fabricated, are but a transcript, so to say, of the celestial motions, and would be of no value without the means of regulating them by observation. It is impossible for them under any circumstances to escape the imperfection of all machinery, the work of human hands; and the moment we remove with our timekeeper east or west, it fails us. It will keep home time alone, like the fond traveller who leaves his heart behind him. The artificial instrument is of incalculable utility, but must itself be regulated by the eternal clock-work of the skies.

This single consideration is sufficient to show how completely the daily business of life is affected and controlled by the heavenly bodies. It is they and not our main-springs, our expansion balances, and our compensation pendulums, which give us our time. To reverse the line of Pope

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

But for all the kindreds and tribes and tongues of men-each upon his own meridian-from the Arctic pole to the equator, from the equator to the Antarctic pole, the eternal sun strikes twelve at noon, and the glorious constellations, far up in the everlasting belfries of the skies, chime twelve at midnight;twelve for the pale student over his flickering lamp, twelve amid

the flaming wonders of Orion's belt, if he crosses the meridian at that fated hour;-twelve by the weary couch of languishing humanity, twelve in the star-paved courts of the empyrean;-twelve for the heaving tides of the ocean; twelve for the weary arm of labor; twelve for the toiling brain; twelve for the watching, waking, broken heart; twelve for the meteor which blazes for a moment and expires; twelve for the comet whose period is measured by centuries; twelve for every substantial, for every imaginary thing, which exists in the sense, the intellect, or the fancy, and which the speech or thought of man, at the given meridian. refers to the lapse of time.

There are occasions in life in which a great mind lives years of rapt enjoyment in a moment. I can fancy the emotions of Galileo, when, first raising the newly-constructed telescope to the heavens, he saw fulfilled the grand prophecy of Copernicus, and beheld the planet Venus crescent like the moon. . . Yes, noble Galileo, thou art right, "It does move." Bigots may make thee recant it; but it moves nevertheless. Yes, the earth moves, and the planets move, and the mighty waters move, and the great sweeping tides of air move, and the empires of men move, and the world of thought moves, ever onward and upward to higher facts and bolder theories. The Inquisition may seal thy lips, but they can no more stop the progress of the great truth propounded by Copernicus and demonstrated by thee, than they can stop the revolving earth!

Close now, venerable sage, that sightless, tearful eye; it has seen what man never before saw;-it has seen enough. Hang up that poor little spy-glass; it has done its work. Not Herschel nor Rosse has comparatively done more. Franciscans and Dominicans deride thy discoveries now, but the time will come when from two hundred observatories in Europe and America the glorious artillery of science shall nightly assault the skies, but they shall gain no conquests in those glittering fields before which thine shall be forgotten. Rest in peace, great Columbus of the heavens, like him scorned, persecuted, broken-hearted; in other ages, in distant hemispheres, when the votaries of science, with solemn acts of consecration, shall dedicate their stately edifices to the cause of knowledge and truth, thy nams shall be mentioned with honor!

There is much by day to engage the attention of the observa. tory; the sun, his apparent motions, his dimensions, the spots on his disc, a solar eclipse, a transit of the inferior planets, the mysteries of the spectrum; all phenomena of vast importance and interest. But night is the astronomer's accepted time; he goes to his delightful labors when the busy world goes to its rest.

A dark pall spreads over the resorts of active life; terrestrial objects, hill and valley, and rock and stream, and the abodes of men disappear; but the curtain is drawn up which concealed the heavenly hosts. There they shine and there they move, as they moved and shone to the eyes of Newton and Galileo, of Keppler and Copernicus, of Ptolemy and Hipparchus; yea, as they moved and shone when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. All has changed on earth; but the glorious heavens remain unchanged. The plough passes over the site of mighty cities, the homes of powerful nations are desolate, the languages they spoke are forgotten; but the stars that shone for them are shining for us; the same eclipses run their steady cycle; the same equinoxes call out the flowers of spring and send the husbandman to the harvest; the sun pauses at either tropic as he did when his course began; and sun and moon, and planet and satellite, and star and constellation and galaxy, still bear witness to the power, the wisdom, and the love of Him who placed them in the heavens, and upholds them there.

THE CHARACTER OF WASHINGTON.*

THERE is a splendid monumental pile in England, the most magnificent perhaps of her hundred palaces, founded in the time of Queen Ann at the public cost, to perpetuate the fame of Marlborough. The grand building, with its vast wings and spacious courts, covers seven acres and a half of land. It is approached on its various sides by twelve gates or bridges, some of them

* This Address was originally delivered before the Mercantile Library Association of Boston, on February 22, 1856; but, during the next three years, was, by public invitation, redelivered in the principal cities of the Union, one hundred and nineteen times in all, for the benefit of a fund then being raised for the purchase and preservation of Mount Vernon. It was the author's good fortune to hear the Address from Mr. Everett's lips, and the passage which moved the audience on that occasion more sensibly than any other is here presented.