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Takes shapes like bubble tossing in the wind.
See! he looks up and smiles; for death to him
Is happiness. Yet could one last embrace
Be given, 't were still a sweeter thing to die.

6. It will be given. Look! how the rolling ground,
At every swell, nearer and still more near

Moves toward the father's outstretched arm his boy.
Once he has touched his garment; how his eye
Lightens with love, and hope, and anxious fears!
Ha! see; he has him now! he clasps him round;
Kisses his face; puts back the curling locks
That shaded his fine brow; looks in his eyes;
Grasps in his own those little dimpled hands;
Then folds him to his breast, as he was wont
To lie when sleeping, and resigned awaits
Undreaded death.

And pangle ss.

And death came soon, and swift,

The huge pile sunk down at once
Into the opening earth. Walls, arches, roof,
And deep foundation-stones, all mingling, fell!

LESSON XCIX.

INFLUENCE OF SUPERIOR MINDS.

SPRAGUE.

1. It belongs to cultivated men to construct, and put in aotion, and direct, the complex machinery of civil society. Who originated these free institutions, the arteries through which the life-blood of our country's prosperity circulates? Who built and rocked the cradle of American liberty, and grded the infant angel, until she walked forth in the vigor of a glorious maturity?

2. Whom do we welcome to the helm of state, when the storm of faction beats, or dark clouds hang about the heavens?

Who speak, trumpet-tongued, to a nation's ear, in behalf of a nation's rights? Who hold the scales of equity, measuring out a portion both to the just and the unjust? Are they men who have been nursed in the lap of ignorance, or are they not rather your great and cultivated minds; your Franklins," and Madisons, and Adamses; and your Kents, and Spencers, and Storys?!

d

3. And then, again, who framed that social system, if system it could be called, which exploded in the horrors of the French revolution ; sporting with time-hallowed associations, and unsealing all the fountains of blood? Think you that ignorance was the presiding genius in that war of elements?

4. O, no; the master-spirits had many of them been known as standard-bearers in the empire of letters; they partook at once of the strength of the angel, and the depravity of the fiend. And, as it is in these opposite cases that I have mentioned, so it is always and everywhere; men with culti vated minds will ultimately have the power, whether they use it in the spirit of a lofty patriotism, or pervert it to do homage to faction, and tear society in pieces.

LESSON C.

DUTY OF LITERARY MEN TO THEIR COUNTRY.

GRIMKE.

1. We cannot honor our country with too deep a rever ence; we cannot love her with an affection too pure and fervent; we cannot serve her with an energy of purpose or a faithfulness of zeal too steadfast and ardent. And what is our country? It is not the East, with her hills and her valleys with her countless sails, and the rocky ramparts of her shores

a Benjamin Franklin, the philosopher. b James Madison; fourth President of the United States. c Samuel, John, and John Quincy Adams. d Chancellor Kent, of New York. • Ambrose Spencer, of New York. f Justice Story, of Cambridge. g French Revolution; a revolution in the French government in 1793, in which Louis XVI. was guillotined, and many of his subjects destroyed.

t is not the North, with her thousand villages, and her harvest-home, with her frontiers of the lake and the ocean.

2. It is not the West, with her forest-sea and her inland isles, with her luxuriant expanses, clothed in the verdant corn, with her beautiful Ohio, and her majestic Missouri. Nor is it yet the South, opulent in the mimic snow of the cotton, in the rich plantations of the rustling cane, and in the golden robes of the rice-field. What are these but the sister families of one greater, better, holier family, our country? I come not here to speak the dialect, or to give the counsels of the patriot

statesman.

3. I come, a patriot-scholar, to vindicate the rights, and to plead for the interests of American literature. And be assured, that we cannot, as patriot-scholars, think too highly of that country, or sacrifice too much for her. And let us never forget, let us rather remember with a religious awe, that the union of these States is as indispensable to our literature, as it is to our national independence and civil liberties, to our prosperity, happiness, and improvement.

