crime is ripe, and then he must set about discharging the du ties of his mission, which is, to imprison one man, to hang an other, and to send a third to the antipodes.

LESSON CXIII.

THE SEA AND ITS DEAD.

CHAPIN.

1. "HITHERTO shalt thou come, but no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." There is no one portion of outward nature which so fitly represents the whole, as that of which these words are spoken- the vast, deep sea. It is the symbol of all that is wild and all that is lovely in the material world. Mottled with every hue-the verdure of the woodland, and the azure of the sky; the crimson and gold of sunset, the procession of the clouds, and the glories of the night; it is the mirror of all natural beauty. And yet this placid loveli ness is only the repose of majesty-the play of inevitable power —for all terrestrial energies are in the springs of the sea and in the rolling of its billows. And as to the mystery of nature -this infinite wonder in which we are embosomed-even the starry heavens are not so pressible an emblem as this world of living waters; fathomless, without a track, out of which conti nents emerge, and in which they sink.

2. I say, then, that the ocean may be fitly taken as a representative of the physical world and the divine mandate. "Hitherto shalt thou come, and no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed,"-may properly be considered as addressed to the entire array of material forces. And those forces, as represented by this great deep, are in the first place within the limits of natural law A wide domain is assigned to the

ocean-it envelops more than half the globe. Our continents and islands, on the map of the world, look small in comparison with its sweep.

3. And I need not say how feeble man is, and all his skill, before its willful fury. Say what we will, with all our familiarity and all our hardihood, our nature intuitively shudders at the thought of the sea. We cannot travel over it with the same quiet enjoyments that we feel upon the land. This is our birthplace and our home. That is naturally hostile to us. We cannot till it and plant it, and make it wear our image as the earth does. It never softens with our civilization. It retains no impression of humanity; it is wild nature forever-savage even in its calmest moods. We travel upon it as through a barbarian dominion with a flag of truce. The old sailor, with all his recklessness, takes from his occupation a solemn vein, as though he felt always the presence of uncontrollable power, and sailed in sight of death.

4. And this train of thought especially occurs to us when we speak of “the dead that are in the sea"-the legions that it has summoned to a hasty end, and that have "sunk like lead in its mighty waters." And, as it seems to us, what an untimeliness in their dissolution! What ghastliness and horror in their taking away! Sometimes with one burst of waves, mingling time and eternity; sometimes with protracted suffering, expanding minutes into years, and with thoughts of hearts that are yearning for them, and expectant forms on which they would have gladly died, but which they shall press no more. Dying far away, too, in awful loneliness, with the black tempest lashing around them, or with grim, inevitable ice-walls shutting them in; nay, even in calm waters, with possible rescue at hand, but with selfishness and cowardice leaving them to their fate! Dying with their faces turned toward home, and the very air of its shores in their nostrils!

5. The dead that are in the sea! Because of them there

arises an agony of bereavement, as for none else. We mourn for those by whose death-beds we stand, in silent anguish taking a farewell look. But this does not pierce our hearts like the fate of those concerning whom there is only the vague record, "Lost at sea!"-gone down in a nameless death, perished in forms we know not how! gone down into the cold waters without a winding-sheet and without a kiss; nay, sometimes engendering a night-mare hope, worse than death or despair, that they may be still alive, lingering upon some obscure shore, carried off in some far-bound ship, or detained by some savage tribe, but yet to come back, even though many years have rolled away, and change our long sorrow into laughter.

6. The dead that are in the sea! The manly forms, the beautiful faces, the dear looks, the hands that still grasp their trust, the babes that still nestle in their mothers' bosoms, for which it has so often opened and closed the doors of its mighty sepulchre. We bide the chances where they lie with poetry, we surround them with the gorgeousness and "sinless trance” of the deep; or we adopt a higher strain, and say that, “in the metaphysics of the belief," it makes no difference where or what the grave is; but we cannot think peacefully of them, as we do of those who pass from us by disease or decay, and who sleep on the breast of their mother earth.

7. So we do not wonder, my friends, that there are thousands to whom the sea is only a terrible power, in whose ears it is chanting a perpetual requiem, and who think it a fitting symbol of those material forces which are so relentless and so cruel, and before which man is so impotent.

LESSON CXIV.

THE PRICE OF ELOQUENCE.

C. COLTON.

1. MORE than twenty centuries ago, the orphan son of an Athenian sword-cutler, neglected by his guardians, and regarded as a youth of feeble promise, became, at the age of sixteen, enamored of eloquence. He resolved, with a strength of will and an ardor of enthusiasm to which nothing is insuperable, to be himself eloquent. This youth becomes successively the docile pupil of Callistratus, Isæus, Isocrates, and Plato. But his stud ies, though embracing a liberal and wide range of letters, philosophy, and science, are not confined to the academy or the public grove. We him daily ascending the Acropolis, and panting for breath as he gains the summit. Again he is seen laboriously climbing Olympus, the Hymettus, and every eminence where genius or the muses have breathed their inspiration.

2. His object, which he pursues with an ardor that never flags, and a diligence that never tires, is twofold, viz: to drink in the free and fresh inspirations of nature and art, and, by unremitting daily exercise, to give expansion to his chest, and strength and freedom of play to his lungs.

3. We see him again, when the tempest comes on, hurrying to the least frequented parts of the Piræus or Phalerus, and while the deafening thunders roar around him, and the deep and stirring eloquence of many waters expands and fills his soul, lifting his feeble and stammering voice, and essaying to give it compass, and flexibility, and power, while he "talks with the thunder as friend to friend, and weaves his garland of the lightning's wing."

4. We see this ardent Athenian youth again, amidst the pro foundest solitudes of nature, holding communion with high and ennobling thoughts stirred within his bosom by the spirit of

the great and godlike, the sublime and beautiful, from every object of nature and of plastic art around him.

5. At length, day after day and night after night, for months, he is seen entering a solitary cave. How is he busied in that subterranean chamber? With his head half shaven, that he may not be tempted to appear too early in society or in public, we find him poring over the tomes of rhetoricians, historians, philosophers, and poets; with his pen, also, eight times transcribing Thucydides, that he may make his own, some portion. of the terseness, energy, and fire of that historian.

6. After all this educational training of the greatest and best masters, living and dead-after all this self-imposed discipline of intellect and spirit, and when he has reached the age of ripe manhood, we go to witness his first effort in forensic eloquence.

7. The hisses of his fastidious auditory stifle and repress for a time the kindling energy and fervor of his soul, and his still embarrassed and stammering enunciation seems to jeopardize the cause he is pleading. At length he rises in a conscious mastery of his subject and of himself, and with the self-sustained dignity of the true orator, conciliates, convinces, moves, persuades, by the clearness, fitness, and force of his arguments, and the thrilling pathos and pungency of his appeals.

8. This is eloquence-the eloquence of the Athenian Demosthenes the triumph of educational skill and self-discipline, united, indeed, with great powers, and with a lofty and indomitable force of will.

9. The meed which the concurrent suffrages of more than two thousand years, in every civilized nation of the globe, have awarded to this great orator, we readily concede to him. But in our admiration of the power of his eloquence, we are too willing to forget the laborious and pains-taking efforts of study and discipline by which he attained his rnrivaled eminence in oratorical power.