deeply lament their condition, and be irresistibly prompted to mitigate', if possible, their sufferings. 2. But it is not the distresses of any such distant regions that have summoned us together on this occasion. The appalling and heart-rending distresses of Ireland and Irishmen form the object of our present consultation. That Ireland, which has been, in all the vicissitudes of our national existence, our friend, and has ever extended to us her warmest sympathy- those Irishmen, who, in every war in which we have been engaged, on every battle-field, from Quebec to Monterey, have stood by us, shoulder to shoulder, and shared in all the perils and fortunes of the conflict. 3. The imploring appeal comes to us from the Irish nation, which is so identified with our own as to be almost part and parcel of ours, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. Nor is it any ordinary case of human misery, or a few isolated cases of death by starvation, that we are called upon to consider. Famine is stalking abroad throughout Ireland; whole towns, counties - countless human beings, of every age, and of both sexes - at this very moment are starving, or in danger of starving, to death. 4. Behold the wretched Irish mother, with haggard looks and streaming eyes, her famished children clinging to her tattered garments, and gazing piteously in her face, begging for food! And see the distracted husband and father, with palid cheeks, standing by, horror and despair depicted in his countenance tortured with the 5 reflection that he can afford no succor or relief to the dearest objects of his heart, about to be snatched forever from him by the most cruel of all deaths! 5. This is no fancy picture; but, if we are to credit the terrible accounts which reach us from that theatre of misery and wretchedness, is one of daily occurrence. Indeed, no imagination can conceive, no tongue express, no pencil paint the horrors of the scenes which are there daily exhibited. 6. Shall starving Ireland plead in vain?-shall the young and the old — dying women and children stretch out their hands to us for bread, and find no relief? Will not this great city, the world's storehouse of an exhaustless supply of all kinds of food, borne to its overflowing warehouses by the Father of Waters,* act, on this occasion, in a manner worthy of its high destiny, and obey the noble impulses of the generous hearts of its blessed inhabitants? 1 MITI-GĀTE. Render less severe; 4 STALKING. Walking proudly, as on [John Gorham Palfrey is a native of Boston. He was for many years a settled clergyman in his native city, and afterwards a professor in the Divinity School of Harvard College. Retiring from the pulpit, he was, for three years, Secretary of State in Massachusetts, and was chosen to Congress in 1847. He is the author of a History of New England, of "Lectures on the Jewish Scriptures and Antiquities," and various other works.] 1. A GOOD daughter! - there are other ministries1 of love, more conspicuous than hers, but none in which a gentler, lovelier spirit dwells, and none to which the heart's warm requitals 2 more joyfully respond. There is no such thing as a comparative estimate of a parent's affection for one or another child. There is little which he needs to covet, to whom the treasure of a good child has been given. * A name sometimes given to the Mississippi River. 2. But a son's occupations and pleasures carry him more abroad; and he lives more among temptations, which hardly permit the affection that is following him, perhaps over half the globe, to be wholly unmingled with anxiety, till the time when he comes to relinquish the shelter of his father's roof for one of his own; while a good daughter is the steady light of her parent's house. 3 3. Her idea is indissolubly connected with that of his happy fireside. She is his morning sunlight, and his evening-star. The grace, and vivacity, and tenderness of her sex, have their place in the mighty sway which she holds over his spirit. The lessons of recorded wisdom, which he reads with her eyes, come to his mind with a new charm, as they blend with the beloved melody of her voice. He scarcely knows weariness which her song does not make him forget, or gloom which is proof against the young brightness of her smile. She is the pride and ornament of his hospitality, and the gentle nurse of his sickness, and the constant agent in those nameless, numberless acts of kindness, which one chiefly cares to have rendered, because they are unpretending but all-expressive proofs of love. 4. And then what a cheerful sharer is she, and what an able lightener, of a mother's cares! What an ever-present delight and triumph to a mother's affection! O, how little do those daughters know of the power which God has committed to them, and the happiness God would have them enjoy, who do not, every time that a parent's eye rests on them, bring rapture to a parent's heart! 5. A true love will, almost certainly, always greet their approaching steps. That they will hardly alienate. But their ambition should be, not to have it a love merely which feelings implanted by nature excite, but one made intense and overflowing by approbation of worthy conduct; and she is strangely blind to her own happiness, as well as undutiful to them to whom she owes the most, in whom the perpetual appeals of parental disinterestedness do not call forth the prompt and full echo of filial devotion. 1 MIN'IS-TRIES. offices. 2 RE-QUITAL. Acts; services; 4 HŎS-PI-TĂL'I-TY. Attention or kind ness to strangers; generous enter tainment of guests. 5 RAPTURE. Excessive joy. Reward; recompense. 8 IN-DIS'SQ-LU-BLY. Inseparably. 1. O LORD of Hosts! Almighty King! 2. Wake in our breasts the living fires, The holy faith, that warmed our sires; 3. Be thou a pillared flame to show The midnight snare, the silent foe; 4. God of all Nations! Sovereign Lord! That fills with light our stormy sky. 5. From treason's rent, from murder's stain, CXI. THE MINSTREL BOY. THOMAS MOORE. 1. THE minstrel boy to the war is gone; And his wild harp slung behind him. 2. The minstrel fell: but the foeman's chain Thy songs were made for the pure and the free; CXII. THE GREEKS AT THERMOPYLÆ, BYRON. [George Gordon Noel Byron, Lord Byron, was born in London in 1788, and died in Greece in 1824. Lord Byron has written much poetry of singular power and fascination, and much which is unworthy of his great genius.] THEY fell devoted, but undying; The very gale their names seemed sighing; The woods were peopled with their fame; Claimed kindred with their sacred clay : |