Everett's weapons are ever kept in good order, and shine well in the sun, but they are little calculated for warfare, and rarely kill when they strike. Webster's words are thunderbolts, which sometimes miss the Titans at whom they are hurled, but always leave enduring marks when they strike. Hazlitt's verbal army is sometimes drunk and surly, sometimes foaming with passion, sometimes cool and malignant; but drunk or sober, are ever dangerous to cope with. Some of Tom Moore's words are shining dirt, which he flings with excellent aim. This list might be indefinitely extended, and arranged with more regard to merit and chronology. My own words, in this connection, might be compared to ragged, undisciplined militia, which could be easily routed by a charge of horse, and which are apt to fire into each other's faces.

244.-BEAUTY OF NATURE.

HUGH MILLER.

I was as light of heart the next morning as any of my brother workmen. There had been a smart frost during the night, and the rime lay white on the grass as we passed onwards through the fields; but the sun rose in a clear atmosphere, and mellowed, as it advanced, into one of those delightful days of early spring, which give so pleasing an earnest of whatever is mild and genial in the better half of the year. All the workmen rested at midday, and I went to enjoy my half-hour alone on a mossy knoll in the neighboring wood, which commands through the trees a wide prospect of the bay and the opposite shore. There was not a wrinkle on the water nor a cloud in the sky, and the branches were as moveless in the calm as if they had been traced on canvas. From a wooded promontory that stretched half way across the frith, there ascended a thin column of smoke. It rose straight as the line of a plummet for more than a thousand yards, and then, on reaching a thinner stratum of air, spread out equally on every side like the foliage of a stately tree. Ben Wyvis rose to the west, white with the yet unwasted snow of winter, and as sharply defined in the clear atmosphere as if all its sunny slopes and blue retiring hollows had been chiseled in marble. A line of snow ran along the opposite hills; all above was white, and all below was purple. They reminded me of the pretty French story, in which an old artist was

described as tasking the ingenuity of his future son-in-law, by giving him as a subject for his pencil a flower-piece composed of only white flowers, of which the one half were to bear their proper color, the other half a deep purple hue, and yet all be perfectly natural; and how the young man resolved the riddle and gained his mistress, by introducing a transparent purple vase into the picture, and making the light pass through it on the flowers that were drooping over the edge. I returned to the quarry, convinced that a very exquisite pleasure may be a very cheap one, and that the busiest employments may afford leisure enough to enjoy it.

245.-AN ORDER FOR A PICTURE.
ALICE CARY.

O, good painter, tell me true,

Has your hand the cunning to draw
Shapes of things that you never saw?
Aye? Well, here is an order for you.
Woods and cornfields a little brown,-

The picture must not be over-bright,—
Yet all in the golden and gracious light,
Of a cloud when the summer sun is down.

Alway and alway, night and morn,
Woods upon woods, with fields of corn
Lying between them, not quite sere,
And not in full, thick, leafy bloom,

When the wind can hardly find breathing room
Under their tassels,-cattle near,
Biting shorter the short green grass,
And a hedge of sumac and sassafras,
With blue-birds twittering all around,—

Ah, good painter, you can't paint sound!

These and the little house where I was born,
Low and little and black and old,
With children, many as it can hold,
All at the windows open wide,-
Heads and shoulders clear outside,

And fair young faces all ablush;

Perhaps you may have seen, some day,

Roses crowding the self-same way,

Out of a wilding, way-side bush.

Listen closer. When you have done

With the woods and cornfields and grazing herds,

A lady, the loveliest ever the sun

Looked down upon, you must paint for me;
Oh, if I could only make you see

The clear blue eyes, the tender smile,
The sovereign sweetness, the gentle grace,
The woman's soul and the angel's face
That are beaming on me all the while!
I need not speak these foolish words:
Yet one word tells you all I would say,-
She is my mother: you will agree
That all the rest may be thrown away.

Two little urchins at her knee
You must paint, sir; one like me,—
The other with a clearer brow,
And the light of his adventurous eyes
Flashing with boldest enterprise:

At ten years old he went to sea,—
God knoweth if he be living now,-
He sailed in the good ship "Commodore,”—
Nobody ever crossed her track

To bring us news, and she never came back.
Ah, 'tis twenty long years and more
Since that old ship went out of the bay

With my great-hearted brother on her deck: I watched him till he shrank to a speck, And his face was toward me all the way. Bright his hair was, a golden brown,

The time we stood at our mother's knee;
That beauteous head, if it did go down,
Carried sunshine into the sea!

