within is cleared from obstruction, or at least from all coercion; it is sacred to the being himself who stands there; it is secured and consecrated to his own responsibility. May I say it?—God himself does not penetrate there with any absolute, any coercive power! He compels the winds and waves to obey him; he compels animal instincts to obey him; but he does not compel man to obey. That sphere he leaves free; he brings influences to bear upon it; but the last, final, solemn, infinite question between right and wrong, he leaves to man himself. Ah! instead of madly delighting in his freedom, I could im agine a man to protest, to complain, to tremble that such a tremendous prerogative is accorded to him. But it is accorded to him; and nothing but willing obedience can discharge that solemn trust; nothing but a heroism greater than that which fights battles, and pours out its blood on its country's altarthe heroism of self-renunciation and self-control. Come that liberty! I invoke it with all the ardor of the poets and orators of freedom; with Spenser and Milton, with Hampden and Sydney, with Rienzi and Dante, with Hamilton and Washington, I invoke it. Come that liberty! come none that does not lead to that! Come the liberty that shall strike off every chain, not only of iron, and iron-law, but of painful constriction, of fears, of enslaving passion, of mad self-will; the liberty of perfect truth and love, of holy faith and glad obedience! 236. KNOWING. C. P. CRANCH. Thought is deeper than all speech, We are spirits clad in veils ; Man by man was never seen; To remove the shadowy screen. Heart to heart was never known, Of a temple once complete. Like the stars that gem the sky, In our light we scattered lie; But a babbling summer stream? But the glancing of a dream? Only when the sun of love Melts the scattered stars of thought; Only when we live above What the dim-eyed world hath taught ; Only when our souls are fed By the Fount which gave them birth, And by inspiration led, Which they never drew from earth, We like parted drops of rain Swelling till they meet and run, Shall be all absorbed again, Melting, flowing into one. 237.-THE DYING GLADIATOR. LORD BYRON. The seal is set.-Now welcome, thou dread power! Derives from thee a sense so deep and clear, And here the buzz of eager nations ran, In murmured pity, or loud-roared applause, As man was slaughtered by his fellow man. And wherefore slaughtered? wherefore, but because Such were the bloody circus' genial laws, And the imperial pleasure. Wherefore not? What matters where we fall to fill the maw Of worms-on battle-plain or listed spot? Both are but theatres where the chief actors rot. I see before me the gladiator lie: He leans upon his hand; his manly brow And his drooped head sinks gradually low; From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, won. Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hailed the wretch who He heard it, but he heeded not: his eyes Were with his heart, and that was far away: But where his rude hut by the Danube lay, All this rushed with his blood. Shall he expire, 238.-GLORY. FRANCIS WAYLAND. The crumbling tombstone and the gorgeous mausoleum, the sculptured marble, and the venerable cathedral, all bear witness to the instinctive desire within us to be remembered by coming generations. But how short-lived is the immortality which the works of our hands can confer! The noblest monuments of art that the world has ever seen are covered with the soil of twenty centuries. The works of the age of Pericles lie at the foot of the Acropolis in indiscriminate ruin. The plowshare has turned up the marble which the hand of Phidias had chiseled into beauty, and the Mussulman has folded his flock beneath the falling columns of the temple of Minerva. But even the works of our hands too frequently survive the memory of those who have created them. And were it otherwise, could we thus carry down to distant ages the recollection of our existence, it were surely childish to waste the energies of an immortal spirit in the effort to make it known to other times, that a being whose name was written with certain letters of the alphabet once lived, and flourished, and died. Neither sculptured marble, nor stately column, can reveal to other ages the lineaments of the spirit; and these alone can embalm our memory in the hearts of a grateful posterity. As the stranger stands beneath the dome of St. Paul's or treads, with religious awe, the silent aisles of Westminster Abbey, the sentiment, which is breathed from every object around him, is, the utter emptiness of sublunary glory. The fine arts, obedient to private affection or public gratitude, have here embodied, in every