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No chapter of romance equals the interest of this expedition. The most fascinating of the works of fiction which have issued from the modern press have, to my taste, no attraction compared with the pages in which the first voyage of Columbus is described by Robertson, and still more by our own Irving and Prescott, the last two enjoying the advantage over the Scottish historian of possessing the lately discovered journals and letters of Columbus himself. The departure from Palos, where, a few days before, he had begged a morsel of bread and a cup of water for his wayworn child, - his final farewell to the Old World at the Canaries, - his entrance upon the trade winds, which then, for the first time, filled a European sail, — the portentous variation of the needle, never before observed, — the fearful course westward and westward, day after day, and night after night, over the unknown ocean, the mutinous and illappeased crew; - at length, when hope had turned to despair in every heart but one, the tokens of land, the cloudbanks on the western horizon, the logs of drift-wood, fresh shrub, floating with its leaves and berries, - the flocks of land-birds, the shoals of fish that inhabit shallow water, the indescribable smell of the shore, the mysterious presentiment that seems ever to go before a great event, — and finally, on that ever-memorable night of the 12th of October, 1492, the moving light seen by the sleepless eye of the great discoverer himself, from the deck of the Santa Maria, and in the morning the real, undoubted land, swelling up from the bosom of the deep, with its plains, and hills, and forests, and rocks, and streams, and strange, new races of men ;- these are incidents in which the authentic history of the discovery of our Continent excels the specious wonders of romance, as much as gold excels tinsel, or the sun in the heavens outshines the flickering taper. E. Everett.

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the

LXXXV.

ADAMS AND JEFFERSON.

WE dismiss them not to the chambers of forgetfulness and

death. What we admired, and prized, and venerated in them, can never be forgotten. I had almost said that they are

now beginning to live; to live that life of unimpaired influence, of unclouded fame, of unmingled happiness, for which their talents and services were destined. Such men do not, cannot die. To be cold and breathless; to feel not and speak not; this is not the end of existence to the men who have breathed their spirits into the institutions of their country, who have stamped their characters on the pillars of the age, who have poured their hearts' blood into the channels of the public prosperity. Tell me, ye who tread the sods of yon sacred height, is Warren dead? Can you not still see him, not pale and prostrate, the blood of his gallant heart pouring out of his ghastly wound, but moving resplendent over the field of honor, with the rose of heaven upon his cheek, and the fire of liberty in his eye? Tell me, ye who make your pious pilgrimage to the shades of Vernon, is Washington indeed shut up in that cold and narrow house? That which made these men, and men like these, cannot die. The hand that traced the charter of Independence is, indeed, motionless; the eloquent lips that sustained it are hushed; but the lofty spirits that conceived, resolved, and maintained it, and which alone, to such men, "make it life to live," these cannot expire ;

"These shall resist the empire of decay,

When time is o'er, and worlds have passed away;

Cold in the dust the perished heart may lie,

But that which warmed it once can never die."

E. Everett.

LXXXVI.

THE INDIAN CHIEF TO THE WHITE SETTLER.

THINK of the country for which the Indians fought! Who

can blame them? As Philip looked down from his seat on Mount Hope, that glorious eminence, that

"throne of royal state, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,

Or where the gorgeous East, with richest hand,
Showers on her kings barbaric pearl and gold,”-

as he looked down, and beheld the lovely scene which spread beneath, at a summer sunset, the distant hill-tops glittering as

with fire the slanting beams streaming across the waters, the broad plains, the island groups, the majestic forest,—could he be blamed, if his heart burned within him, as he beheld it all passing, by no tardy process, from beneath his control, into the hands of the stranger?

As the river chieftains the lords of the waterfalls and the mountains ranged this lovely valley, can it be wondered at if they beheld with bitterness the forest disappearing beneath the settler's axe? the fishing-place disturbed by his saw-mills? Can we not fancy the feelings with which some strong-minded savage, the chief of the Pocomtuck Indians, who should have ascended the summit of the Sugar-loaf Mountain, (rising as it does before us, at this moment, in all its loveliness and grandeur,) -in company with a friendly settler,contemplating the progress already made by the white man, and marking the gigantic strides with which he was advancing into the wilderness, should fold his arms and say, "White man, there is eternal war between me and thee! I quit not the land of my fathers, but with my life. In those woods, where I bent my youthful bow, I will still hunt the deer; over yonder waters I will still glide, unrestrained, in my bark canoe. By those dashing waterfalls I will still lay up my winter's store of food; on these fertile meadows I will still plant my corn.

