LESSON XVIII.

Lines on revisiting the Country.-Bryant.

I STAND Upon my native hills again,

Broad, round, and green, that, in the southern sky, With garniture of waving grass and grain,

Orchards and beechen forests, basking lie;

While deep the sunless glens are scooped between, Where brawl o'er shallow beds the streams unseen.

A lisping voice and glancing eyes are near,
And ever restless steps of one, who now
Gathers the blossoms of her fourth bright year:
There plays a gladness o'er her fair young brow,
As breaks the varied scene upon her sight,
Upheaved and spread in verdure and in light:

For I have taught her, with delighted eye,
To gaze upon the mountains; to behold,
With deep affection, the pure, ample sky,
And clouds along the blue abyses rolled;
To love the song of waters, and to hear
The melody of winds with charmed ear.

Here I have 'scaped the city's stifling heat,
Its horrid sounds and its polluted air;
And, where the season's milder fervors beat,

And gales, that sweep the forest borders, bear
The song of bird and sound of running stream,
Have come awhile to wander and to dream.

Ay, flame thy fiercest, sun! thou canst not wake,
In this pure air, the plague that walks unseen;
The maize leaf and the maple bough but take
From thy fierce heats a deeper, glossier green;
The mountain wind, that faints not in thy ray,
Sweeps the blue steams of pestilence away.

The mountain wind-most spiritual thing of all
The wide earth knows-when, in the sultry time,
He stoops him from his vast cerulean hall,
Ile seems the breath of a celestial clime,→

As if from heaven's wide-open gates did flow
Health and refreshment on the world below.

LESSON XIX.

The Spirit of the Revolution.-PRESIDENT LINDSLEY 1. HAD Great Britain succeeded in her purpose, we hɩ 1 not only been taxed at her pleasure, but our trade woul have been restricted to the ports of the parent state, and we should not, at this day, have been permitted to make out of our own native iron, a hoe or a hobnail.

2. Such was the splendid project of the British ministry to aggrandize old England, by converting her American offspring into hewers of wood and drawers of water for the benefit of her pampered gentry at home.

3. But did she succeed? Ay, that is the question-and when did an American blush to meet it? Did England succeed in crushing the spirit of her American yeomanry? Every schoolboy can give the proper answer. He has learned the whole story of the revolution by heart. He has followed the American standard, with streaming eyes and exulting heart, from Lexington and Bunker's Hill to Saratoga and Yorktown.

4. Almost the first lessons that I ever received from the lips of maternal affection, were the victories and privations, the exploits and the sufferings of the patriot soldier. And the first mortal name that I learned to pronounce with almost religious veneration was the name of Washington!

5. And when the news arrived (I was then a little lad at school,) that the great Washington was dead-we all felt and wept as though we had lost a father. Such another scene of spontaneous and universal sorrow I have never witnessed-nor will the impression be effaced while memory endures. None of us- -I mean the children at schoolhad ever seen him-but our fathers and mothers had scen him, and had told us all about him-and we were in the vicinity of many of his disasters and of many of his brightest achievements.

6. I beheld grief and dismay in every countenance. None so poor, so mean, so ignorant, as not to mourn on that

occasion. I should have been shocked, child as I was, had I met with one cheerful or smiling face.

7. The whole land wore the garb of bereavement, and the language of sorrow flowed from every tongue. When did king or emperor-when did hero or conqueror die— and leave a nation of freemen in tears?

8. But it is not my purpose to portray the character of Washington, or to pronounce his eulogy. I shall not attempt even a review of the principal transactions and events of his extraordinary and singularly fortunate life, nor of the consequences which have resulted, or may yet result, to mankind, from so august and imposing an example of disinterested and holy devotion to the cause of liberty and human happiness.

9. I have not been allowed the leisure necessary to do justice even to my own humble and inadequate conceptions of the magnitude, importance and momentous bearing of these high topics. Such themes demand a master's pencil, and an angel's tongue.

