corrosion of time, and acquire new vigor and influence from the crimes of ambition and the decay of empires. The invaluable valediction bequeathed to the people who inherited his affections, is the effort of a mind whose powers, like those of prophecy, could overleap the tardy progress of human reason, and unfold truth without the labor of investigation. Impressed in indelible characters, this legacy of his intelligence will descend, unsullied as its purity, to the wonder and instruction of succeeding generations; and should the mild philosophy of its maxims be ingrafted into the policy of nations, at no distant period will the departed hero, who now lives only in the spotless splendor of his own great actions, exist in the happiness and dignity of mankind.

The sighs of contemporary gratitude have attended the sublime spirit to its paternal abode; and the prayers of meliorated posterity will ascend in glowing remembrance of their illustrious benefactor! The laurels that now droop as they shadow his tomb with monumental glory, will be watered by the tears of ages; and, embalmed in the heart of an admiring world, the temple erected to his memory will be more glorious than the pyramids, and as eternal as his own imperishable virtues !

ROBERT TREAT PAINE.

77. THE DEATH OF GEN. HARRISON.

THE great body of the American people had fixed their hopes on General Harrison, as the individual under whose auspices, in the presidential office, the country might regain its prosperity, and be reinstated in the honest and honorable republicanism of its earlier days. These hopes fired the bosoms of the people; they cheered, invigorated, and united them in the political contest; and they seemed to be realized by his elevation. Where are they now? So far as he was concerned, they are entombed with him; and bereaved America, tearful and trembling, casts a pensive and timorous eye over the period which she deemed him destined to brighten and bless.

Behold the melting away of earthly greatness! When I reflect on these events, I am confounded with the various, mighty, and rapid vicissitudes in human affairs. We seem to have passed through the excitement and incidents of an age. A private citizen becomes the rallying point of party arrangements, that reach to the remotest corners of our extensive

REV. J. F. McLAREN.--DR. STEVENS.

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country, and that animate every man with a zeal which seems to identify the destiny of the nation with his individual action. In ten thousand neighborhoods, they meet to decide the civil strife: a thrilling suspense of universal uncertainty is terminated by the irreversible announcement; and upon that private citizen devolves the distinguished glory of presiding over the civil affairs of seventeen millions of people! We looked upon him in amazement; but while we looked, we saw him grow pale and sink, and gasp, and die :-" and wherein is he any more to be accounted of!"

Do crowned heads rank high in the circles of human greatness? Much more did he; for it was not the accident of royal birth-it was not the issue of ambition, that exalted him. No; it was a nobler cause! High, by undisputed merit, in the hearts of the people, their suffrage raised him high in official station. Their spontaneous call drew him from the retirement and repose of private life," which he had hoped would be perpetual;" and the enthusiasm of their patriotism placed him at the post of high responsibility, occupied only by those whom the people delight to trust and honor. They saw him constitutionally invested with the honors and authority of the lofty station; they mingled their gratulations together; and the voice of rejoicing was heard through the land. But, scarcely had the pleasant gales wafted the plaudits of a delighted people to the borders of the republic, ere they are commissioned to bear the heavy tidings, thrilling to every heart, that the President of the Union is dead! So transitory is earthly greatness! "Man, being in honor, abideth not." "He dieth; yea, he giveth up the ghost; and where is he?"

REV. J. F. McLAREN.

78. THE DEATH OF GEN. TAYLOR.

YES! General Taylor is dead! The bold soldier, the devoted patriot, the upright president is dead. But it is his body only that is dead. That which vivified his form, which lit up his eye, which spoke out from his tongue; that which made him what he was the soul; that is not dead!

"In the blank silence of the narrow tomb

The clay may rest which wrapped his human birth;

But, all unconquered by that silent doom,

The spirit of his thought shall walk the earth,

In glory and in light.'

His deeds are not dead. That soldierly prowess which marked his conduct in three sanguinary wars; which won for him laurels in youth, as well as garlands in age; those great achievements on the tented field, beneath the moated wall and in the nation's cabinet, marking him out as a model of courage, energy, and decision ;-these are not dead. Those deeds are written in his country's annals-are part of his country's glory, and shall live while a page of history remains.

His name is not dead. But five years ago, the nation, with breathless anxiety, turning its eyes to the Rio Grande-to the little army of occupation and to the scarcely known leader, asked, with an intensity of earnestness which showed how much hung upon his character, Who is General Taylor? They ask not now that question; for that name, coupled with so many victories, and linked with such mighty deeds,

"Is Freedom's now and Fame's:

One of the few, the immortal names
That were not born to die."