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Stranger, the land is mine! I understand not these paper rights. I gave not my consent, when, as thou sayest, these broad regions were purchased, for a few baubles, of my fathers. They could sell what was theirs; they could sell no more. How could my father sell that which the Great Spirit sent me into the world to live upon? They knew not what they did.

"The stranger came, a timid suppliant, few and feeble, and asked to lie down on the red man's bear-skin, and warm himself at the red man's fire, and have a little piece of land to raise corn for his women and children; and now he is become strong, and mighty, and bold, and spreads out his parchments over the whole, and says, 'It is mine.'

"Stranger! there is not room for us both. The Great Spirit has not made us to live together. There is poison in the white man's cup; the white man's dog barks at the red man's heels. If I should leave the land of my fathers, whither shall I fly?

Shall I go to the south, and dwell among the graves of the Pequots? Shall I wander to the west, the fierce Mohawk, the man-eater, is my foe. Shall I fly to the east, the great water is before me. No, stranger; here I have lived, and here will I die; and if here thou abidest, there is eternal war between me and thee.

"Thou hast taught me thy arts of destruction; for that alone I thank thee. And now take heed to thy steps; the red man is thy foe. When thou goest forth by day, my bullet shall whistle past thee; when thou liest down by night, my knife is at thy throat. The noonday sun shall not discover thy enemy, and the darkness of midnight shall not protect thy rest. Thou shalt plant in terror, and I will reap in blood; thou shalt sow the earth with corn, and I will strew it with ashes; thou shalt go forth with the sickle, and I will follow after with the scalping-knife; thou shalt build, and I will burn, till the white man or the Indian perish from the land."

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E. Everett

IF

LXXXVII.

THE MEN OF "SEVENTY-SIX."

F we look only at one part of the work of the men of '76, if we see them poring over musty parchments by the midnight lamp, citing the year-books against writs of assistance, disputing themselves hoarse, about this phrase in the charter of Charles the First, and that section in a statute of Edward the Third, we should be disposed to class them with the most bigoted conservatives that ever threw a drag-chain around the limbs of a young and ardent people. But, gracious heavens, look at them again, when the trumpet sounds the hour of resistance; survey the other aspect of their work. See these undaunted patriots, in their obscure caucus gatherings, in their town-meetings, in their provincial assemblies, in their continental congress, breathing defiance to the British Parliament and the British throne. March with their raw militia to the conflict with the trained veterans of the seven years' war. Witness them, a group of colonies, extemporized into a confederacy, entering with a calm self-possession into alliance with the oldest monarchy in

Europe; and occupying, as they did, a narrow belt of territory along the coast, thinly peopled, partially cleared, hemmed in by the native savage, by the Alleghanies, by the Ohio, and the Lakes; behold them dilating with the grandeur of the position, radiant in the prospective glories of their career, casting abroad the germs of future independent States, destined, at no distant day, not merely to cover the face of the thirteen British colonies, but to spread over the territories of France and Spain on this continent, over Florida and Louisiana, over New Mexico and California, beyond the Mississippi, beyond the Rocky Mountains, to unite the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, the arctic and the torrid zones, in one great network of confederate republican government. Contemplate this, and you will acknowledge the men of Seventy-six to have been the boldest men of progress that the world has ever seen!

These are the men whom the Fourth of July invites us to respect and to imitate; the James Otises and the Warrens, the Franklins and the Adamses, the Patrick Henrys and the Jeffersons, and him whom I may not name in the plural number, brightest of the bright and purest of the pure, -Washington himself. But let us be sure to imitate them, (or strive to do so,) in all their great principles, in both parts of their noble and comprehensive policy. Let us reverence them as they reverenced their predecessors, not seeking to build up the future on the ruins of all that had gone before, nor yet to bind down the living, breathing, burning present to the mouldering relics of the dead past, but deducing the rule of a bold and safe progress, from the records of a wise and glorious experience.

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E. Everett.

WE

LXXXVIII.

THE SAME CONCLUDED.

E live at an era as eventful, in my judgment, as that of "76, though in a different way. We have no foreign yoke to throw off; but in the discharge of the duty devolved upon us by Providence, we have to carry the republican independence which our fathers achieved, with all the organized institutions of an enlightened community, institutions of religion,

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