LESSON CXV.

NEW ENGLAND AND THE UNION.

PRENTISS.

1. GLORIOUS New England! thou art still true to thy ancient fame, and worthy of thy ancestral honors. On thy pleasant valleys rest, like sweet dews of morning, the gentle recollections of our early life; around thy hills and mountains cling, like gathering mists, the mighty memories of the revolution; and far away in the horizon of thy past, gleam, like thy own bright northern lights, the awful virtues of our Pilgrim sires! But while we devote this day to the remembrance of our native land, we forget not that in which our happy lot is cast. We exult in the reflection, that though we count by thousands the miles which separate us from our birthplace, still our country is the same. We are no exiles meeting upon the banks of a foreign river, to swell its waters with our homesick tears. Here floats the same banner which rustled above our boyish heads, except that its mighty folds are wider, and its glittering stars increased in number.

2. The sons of New England are found in every state of the broad republic! In the east, the south, and the unbounded west, their blood mingles freely with every kindred current. We have but changed our chamber in the paternal mansion; in all its rooms we are at home, and all who inhabit it are our brothers. To us the Union has but one domestic hearth; its household gods are all the same. Upon us, then, peculiarly de volves the duty of feeding the fires upon that kindly hearth; of guarding with pious care those sacred household gods.

3. We cannot do with less than the whole Union! to us it admits of no division. In the veins of our children flows northern and southern blood: how shall it be separated? who shall put asunder the best affections of the heart, the noblest instincts

of our nature? We love the land of our adoption; so do we that of our birth. Let us ever be true to both; and always exert ourselves in maintaining the unity of our country, the integrity of the republic.

4. Accursed, then, be the hand put forth to loosen the golden cord of union! thrice accursed the traitorous lips which shall propose its severance!

LESSON CXVI.

DANIEL WEBSTER'S STYLE.

WHIPPLE,

1. EVERY great writer has a style of his own, constructed according to the character of his mind and disposition. The style of Mr. Webster has great merit, not only for its vigor, clearness, and compression, but for the broad impress which it bears of the writer's nature. It owes nothing to the usual tricks of rhetoric, but seems the unforced utterance of his intellect, and is eminently Websterian. There is a granite-like strength in its construction. It varies, from the simple force and directness of logical statement, to a fierce, trampling energy of manner, with each variation of his mind from calmness to excitement.

2. He appears moderately gifted with fluency. Were it not for the precision and grasp of his mind, he would probably be a hesitating extemporaneous speaker. But with a limited command of language, he has a large command of expression. He has none of the faults which spring from verbal fluency, and is never misled by his vocabulary. Words, in his mind, are not masters, but instruments. They seem selected, or rather clutched, by the faculty or feeling they serve. They never overload his meaning. Perhaps extreme readiness in the use

of language is prejudicial to depth and intensity of thinking. The ease with which a half-formed idea, swimming on the mind's surface, is clothed in equivocal words, and illustrated with vague images, is the "fatal facility" which produces mediocrity of thought.

3. In Mr. Webster's style, we always perceive that a presiding power of intellect regulates his use of terms. The amplitude of his comprehension is the source of his felicity of expression. He bends language into the shape of his thought; he never accomodates his thought to his language. The grave, high, earnest nature of the man looks out upon us from his wellknit, massive, compact sentences. We feel that we are reading the works of one whose greatness of mind and strength of passion no conventionalism could distort, and no exterior process of culture could polish into feebleness and affectation; of one who has lived a life, as well as passed through a college— who has looked at nature and man as they are in themselves, not as they appear in books. We e can trace back expressions to influences coming from the woods and fields-from the fireside of the farmer-from the intercourse of social life.

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4. The secret of his style is not to be found in Kames or Blair, but in his own mental and moral constitution. There is a tough, sinewy strength in his diction, which gives it almost muscular power in forcing its way to the heart and understanding. Occasionally, his words are of that kind which are called half-battles, stronger than most men's deeds." In the course of an abstract discussion, or a clear statement of facts, he will throw in a sentence which almost makes us spring to our feet. When vehemently roused, either from the excitement of opposition, or in unfolding a great principle which fills and expands his soul, or in paying homage to some noble examplar of vir tue and genius, his style has a Miltonic grandeur and roll, which can hardly be surpassed for majestic eloquence.

5 In that exulting rush of the mind, when every faculty is

permeated by feeling, and works with all the force of passion, his style has a corresponding swiftness and energy, and seems endowed with power to sweep all obstacles from its path. In those inimitable touches of wit and sarcasm, also, where so much depends on the selection and collocation of apt and expressive language, and where the object is to pelt and tease rather than to crush, his diction glides easily into colloquial forms, and sparkes with animation and point.

LESSON CXVII.

FARMERS.

SEWARD.

1. FARMERS planted these colonies—all of them—and organized their governments. They were farmers who defied the British soldiery on Bunker Hill, and drove them back from Lexington. They were farmers-aye, Vermont farmers, who captured the fortress at Ticonderoga, and accepted its capitulation in the name of the "Great Jehovah and the continental congress," and thus gave over the first fortified post to the cause of the revolution. They were farmers who checked British power at Saratoga, and broke it in pieces like a potter's vessel at Yorktown.

2. They were farmers who reörganized the several states and the federal government, and established them all on the principles of equality and affiliation. In every state, and in the whole Union, they constitute the broad electoral faculty, and by their preponderating suffrages the vast and complex ma chine is perpetually sustained and kept in regular motion and operation. That it is in the main well administered, we all know by experienced security and happiness; that it might be better administered, our perpetual and intense passion for

change fully proves; that it is administered no better, results from what? From the fact that the electoral body, the farmers, intelligent and patriotic as they are, may nevertheless become more intelligent and more patriotic than they now are. The more intelligent and patriotic they become, the more ef fective will be their control, and the wiser their direction of the government. Is there not room? Nay, is there not need for more activity, energy, and efficiency, on their part, for their own security and welfare?

3. In the federal government commerce has its minister and department, the law its organ and representative, and the arts their commissioner and bureau. But the vast interest of agriculture has only a single desk and a subordinate clerk in the basement of the patent-office. It is scarcely better in the states. An empty charter of incorporation, with a scanty endowment, constitutes substantially all that has been anywhere done for agriculture. Gentlemen, I like not that it should be so.

4. Our nation is rolling forward in a high career, exposed to shocks and dangers. It needs the utmost wisdom and virtue to guide it safely; it needs the steady and enlightened direction which, of all others, the farmers of the United States can best exercise, because, being freeholders invested with equal power of suffrage, they are at once the most liberal and the most conservative element in the country.

LESSON CXVIII.

THE MAYFLOWER.

EVERETT.

1. METHINKS I see it now, that one solitary, adventurous vessel, the Mayflower of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future state, and bound across the unknown sea. I