in their inoffensive weakness, rich in their untempting poverty, the patient fugitives are permitted to pursue unmolested the thorny paths of tribulation; and, landed at last on the unfriendly shore, the hosts of God, in the frozen mail of December, encamp around the dwellings of the just;

"Stern famine guards the solitary coast,

And winter barricades the realms of frost." While Bacon is attuning the sweetest strains of his honeyed eloquence to soothe the dull ear of a crowned pedant, and his great rival, only less obsequious, is on his knees to deprecate the royal displeasure, the future founders of the new republic beyond the sea are training up for their illustrious mission, in obscurity, hardship, and weary exile in a foreign land.

And now, for the fulness of time is come,let us go up once more, in imagination, to yonder hill, and look out upon the November scene. That single dark speck, just discernible through the perspective glass, on the waste of waters, is the fated vessel. The storm moans through her tattered canvas, as she creeps, almost sinking, to her anchorage in Provincetown harbour; and there she lies, with all her treasures, not of silver and gold, (for of these she has none,) but of courage, of patience, of zeal, of high spiritual daring. So often as I dwell in imagination on this scene; when I consider the condition of the Mayflower, utterly incapable, as she was, of living through another gale; when I survey the terrible front presented by our coast to the navigator who, unacquainted with its channels and roadsteads, should approach it in the stormy season, I dare not call it a mere piece of good fortune, that the general north and south wall of the shore of New England should be broken by this extraordinary projection of the Cape, running out into the ocean a hundred miles, as if on purpose to receive and encircle the precious vessel. As I now see her, freighted with the destinies of a continent, barely escaped from the perils of the deep, approaching the shore precisely where the broad sweep of this most remarkable headland presents almost the only point, at which, for hundreds of miles, she could, with any ease, have made a harbour, and this, perhaps, the very best on the seaboard, I feel my spirit raised above the sphere of mere natural agencies. I see the mountains of New England rising from their rocky thrones. They rush forward into the ocean, settling down as they advance; and there they range themselves, as a mighty bulwark around the Heaven-directed vessel. Yes, the everlasting God himself stretches out the arm of his mercy and his power, in substantial manifestation, and gathers the meek company of his worshippers as in the hollow of his hand.

THE PROGRESS OF DISCOVERY.

FROM AN ADDRESS AT AMHERST COLLEGE.

WE are confirmed in the conclusion that the popular diffusion of knowledge is favourable to the growth of science, when we reflect that, vast as the domain of learning is, and extraordinary as is

the progress which has been made in almost every branch, we may assume as certain, I will not say that we are in its infancy, but that the discoveries which have been already made, wonderful as they are, bear but a small proportion to those that will hereafter be effected; and that in every thing that belongs to the improvement of man, there is yet a field of investigation broad enough to satisfy the most eager thirst for knowledge, and diversified enough to suit every variety of taste, order of intellect, or degree of qualification. For the peaceful victories of the mind, that unknown and unconquered world, for which Alexander wept, is for ever near at hand; hidden indeed, as yet, behind the veil with which nature shrouds her undiscovered mysteries, but stretching all along the confines of the domain of knowledge, sometimes nearest when least suspected. The foot has not yet pressed, nor the eye beheld it; but the mind, in its deepest musings, in its wildest excursions, will sometimes catch a glimpse of the hidden realm-a gleam of light from the Hesperian island-a fresh and fragrant breeze from off the undiscovered land

"Sabæan odours from the spicy shore," which happier voyagers, in after times, shall approach, explore and inhabit. Who has not felt, when, with his very soul concentrated in his eyes, while the world around him is wrapped in sleep, he gazes into the holy depths of the midnight heavens, or wanders in contemplation among the worlds and systems that sweep through the immensity of space-who has not felt as if their mystery must yet more fully yield to the ardent, unwearied, imploring research of patient science? Who does not, in those choice and blessed moments, in which the world and its interests are forgotten, and the spirit retires into the inmost sanctuary of its own meditations, and there, unconscious of every thing but itself and the infinite Perfection, of which it is the earthly type, and kindling the flame of thought on the altar of prayer-who does not feel, in moments like these, as if it must at last be given to man, to fathom the great secret of his own beingto solve the mighty problem

"Of providence, foreknowledge, will and fate?"