4. If, indeed, we desire to behold a literature like that, which has sculptured, with such energy of expression, which has painted so faithfully and vividly, the crimes, the vices, the follies of ancient and modern Europe; if we desire that our land should furnish for the orator and the novelist, for the painter and the poet, age after age, the wild and romantic scenery of war; the glittering march of armies, and the revelry of the camp; the shrieks and blasphemies, and all the horrors of the battle field; the desolation of the harvest, and the burning cottage; the storm, the sack, and the ruin of cities; if we desire to unchain the furious passions of jeal ousy and selfishness, of hatred, revenge and ambition, those ions, that now sleep harmless in their den; if we desire that the lake, the river, the ocean, should blush with the blood of brothers; that the winds should waft from the land to the sea, from the sea to the land, the roar and the smoke of battle; that the very mountain tops should become altars for the sacrifice of brothers; if we desire that these, and such as these,

the elements, to an incredible extent, of the literature of the old world, should be the elements of our literature; then, but then only, let us hurl from its pedestal the majestic statue of our union, and scatter its fragments over all our land.

5. Bat, if we covet for our country the noblest, purest, loveliest literature the world has ever seen, such a literature is shall honor God, and bless mankind; a literature, whose miles might play upon an angel's face, whose tears "would not stain an angel's cheek;" then let us cling to the union of these States, with a patriot's love, with a scholar's enthusiasm, with a Christian's hope. In her heavenly character, as a holocaust self-sacrificed to God; at the height of her glory, as the ornament of a free, educated, peaceful, Christian people, American literature will find that the intellectual spirit is her very tree of life, and that union is her garden of paradise.

LESSON CI.

THE OBJECT OF ASTRONOMY.

1. THE study of astronomy must have been coeval with the existence of man; for there is no rational being, who has for the first time lifted his eyes to the nocturnal sky, and beheld the moon walking in brightness amid the planetary

the hosts of stars, but must have been struck with admiration and wonder at the splendid scene, and excited to inquiries into the nature an】 destination of those far distant orbs. Compared with the splendor. the amplitude, the august motions, and the ideas of infinity which the celestial vault presents, the most resplendent terrestrial scenes sink into inanity, and appear unworthy of being set in competition with the glories of the sky.

2. When on a clear autumnal evening, after sunset, we take a serious and attentive view of the celestial canopy; when we behold the moon displaying her brilliant crescent in the west

a Holocaust; a whole burnt offering.

eru sky; the evening star gilding the shades of night; the planets moving in their several orbs; the stars, one after another, emerging from the blue ethereal, and gradually lighting up the firmament, till it appears all over spangled with a brilliant assemblage of shining orbs; and, particularly, when we behold one cluster of stars gradually descending below the western horizon, and other clusters emerging from the east, aud ascending, in unison, the canopy of heaven: when we contemplate the whole celestial vault, with all the shining orbs it contains, moving in silent grandeur, like one vast concave sphere, around this lower world, and the place on which we stand; such a scene naturally leads a reflecting mind to such inquiries as these: Whence come those stars which are asrending from the east? Whither have those gone which have disappeared in the west?

3. What becomes of the stars during the day, which are seen in the night? Is the motion which appears in the celestial vault real, or does a motion in the earth itself cause this appearance? What are those immense numbers of shining orbs which appear in every part of the sky? Are they mere studs or tapers fixed in the arch of heaven, or are they bodies of an immense size and splendor? Do they shine with borrowed light, or with their own native luster? Are they placed only a few miles above the region of the clouds, or at immense distances, beyond the range of human comprehension? Can their distance be ascertained? Can their bulk be computed? By what laws are their motions regulated? and what purposes are they destined to subserve in the great plan of the universe? These, and similar questions, it is the great object of astronomy to resolve, so far as the humar mind has been enabled to prosecute the path of discovery.

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