Out in the fields one summer night
We were together, half afraid

Of the corn-leaves' rustling, and of the shade
Of the high hills, stretching so still and far,-
Loitering till after the low little light

Of the candle shone through the open door,
And, over the hay-stack's pointed top,
All of a tremble, and ready to drop

The first half-hour the great yellow star
That we, with staring, ignorant eyes,
Had often and often watched to see

Propped and held in its place in the skies
By the fork of a tall red mulberry tree,

Which close in the edge of our flax-field grew,Dead at the top,-just one branch full

Of leaves, notched round, and lined with wool, From which it tenderly shook the dew Over our head, when we came to play In its handbreadth of shadow, day after day. Afraid to go home, sir, for one of us bore

A nest full of speckled and thin-shelled eggs,-
The other a bird held fast by the legs,
Not so big as a straw of wheat;

The berries we gave her she wouldn't eat,
But cried and cried, till we held her bill,
So slim and shining, to keep her still.

At last we stood at our mother's knee.
Do you think, sir, if you try,
You can paint the look of a lie?
If you can, pray have the grace
To put it solely in the face
Of the urchin that is likest me;

I think 'twas solely mine, indeed:
But that's no matter,-paint it so;

The eyes of our mother-(take good heed)—
Looking not on the nest-full of eggs,

Nor the fluttering bird held so fast by the legs,
But straight through our faces, down to our lies,
And oh, with such injured, reproachful surprise,
I felt my heart bleed where that glance went, as though
A sharp blade struck through it.

You, sir, know,
That you on the canvas are to repeat

Things that are fairest, things most sweet,—
Woods and cornfields and mulberry tree,-

The mother, the lads, with their birds at her knee,
But, oh, that look of reproachful woe!
High as the heavens your name I'll shout,
If you paint me the picture, and leave that out.

246 -DISTRUST OF LIBERTY.

T. B. MACAULAY.

Ariosto tells a pretty story of a fairy, who, by some mysterious law of her nature, was condemned to appear at certain seasons in the form of a foul and poisonous snake. Those who injured her, during the period of her disguise, were forever excluded from participation in the blessings which she bestowed. But to those who, in spite of her loathsome aspect, pitied and protected her, she afterwards revealed herself in the beautiful and celestial form which was natural to her, accompanied their steps, granted all their wishes, filled their houses with wealth, made them happy in love, and victorious in war. Such a spirit is Liberty. At times she takes the form of a hateful reptile. She growls, she hisses, she stings. But woe to those who in disgust shall venture to crush her! And happy are those who,

having dared to receive her in her degraded and frightful shape, shall at length be rewarded by her in the time of her beauty and her glory.

There is only one cure for the evils which newly acquired freedom produces-and that cure is freedom! When a prisoner leaves his cell, he cannot bear the light of day; he is unable to discriminate colors, or recognize faces. But the remedy is not to remand him into his dungeon, but to accustom him to the rays of the sun. The blaze of truth and liberty may at first dazzle and bewilder nations which have become half blind in the house of bondage. But let them gaze on, and they will soon be able to bear it. In a few years men learn to reason. The extreme violence of opinion subsides. Hostile theories correct each other. The scattered elements of truth cease to conflict. and begin to coalesce. And at length a system of justice and order is educed out of the chaos. Many politicians of our time are in the habit of laying it down as a self-evident proposition, that no people ought to be free, till they are fit to use their freedom. The maxim is worthy of the fool in the old story, who resolved not to go into the water till he had learned to swim! If men are to wait for liberty until they become wise and good in slavery, they may indeed wait forever.

247-LAND OF BENEDICTIONS.

G. C. VERPLANCK.

What, it is asked, has this nation done to repay the world for the benefits we have received from others? Is it nothing for the universal good of mankind to have carried into successful operation a system of self-government-uniting personal liberty, freedom of opinion, and equality of rights, with national power and dignity, such as had before existed only in the Utopian dreams of philosophers? Is it nothing, in moral science, to have anticipated, in sober reality, numerous plans of reform in civil and criminal jurisprudence, which are but now received as plausible theories by the politicians and economists of Europe? Is it nothing to have been able to call forth, on every emergency, either in war or peace, a body of talents always equal to the difficulty? Is it nothing to have, in less than half a century, exceedingly improved the sciences of political economy, of law, and of medicine, with all their auxiliary branches; to have enriched human