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III.

I never saw my mother smile.
Her gentle tones my heart beguile.
They fall like distant melody,—
They are so mild and sweet to me.
She murmurs not-my mother dear!
Though sometimes I have kissed the tear
From her soft cheek, to tell the joy
One smiling word would give her boy.

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Yet, though delightful flew the hours,
So passed in childhood's peaceful bowers,
When all were gone to school but I,
I used to sit at home and sigh;
And, though I never longed to view
The earth so green, the sky so blue,
I thought I'd give the world to look
Along the pages of a book.

VI.

Now, since I've learned to read and write
My heart is filled with new delight;
And music too,—can there be found
A sight so beautiful as sound?

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GEORGE DENISON PRENTICE, the distinguished editor of the "Louisville Journal," was born in Preston, Connecticut, December 18th, 1802. After graduating at Brown University in Rhode Island, which he did in 1823, he studied law, but never entered upon the duties of the profession; choosing rather those of an editor. In 1831, having taken up his abode in Louisville, Kentucky, he became editor of the "Louisville Journal;" which position he still holds; having gained therein what most richly he deserves, a high reputation for wit, as a writer, and for ability and steady patriotism, as a politician. The following is from the columns of his Journal.

DUTY OF THE GOVERNMENT IN THE PRESENT CRISIS.

GEO. D. PRENTICE,

1. The policy of accepting peace, on the condition of recognizing the independence of the Southern Confederacy, would be a terrible one. Nay, it would be a policy that we but feebly characterize by the word terrible. It would be the death, the everlasting death, of the great and glorious hope that now lives in the hearts of tens of millions upon this continent and hundreds of millions throughout the civilized world. It would be the destruction of the mightiest work that the spirit of freedom has ever done upon the earth. What has been the admiration and the wonder of the nations, would be their pity and their

scorn.

2. Let no one delude himself with the thought or fancy that a government, a nation, has not a right to defend itself, by all the powers and energies at its command, against disruption and dissolution. To do this is, as a general truth, among a nation's most sacred rights and its highest and most solemn duties. The nation that should not recognize and assert the right and the duty would be the object of all mankind's contempt. Surely no

human being supposes that England, or France, or Spain, or Austria, or Russia, if a portion, even a majority, of a section of either of those kingdoms or empires, should assert the right of erecting their section into an independent realm, would permit the right, thus claimed, to be practically asserted.

3. It is absurd to suppose that either of them, upon any claim of a portion of their people to the right of self-government, would submit to dismemberment, submit to be divided into two kingdoms or empires. Sooner would they wage a war of centuries, a war, as they would justly consider it, of national life or death.

4. To submit to the separation of the United States into two independent powers, would not only be the most fatal example that we could set for the existing generation of men, and to all generations that are to come after us, but would render the whole area of the thirty-four states one of the feeblest and most wretched portions of the civilized world. All our old glory would be turned to midnight darkness. The two republics, or two monarchies, supposing that to be the number into which our country should at first be divided, could never remain for even one year at peace. A thousand causes would render collisions and wars between them inevitable. Neither of the two could have the least security against its own disintegration and dissolution.

5. The United States government at Washington, having established the precedent of permitting eleven or twelve or fifteen states to go off at pleasure, could not restrain other states from doing the same thing. Each and every state, remaining even temporarily in the United States, would feel that it had the power to assert and maintain its right of either seceding into the Southern Confederacy, or of establishing, together with such other states as it might be able to carry with it, an independent sovereignty, and it would exercise this fancied right whenever, any cause, frivolous or otherwise, it should become dissatisfied with the acts of the government of its section. What is now the United States, as distinguished from the Confederate States, would almost certainly, within half a dozen years, consist of half a dozen petty and jarring powers, with no common head

for

6. The same, or even worse, would be the condition of the states of the Southern Confederacy, based, as that confederacy avowedly is, and would be, upon the assumption, as a fundamental principle of government, that every state, or every two or three states, must ever be recognized as having the right to establish an independent government or independent governments at will. There would be no government in either section fit to be called one. Our country, that we have been so proud of, would be in a worse condition than the miserable little republics of South America.

7. No pretended sovereignty, north or south, could ever obtain from abroad a loan of even the most inconsiderable amount; for European nations would scorn to intrust their money to governments not even claiming to embody any principle of self-preservation. The powers which have not dared to provoke the warlike energies of earth's great republic, would deride us in our helplessness, and, by the presence of even a single man-of-war, compel us to yield obedience to their haughty and tyrannical dictation. Horrible servile insurrections would break out everywhere in the slaveholding region, making fields and firesides desolate.

8. Masses of slaves, first from the slave states nearest to the free states, and afterward from those more remote, would escape -some by stealth and others openly-till the last vestige of slavery would disappear. All the petty powers, jealous and hostile, would have to keep standing armies, vast in proportion to the means of supporting them, and the consequent taxes would impoverish the people to the point of hopeless and irretrievable ruin. Hundreds and thousands of desperate men, accustomed to blood and violence, and having no means of honest subsistence for themselves and families, would organize gangs of banditti, such as for years have infested Mexico.

9. But this condition of anarchy* or half-anarchy could no

* ANʼARCHY is compounded of AN (without) and ARCHY (rule), an means without rule or government; political confusion. For a numbe. of words containing the radical form archy, see Sanders' and McElligott' Analysis of English Words, Exercises XXXII. and CCXXX

From the midst of all the con

last forever, or even very long. fusion and lawlessness and strife, some bold master-spirit would spring up, and, rallying thousands to his standard, pursue his conquering and devastating march until the whole of what has been the United States, would be made a bloody and relentless despotism, as drear and remorseless as any one recorded ir history.

10. And now the question is, whether the United States through a dread of the inconveniences and even the great sufferings and sacrifices of the war that is upon us, ought to accept this condition of things for the sake of a brief, a hollow, a nominal peace. To our minds it would be a dreadful crime against God and the human race. It would mark the present generation of the people of this country, as the guiltiest enemies and murderers of freedom in all the history of the world.

11. Our glorious old fathers of '76 bequeathed not more to us than to the generation that are to c. me hereafter-their posterity as well as ours-the great and magnificent inheritance of the Union. Our fathers of later periods received, guarded, transmitted, the sacred, the magnificent bequest to us, to be in turn passed down by us to those for whom, as for ourselves, the patriots who won it by their blood, ordained it.

12. And now should we, can we, dare we, in the face of heaven and earth, stop the awful bequest in its descent, shiver it into worthless fragments, destroy that which is not our own, but mankind's for this and the coming ages, defraud posterity of the richest blessing ordained for them by the sainted and illustrious dead of a dead century, swindle all the human race of this and all the future time, of what myriads of millions have contemplated with gratitude and adoration as the mightiest boon of God to his creatures, and leave our names to crcak and blacken on the gibbet of infamy, as the names of men who cursed their race, and shall be cursed by it as long as there shall be an atmosphere to bear the sound of a curse upon its bosom !

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