LIST OF PLATES. Sabbath-Day Point, Lake George. (Frontispiece.) J. ANDREWS, dirext. BARTLETT, del. A. C. WARREN, SC. Vignette Title. O. PELTON, SC. Good Resolution. J. ANDREWs, dirext. H. LIVERSEEGE, del. ..Page 79 Jephthah's Daughter. H. MELVILLE, del. O. PELTON, SC. 66 154 Scene on the Hudson. E. WAKEFIELD, del. E. HOBART, SC. " 241 THE ROSE OF SHARON. HUMAN LIFE. EXTRACT FROM AN UNPUBLISHED LECTURE. BY H. GREELEY. To the piercing gaze of an unfettered spirit, unmindful of space, which should scan it from the central orb of our system, this fair globe of ours must afford a spectacle of strange magnificence and beauty. Rolling on, ever on, in her appointed round, the earth must present new scenes of interest and grandeur with every hour of her revolving progress: now the swarming vales of China and Japan; the sultry plains of India with its tiger-haunted jungles, relieved by the gaunt, bleak piles of the Himmalehs, piercing the very skies with their pinnacles of eternal rock and ice; then appear the more alluring and variegated glades of Southern and Middle Europe; and with them the scorched and glowing deserts of Africa, shining in silvery worthlessness and arid desolation. The broad green belt of the billowy Atlantic now unfolds itself; and then appears the deeper green of this immense luxuriant forest, America, with the achievements of three centuries of advancing, struggling civilization barely sufficing to dot irregularly its Eastern border, and hardly equaling in extent those Prairie openings in its centre, which nature, or rather the red man's annual conflagration, has sufficed through many ages to hollow out by imperceptible gradations. From amid the all-embracing foliage, shine forth with steady radiance, yet with deep serenity, the mirror-like surfaces of the Great Lakes the last surpassing in size, profundity and beauty; the slender threads of the father of waters and his far-stretching tributaries are seen disparting vales whose exuberant fertility has known no parallel since Eden; while, farther on, the tremendous chains of the Andes, the Rocky Mountains, heave up their scathed and rugged sides through the surrounding sea of verdure, as if in grim and haughty defiance to the utmost fury of the lightning and the hurricane, or in scornful exultation over the crouching |