His glory is not dead. The sun that shed such lustrous beams has, indeed, set, but the whole firmament blushes with the roseate tints which linger above the horizon. His honors have all been gathered under that flag which he never lowered to mortal foe, but which a nation lowered to him, when he fell beneath the only enemy he could not conquer. Forty years he dwelt beneath that banner; under it he won his victories and his fame; beneath it he put off the corselet of the warrior for the toga of the statesman; on it his eye last rested as it floated out in freedom's breeze, on freedom's natal morn; and under its craped and drooping folds he was borne, amidst the mourning of a great nation, to the voiceless dwelling of the tomb. And now, wherever that flag lifts up to heaven its glittering stars of freedom, or rolls out to the wind the blended stripes of union -whether it rustles to the breezes of the Atlantic, or dallies with the airs of the Pacific-whether it waves from the peaks of the Rocky Mountains, or hangs pensively in the lowly valley-whether it floats over bristling ramparts, or the dome of the capitol,-it cannot be hoisted, it cannot be seen, neither in the present hour of sorrow, nor yet in the roll of far-off ages, without telling of him as a patriot, a hero, and a statesman.

His influence is not dead. He has set in motion trains of thought, schemes of state, and agencies of power that will be working out their result to far-distant generations. Influence is immortal. The great thoughts of a great mind are as death

less as the mind that bore them. The deeds of one chieftain are models for future chieftains; and many a modern hero, like Michael Angelo, has learned to sculpture out for himself a more than ideal perfection, by studying some fragment of former greatness-some "Torso" of a once giant mind, that even in its mutilation has fired his thought with beauty, and guided his art with truth. Gen. Taylor, once the man of a party, is now the man of the country! Death has cut the tie which bound him to a political sect, and in its place forged an adamantine chain that links his memory with the Union-the whole Union-by the most thrilling remembrances that can stir the soul, or rouse the gratitude, or call out the love of a noble and independent people. DR. STEVENS.

79. A RELIGIOUS SPIRIT IN EDUCATION.

From a discourse at the opening of the New York Free Academy THE spirit of Christianity should pervade education as it pervades the laws of the land and the administration of justice; and a devout Christian sentiment should be its prevailing tone of morals and philosophy. Let instructors teach that the truths of Nature rest upon the truth of God. Let them demonstrate that at the foundation of every science lies omniscient wisdom; that all of beautiful or sublime truth is but a development of the Divine mind. Let them point to the limits where man, by searching, can find out no further, because he meets the unrevealed mysteries of the Divine power. Let the serene light of a pure religion permeate every science, brightening and blending with its beauty and truth, like a lamp set within a vase of alabaster, bringing out, into bolder relief and more exquisite effect, the forms and ornaments that are sculptured upon it.

When exhibiting the scroll of the heavens, and pointing out the golden characters emblazoned upon it, let them teach that those characters are the symbols of worlds; let not the guidance of a mad undevoutness lead to the inconclusive reasoning, that because the Almighty hath created all those radiant spheres, which none but himself can number or call by their names, and for his glory sent them upon their career, whirling, like burning censers, through the sky, and binds them to his throne with cords invisible, and sustains them in their prescribed courses, not needing to check or alter, with his hand, their intricate movements; therefore, his rebellious creatures upon this apostate orb

are not subject to the moral laws and the eternal sanctions of his infinite government; but let this be the spirit of their teaching:-"When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him? or the son of man, that thou visitest him?"

When, beneath the varied surface of this earth, the instructor shows his pupils those tablets of stone on which are graven the only records of its primeval ages, he will let them trace on them, as on the tables of the law written upon Mount Sinai, the finger of God. He will teach them, that the records of God's power and the revelation of his will, the registers of an eternity past, and the chart of an eternity to come, shall one day be beautifully reconciled in a perfect gospel harmony. He will tell them that should voices come forth from the tomb of buried centuries, full of dark and doubtful import, they may be like the false oracles of ancient times, issuing from the earth only to beguile those who trusted in them; that should science seem to declare that the Jehovah, who spake by the lips and the pen of Moses of the creation of the world and the origin of our race, is to be dethroned, they have only to wait until, by a more potent adjuration, she be compelled to make a fuller, a clearer, and more truthful utterance; for science, exorcised and dispossessed, shall one day sit humbly at the foot of the Cross, and the Pythoness shall become a prophetess,

ROBERT KELLY.

80. MENTAL DILIGENCE.

From a discourse at the first Anniversary of the New York Free Academy.

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THE mind must not be pampered with luxuries, nor frittered away with frivolity. It must sharpen its appetite by mauly exercises, and invigorate its powers by manly studies. It must be grasping for truths which are almost beyond its reach. amusement must be to hunt the boldest dogma down, with all the keenness of a sportsman. It must eat that which it taketh in hunting, and it will grow by what it feeds on. It is thus that desirable distinction has always been attained. The great and good of past ages, those of whom the race has most reason to be proud, those whose examples and whose fame are most familiar to us, are the most striking examples of it. History and Fame will show you the records of ancient greatness. It