form, the finest conceptions of which their age was capable. Each one of these monuments has been watered by the tears of the widow, the orphan, or the patriot. But generations have passed away, and mourners and mourned have sunk together into forgetfulness. The aged crone or the smooth-tongued beadle, as now he hurries you through aisles and chapel, utters, with measured cadence and unmeaning tone, for the thousandth time, the name and lineage of the once honored dead; and then gladly dismisses you, to repeat again his well-conned lesson to another group of idle passers-by. Such, in its most august form, is all the immortality that matter can confer. It is by what we ourselves have done, and not by what others have done for us, that we shall be remembered by after ages. It is by thought that has aroused my intellect from its slumbers, which has "given lustre to virtue, and dignity to truth," or by those bright examples which have inflamed my soul with the love of goodness, and not by means of sculptured marble, that I hold communion with Shakspeare and Milton, with Johnson and Burke, with Howard and Wilberforce. 239.-WATER IN LANDSCAPE. D. G. MITCHELL. I believe there is nothing in nature which so enlaces one's love for the country, and binds it with willing fetters, as the silver meshes of a brook. Not for its beauty only, but for its changes; it is the warbler; it is the silent muser; it is the loiterer; it is the noisy brawler; and, like all brawlers, beats itself into angry foam, and turns in the eddies demurely penitent, and runs away to sulk under the bush. Brooks, too, pique terribly a man's audacity, if he have any eye for landscape gardening. It seems so manageable in all its wildness. Here in the glen a bit of dam will give a white gush of waterfall, and a pouring sluice to some overshot wheel; and the wheel shall have its connecting shaft and whirl of labors. Of course, there shall be a little scape-way for the trout to pass up and down; a rustic bridge shall spring across somewhere below, and the stream shall be coaxed into loitering where you will, under the roots of a beech that leans over the water; into a broad pool of the pasture close, where the cattle may cool themselves in August. In short, it is easy to see how a brook may be held in leash, and made to play the wanton for you summer after summer. I do not forget that poor Shen stone ruined himself by his coquetries with the trees and brooks at Leasowes. I commend the story of the bankrupt poet to those who are about laying out country places. Meantime our eyes shall run where the brooks are running -to the sea. It must be admitted that a sea view gives the final and the kingly grace to a country home. A lake view and a river view are well in their way, but the hills hem them; the great reach, which is a type, and, as it were, a vision of the future, does not belong to them. There is none of that joyous strain to the eye in looking on them which a sea view provokes. The ocean seems to absorb all narrowness, and tides it away, and dashes it into yeasty multiples of its own illimitable width. A man may be small by birth, but he cannot grow smaller with the sea always in his eye. 240.-LITTLE EVA. H. B. STOWE. Her form was the perfection of childish beauty, without its usual chubbiness and squareness of outline. There was about it an undulating and aerial grace such as one might dream of for some mythic and allegorical being. Her face was remarkable, less for its perfect beauty of feature than for a singular and dreamy earnestness of expression, which made the ideal start when they looked at her, and by which the dullest and most literal were impressed, without exactly knowing why. The shape of her head and the turn of her neck and bust were peculiarly noble, and the long, golden-brown hair that floated like a cloud around it, the deep, spiritual gravity of her violet blue eyes, shaded by heavy fringes of golden brown,-all marked her out from other children, and made every one turn and look after her, as she glided hither and thither on the boat. Nevertheless, the little one was not what you would have called either a grave child or a sad one. On the contrary, an airy and innocent playfulness seemed to flicker like the shadow of summer leaves over her childish face, and around her buoyant figure. She was always in motion, always with half a smile on her rosy mouth, flying hither and thither, with an undulating and cloud-like tread, singing to herself as she moved, as in a happy dream. Her father and female guardian were incessantly busy in pursuit of her—but, when caught, she melted from them again like a summer cloud; and as no word of chiding or reproof ever fell on her ear for |