G. 8. HILLIARD.- 99 sustain the patriot who mourns over the undeserved misfortunes of his country. Our Rome cannot fall, and we be innocent. No conqueror will chain us to the car of his triumph; no countless swarm of Huns and Goths will bury the memorials and trophies of civilized life beneath a living tide of barbarism. Our own selfishness, our own neglect, our own passions, and our own vices will furnish the elements of our destruction. With our own hands we shall tear down the stately edifice of our glory. We shall die by self-inflicted wounds. But we will not talk of themes like these. We will not think of failure, dishonor, and despair. We will elevate our minds to the contemplation of our high duties, and the great trust committed to us. We will resolve to lay the foundations of our prosperity on that rock of private virtue which cannot be shaken until the laws of the moral world are reversed. From our own breasts shall flow the salient springs of national increase. Then our success, our happiness, our glory is inevitable. We may calmly smile at all the croakings of all the ravens, whether of native or foreign breed. The whole will not grow weak by the increase of its parts. Our growth will be like that of the mountain oak, which strikes its roots more deeply into the soil, and clings to it with a closer grasp as its lofty head is exalted and its broad arms stretched out. The loud burst of joy and gratitude which this, the anniversary of our independence, is breaking from the full hearts of a mighty people, will never cease to be heard. No chasms of sullen silence will interrupt its course; no discordant notes of sectional madness mar the general harmony. Year after year will increase it, by tributes from now unpeopled solitudes. The farthest West shall hear it and rejoice; the Oregon shall swell it with the voice of its waters; the Rocky Mountains shall fling back the glad sound from their snowy crests. G. S. HILLIARD. 72. CALIFORNIA. THE colonizing of California is an unequalled wonder in the history of the world, whether you consider the rapidity of its progress; the moral dignity of its settlement, even in the midst of the overwhelming confusion of its multitudes tumbling in from every quarter; the wisdom displayed in its organization by the first generation of its inhabitants, in the first year of its occupation; or the incalculable results to which its settlement must lead, in the moral and commercial history of the world. By this process of settlement, this continent must soon become the highway to the opening riches of Eastern Asia, and the great road also on which moral and intellectual influence is to travel thither. So that either for the purposes of earthly gain, or of religious usefulness to man, we may hope the stormy doubling of the southern Capes will soon come to an end. Now, I call this whole extent of territory a gift to this generation; an attainment from a far higher power than the mere power of man, for purposes most important to the interests of man, and most near to the honor of his Creator. Let the suffering inhabitants of the Old World come: we may reel a little beneath the burden on this Atlantic strip, but it will be to gather strength and greatness by the effort. Let every sorrowing refugee feel, the moment he has reached our shore, that he is an American, born in that auspicious hour, and entitled to an inheritance for himself and his children after him, to be made dependent upon nothing but his own fidelity in sustaining and defending American principles of liberty, order, and truth, and carrying out, in his own efforts, the great and noble purposes for which America has been opened and provided. With this extending territory we may safely invite the hard-working men from all the earth. We may tell the whole crowd of sufferers under foreign despotism, that there is a Goshen for them here, and that God has sent us before them to preserve life. Here they may cast away the iron which has entered into their soul, and rise to the manhood of their Creation, free, honored, and useful to mankind. DR. S. H. TYNG. 73. THE DEVELOPMENT OF OUR COUNTRY. Ir is but a few years since we entered upon the conquest of a country wilder than Germany in the days of Cæsar, and ten times more extensive; and yet in that short space we have reached a point of physical development which twenty centuries have not accomplished there. The forests have fallen down, the earth has been quarried, cities and towns have sprung up all over the immense extent of our land, thronged with life, and resounding with the multitudinous hum of traffic; and from hundreds of ports the canvas of ten thousand sails whitens all DR. C. S. HENRY.-E. H. CHAI 1. 101 the ocean and every sea, bearing the products of our soil and manufactures, and bringing back the wealth and luxuries of every quarter of the globe. Then, too, the tremendous agencies of nature—the awful forces evolved by chemical and dynamic science—have been subdued to man's dominion, and have become submissive ministers to his will, more prompt and more powerful than the old fabled geni of the Arabian tales. Little did our fathers, little did we ourselves, even the youngest of us, dream-in the days of our childhood, when we fed our wondering imaginations with the prodigies wrought by those elemental spirits evoked by the talismanic seal of Solomon-that these were but faint foreshadowings of what our eyes should see in the familiar goings on of the every-day life around us. Yet, so it truly is. Ha! gentlemen, the steam-engine is your true elemental spirit: it more than realizes the gorgeous ideas of the old Oriental imagination. That had its different orders of elemental spirits-genii of fire, of water, of earth, and of air, whose everlasting hostility could never