LESSON XX.

American National Character.-PRESIDENT LINDSLEY. 1. We have been so long accustomed to read and hear of British tyranny, and of our emancipation from a sort of Egyptian bondage-that we are extremely apt to mistake the real condition of our ancestors, and to fancy that they were slaves.

2. Europeans fall into the same error, whenever they speculate about our colonial vassalage and present insti tutions.

3. They view us as youthful adventurers, who have been and still are trying a very doubtful and perilous experiment.

4. They concede that we have managed pretty well for some fifty years—but then it is even yet but an experi ment of fifty years at most. And their wise men are still extremely sceptical as to the final result.

5. They think that we must come to monarchy at last-or that a military despotism will be erected upon the ruins

of the republic. And they refer us to Greece and Rome, and to the fate of all other republics.

6. They do not know-and we have ourselves nearly forgotten-that we have been learning the art, and trying the experiment of free government, of self-government, of republican representative government, for more than two hundred years.

7. It is a libel on the character of our fathers to say that they were ever enslaved.

8. They not only maintained inviolate and cherished most religiously, all the natural and all the constitutional rights and liberties of free-born Englishmen-but they reared up institutions and structures of a far more liberal and popular cast than England had ever known, or than England has yet dared to hope for. And all this too while they were dependent, though not servile colonists.

9. Possessing, as they did, a spirit and domestic governments so thoroughly popular-so radically and invincibly republican-it seems wonderful that the British ministry could have been so infatuated as to dream of extorting from them, by artifice or by violence, the very right, in defence of which every Englishman would hazard life and fortune and sacred honor-the very right which lies at the foundation and constitutes the essence of English liberty-the very right, which, at home, would have been the last that any visionary or dementated statesman would have thought of invading or of calling in question.

10. But this rash and fatal attempt was made. Be it remembered however-it was only the attempt that was made. Englishmen cannot be taxed without their own consent-legally given by their representatives in Parlia ment. We had no representatives in the British Parlia ment-neither Peers nor Commoners. The British Parliament, therefore, could not tax Englishmen resident in America, without a palpable violation of the British constitution.

11. The colonial assemblies were our only Parliaments, and through their agency alone could taxes be levied upon our citizens for the support of the common government. The British ministry and Parliament, however, held a dif ferent doctrine-and, in the plentitude of their power and their folly, resolved to tax the colonies.

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12. Hence originated the war of our glorious revolution A controversy at first, not for independence, but for constitutional liberty. The justice of our cause was not questioned, at the time, by any enlightened patriot in England.

13. By all the world, it has since been acknowledged. Had we hesitated, Englishmen would have derided and scorned us as recreant, degenerate, cowardly apostates.

14. Had we tamely yielded to British usurpation-had we conceded the legal right of Parliament to tax us at their pleasure, we had been slaves indeed. And what we might have been at this day, would not be worth the trouble of conjecturing.

15. It was a war then, on our part, strictly of principle. It was not the amount or magnitude of the burden which was attempted at first to be imposed-it was not the paltry pounds, shillings and pence, which were likely to be drawn from our purse-that caused an appeal to the sword.

16. It was the vital, fundamental principle, upon which all free institutions rest, and without which there can be no liberty and no security-for which we contended. This principle of self-taxation-of unrestricted, absolute control over our own property-of taxation and representation— we would not yield or renounce.

17. We indignantly repelled every insidious effort to bring about its surrender; and we finally crushed, on the battle field, all hope of achieving this favorite object by military force.

⚫ 18. The struggle was long and fierce, and, to most human eyes, awfully doubtful as to the issue. Every thing on our part was at stake. We had entered the lists, single handed, against the most powerful and opulent nation in the world, and without one avowed friend even to cheer us onward.

19. Our fathers saw full well the perils of their position and the tremendous responsibility which they had assu med. But their only alternative was victorious war, or unmitigated hopeless servitude