When dust to dust returns, And the freed spirit seeks again its God,— The land-marks of their age, High-Priests, Kings of the realm of mind are they, A realm unbounded as posterity; The hopeful future is their heritage; Their words of truth, of love and faith sublime, Such kindling words are thine, Thou o'er whose tomb the requiem soundeth still, And since thy Master to the world gave token Thy reverent eye could see, Though sinful, weak, and wedded to the clod, Heir of His love, born to high destiny: Great teachers formed thy youth,* As thou didst stand upon thy native shore; Nature and God spoke with thee, and the truth Ages agone, like thee, The famed Greek with kindling aspect stood "In this town I pursued my theological studies. had no professor to guide me, but I had two noble places of study. One was yonder beautiful edifice now so frequented as a public library; the other was the beach, the roar of which has so often mingled with the worship of this place, my daily resort, dear to me in the sunshine, still more attractive in the storm. Seldom do I visit it now without thinking of the work, which there, in the sight of that beauty, in the sound of those waves, was carried on in my soul. No spot on earth has helped to form me so much as that beach. There I lifted up my voice in praise amidst the tempest. There, softened by beauty, I poured out my thanksgiving and contrite confessions. There, in reverential sympathy with the mighty power around me, I became conscious of the power within. There, struggling thoughts and emotions broke forth, as if moved to utterance by nature's eloquence of winds and waves. There began happiness surpassing all worldly pleasure, all gifts of fortune-the happiness of communing with the work of God."-Dr. Channing's Discourse at Newport,R.1. A TRUE PATRIOT. BY JAMES C. FIELDS. It is related that when Socrates fell a victim to the passions of a partial tribunal, and a deluded people, and all his disciples were terrified into flight, his friend Isocrates had the honorable intrepidity to appear in the streets of Athens with the mourning garb. Ha! leave ye, in affright, Have you not one true heart, Reel back, ye cowering slaves! With pallid fear! Look where the true man stands,- The grey-haired seer! Gaze on the patriot now, In mourning robes; Grief his heart probes! See how your soil he spurns, Low bows his head. In sorrow driven. Take up the strain ! Go, charge the flying Greek That silent bier; God-like-Farewell! : GONE. BY JOHN G. WHITTIER. "Gone before To that unseen and silent shore, Some summer morning?"-LAMB. Another hand is beckoning us, Another call is given; And glows once more with Angel-steps Our young and gentle friend whose smile Has left us, with the flowers. No paling of the cheek of bloom No shadow from the Silent Land The light of her young life went down, The glory of a setting star Clear, suddenly and still. As pure and sweet, her fair brow seemedEternal as the sky; And like the brook's low song, her voice- And half we deemed she needed not The blessing of her quiet life Fell on us like the dew; And good thoughts, where her footsteps fell, Like fairy blossoms grew. Sweet promptings unto kindest deeds Were in her very look; We read her face, as one who reads The measure of a blessed hymn, We miss her in the place of prayer, We pause beside her door to hear There seems a shadow on the day, A dimness on the stars of night, One thought hath reconciled; THE STAR OF BETHLEHEM. BY JOHN G. WHITTIER. Where time the measure of his hours By changeful bud and blossom keeps, Where, to her poet's turban stone, The Spring her grateful gifts impart, And strange bright blossoms shone around, A fitting home in Iran's flowers. Awakened feelings new and sad,— No Christian garb, nor Christian word, Nor church with Sabbath bell chimes glad, But Moslem graves, with turban stones, And mosque-spires gleaming white, in view, And grey-beard Mollahs in low tones Chanting their Korar. service through. As if the burning eye of Baal The servant of his Conqueror knew, From skies which knew no cloudy veil, The Sun's hot glances smote him through, Like tempting fiends, were such as they The hoary magi's rites of hell! "And what am I, o'er such a land The banner of the Cross to bear? Dear Lord uphold me with thy hand, He ceased; for at his very feet In mild rebuke, a floweret smiled- The story of the Saviour's birth. In love, the Christian floweret leaned. Which God's dear love had nurtured there. FOREFATHERS' DAY. The 225th anniversary of the landing of the Pilgrims was celebrated at Plymouth on the 22d inst. with the usual empty declamation about their virtues, sufferings and sacrifices. Among those who made speeches at the dinner given on the occasion were Edward Everett and Rufus Choate,-men who have not an atom of moral heroism in their composition, and who stand in this evil generation, where the time-serving and pusillanimous in all ages have stood. Respecting this matter, we find in the Boston Courier, of Tuesday last, the following original lines, which cut to the quick,' and which, though unaccompanied by any name or signature, we are almost certain were written by that true poet of Humanity and Freedom, JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.