be subdued to unity of purpose: this combines the powers of all in one, and a child may control them! Across the ocean, along our coast, through the length of a hundred rivers, with the speed of wind, we plough our way against currents, wind, and tide; while, on iron roads, through the length and breadth of the land, innumerable trains, thronged with human life and freighted with the wealth of the nation, are urging their way in every direction-flying through the valleys; thundering across the rivers; panting up the sides, or piercing through the hearts of the mountains, with the resistless force of lightning, and scarcely less swift! All this is wonderful! The old limitations to human endeavor seem to be broken through-the everlasting conditions of time and space seem to be annulled! Meanwhile the magnificent achievements of to-day lead but to grander projects for to morrow. Success in the past serves but to enlarge the pur poses of the future; and the people are rushing onward in a career of physical development, to which no bounds can be assigned. DR. C. S. HENRY. 74. THE SIN OF PROFANENESS. PROFANENESS is a brutal vice. He who indulges it is no gentleman. I care not what his stamp may be in society, I care not what clothes he wears, or what culture he boastsdespite all his refinement, the light and habitual taking of God's name betrays a coarse nature and a brutal will. Profaneness is an unmanly and silly vice. It certainly is not a grace in conversation, and it adds no strength to it. There is no organic symmetry in the narrative that is ingrained with oaths; and the blasphemy that bolsters an opinion, does not make it any more correct. Nay, the use of these expletives argues a limited range of ideas, and a consciousness of being on the wrong side; and if we can find no other phrases through which to vent our choking passion, we had better repress that passion. Again, profaneness is a mean vice. It indicates the grossest ingratitude. According to general estimation, he who repays kindness with contumely-he who abuses his friend and benefactor, is deemed pitiful and wretched. And yet, oh! profane man, whose name is it you handle so lightly? It is that of your best Benefactor! You whose blood would boil to hear the venerable names of your earthly parents hurled about in scoffs and jests, abuse, without compunction and without thought, the name of your heavenly Father! Finally, profaneness is an awful vice. Önce more I ask, whose name is it you so lightly use? That name of God-have you ever pondered its meaning? Have you ever thought what it is that you mingle thus with your passion and your wit? It is the name of Him whom the angels wor ship, and whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain! Profane man! though habit be ever so stringent with you, when the word of mockery and of blasphemy is about to leap from your lips, think of these considerations-think of God, and, instead of that rude oath, cry out in reverent prayer, "Hallowed be thy name!" E. H. CHAPIN. 75. WASHINGTON, A MAN OF GENIUS. How many times have we been told that Washington was not a man of genius, but a person of excellent common sense, of admirable judgment, of rare virtues! He had no genius, it seems. O no! genius, we must suppose, is the peculiar and shining attribute of some orator, whose tongue can spout patriotic speeches; or some versifier, whose muse can Hail Columbia, but not of the man who supported states on his arm, and car E. P. WHIPPLE.-ROBERT TREAT PAINE. 103 Is it worth any ried America in his brain. What is genius? thing? Is splendid folly the measure of its inspiration? Is wisdom its base and summit,-that which it recedes from, or tends towards? And by what definition do you award the name to the creator of an epic, and deny it to the creator of a country? On what principle is it to be lavished on him who sculptures in perishing marble the image of possible excellence, and withheld from him who built up in himself a transcendent character, indestructible as the obligations of duty, and beautiful as her rewards? Indeed, if by the genius of action, you mean will enlightened by intelligence, and intelligence energized by will,-if force and insight be its characteristics, and influence its test, and if great effects suppose a cause proportionally great, a vital, causative mind, then was Washington most assuredly a man of genius, and one whom no other American has equalled in the power of working morally and mentally on other minds. His genius was of a peculiar kind, the genius of character, of thought, and the objects of thought solidified and concentrated into active faculty. He belongs to that rare class of men,-rare as Homers and Miltons, rare as Platos and Newtons,-who have impressed their characters upon nations without pampering national vices. Such men have natures broad enough to include all the facts of a people's practical life, and deep enough to discern the spiritual laws which underlie, animate, and govern those facts. EDWIN P. WHIPPLE. 76. THE DEATH OF WASHINGTON. HAVING accomplished the embassy of a benevolent Providence, Washington, the founder of one nation, the sublime instructor of all, took his flight to heaven-not like Mahomet, for his memory is immortal without the fiction of a miracle; not like Elijah, for recording time has not registered the man on whom his mantle should descend; but in humble imitation of that Omnipotent Architect, who returned from a created universe to contemplate from his throne the stupendous fabric he had erected! The august form whose undaunted majesty could arrest the lightning, ere it fell on the bosom of his country, now sleeps in silent ruin, untenanted of its celestial essence. But the incorruptible example of his virtues shall survive, unimpaired by the |