-Liberator, for 2nd mo. 2, 1846. AN INTERVIEW WITH MILES STANDISH. My wonder, then, was not unmixed Whose doublet plain and plainer hose Only to fill the street with, Once changed to ghosts by hungry worms, I'll take the ghost's word for a thousand pounds."—Hamlet. Who knows, thought I, but he has come, I sate one evening in my room In that sweet hour of twilight, By Charon kindly ferried, To tell me of some mighty sum When mingling thoughts,-half light, half gloom,- Behind the wainscot buried? Throng through the spirit's skylight; The flames by fits curl'd round the bars, I sate and mused; the fire burned low, Smoothed down their knotty fronts, and grew Mine ancient, high-backed Spanish chair That had been strangers long since, while, 'Mid Andalusian heather, The oak, that made its sturdy frame, It came out in that famous bark For as that saved of bird and beast A pair for propagation, So has the seed of these increased, Kings sit, they say, in slippery seats; Of ice, the northern sailor meets, Of royal man or woman, There is a buccaneerish air There was a bluntness in his way His bold, gray eye could not conceal His words, like doughty blows on steel, "I come from Plymouth, deadly bored Strength's knots and gnarls all pared away, "We had some roughness in our grain; The eye to rightly see us is Not just the one that lights the brain Of drawing-room Tyrtæuses;- He had stiff knees, the Puritan, These loud ancestral boasts of yours, "Good sir," I said, "you seem much stirred, The sacred compromises" "Now God confound that dastard word, Northward it has this sense alone, "While knaves are busy with their charts The soul that utters the North should be As chainless as her wind-roused sea, 'Tis true we drove the Indians out "O shame, to see such painted sticks With Slavery's lash upon her back, To shout huzzas when, with a crack, "6 No, Freedom, no! blood should not stain The hem of thy white vesture. "I feel the soul in me draw near The hill of prophesying; In this bleak wilderness I hear A John the Baptist crying; Far in the East I see "pleap The first streaks of forewarning, "Child of our travail and our woe, I hear great footsteps through the shade And voices call like that which bade I looked, no form my eyes could find, I heard the cock just crowing, And through the window-cracks the wind Some Pilgrim stuff that hates all sham,- FROM "DREAM LOVE." How slight is a smile or a kind word to the giverhow much it may be to the receiver. So little do we know of the thoughts and feelings of those who move about us, so little does the inward and hidden world correspond with the outward and apparent, that we cannot calculate our influence, and when we think that trivial offices of kindness, which cost us nothing, may make flowers to spring up in another's heart, we should be slow to refuse them. This passing jest may have built the climax to an argument, which shall turn a struggling soul from out the path of duty-that word of encouragement afforded the prompting impulse which shall last forever. We cannot help the bias which others take from us. No man can live for himself, though he bury himself in the most eremitical caverns. We, as it were, are an illimitable and subtly entangled chain in the vast mechanism of Nature. The vibration of one link sounds along the whole line. Life is after all just what we choose to make it-and no man is so poor that he can not shape a whole world for himself even out of nothing. When I stand under the trees of another, and see the yellow morning gleaming through their tall shafts, and broken into a magnificent, illuminated oriel by the intervening leaves; when I look down the forest's sombre aisles, and hear the solemn groaning of the oaks, wrestling with the night blast, as if they struggled in prayer against an evil spirit-is it not my world that I behold, do I not own the silent stars that seem to fly through the clouds-and is not the large and undulating stretch of summer landscape mine, which my moving eye beholds? The power of enjoyment is the only true ownership that man can have in nature, and the landed proprietor may walk landless as MacGregor, though the world |