When I think in what slight elements the great discoveries that have changed the condition of the world have oftentimes originated; on the entire revolution in political and social affairs which has resulted from the use of the magnetic needle; on the world of wonders, teeming with the most important scientific discoveries, which has been opened by the telescope; on the all-controlling influence of so simple an invention as that of movable metallic types; on the effects of the invention of gunpowder, no doubt the casual result of some idle experiment in alchemy; on the consequences that have resulted and are likely to result, from the application of the vapour of boiling water to the manufacturing arts, to navigation, and transportation by land; on the results of a single sublime conception in the mind of Newton, on which he erected, as on a foundation, the glorious temple of the system of the heavens; in fine, when I consider how, from the great master-principle of the philosophy

of Bacon-the induction of Truth from the observation of Fact-has flowed, as from a living fountain, the fresh and still swelling stream of modern science, I am almost oppressed with the idea of the probable connection of the truths already known, with great principles which remain undiscovered, of the proximity in which we may unconsciously stand, to the most astonishing, though yet unrevealed mysteries of the material and intellectual world.

If, after thus considering the seemingly obvious sources from which the most important discoveries and improvements have sprung, we inquire into the extent of the field, in which farther discoveries are to be made, which is no other and no less than the entire natural and spiritual creation of God-a grand and lovely system, even as we imperfectly apprehend it, but no doubt most grand, lovely and harmonious, beyond all that we now conceive or imagine; when we reflect that the most insulated, seemingly disconnected, and even contradictory parts of the system are, no doubt, bound together as portions of one stupendous whole; and that those which are at present the least explicable, and which most completely defy the penetration hitherto bestowed upon them, are as intelligible, in reality, as that which seems most plain and clear; that as every atom in the universe attracts every other atom, and is attracted by it, so every truth stands in harmonious connection with every other truth; we are brought directly to the conclusion, that every portion of knowledge now possessed, every observed fact, every demonstrated principle, is a clew, which we hold by one end in the hand, and which is capable of guiding the faithful inquirer farther and farther into the inmost recesses of the labyrinth of nature. Ages and ages may elapse, before it conduct the patient intellect to the wonders of science to which it will eventually lead him; and perhaps with the next step he takes, he will reach the goal, and principles destined to affect the condition of millions beam in characters

ance.

fore it became, through the means of those qualities, the pilot which guided Columbus to the American continent. Before the invention of the compass could take full effect, it was necessary that some navigator should practically and boldly grasp the idea that the globe is round. The two truths are apparently without connection; but in their application to practice, they are intimately associated. Hobbes says that Dr. Harvey, the illustrious discoverer of the circulation of the blood, is the only author of a great discovery who ever lived to see it universally adopted. To the honour of subsequent science, this remark could not now, with equal truth, be made. Nor was Harvey himself without some painful experience of the obstacles, arising from popular ignorance, against which truth sometimes forces its way to general acceptWhen he first proposed the beautiful doctrine, his practice fell off; people would not continue to trust their lives in the hands of such a dreamer. When it was firmly established and generally received, one of his opponents published a tract de circulo sanguinis Salomoneo, and proved from the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes, that the circulation of the blood was no secret in the time of Solomon. The whole doctrine of the Reformation may be found in the writings of Wiclif; but neither he nor his age felt the importance of his principles, nor the consequences to which they led. Huss had studied the writings of Wiclif in manuscript, and was in no degree behind him, in the boldness with which he denounced the papal usurpations. But his voice was not heard beyond the mountains of Bohemia; and he expired in agony at the stake, and his ashes were scattered upon the Rhine. A hundred years passed away. Luther, like an avenging angel, burst upon the world, and denounced the corruptions of the church, and rallied the host of the faithful, with a voice which might almost call up those ashes from their watery grave, and form and kindle them again into a liv. ing witness of the truth.

Thus Providence, which has ends innumerable to answer, in the conduct of the physical and intellectual, as well as of the moral world, sometimes permits the great discoverers fully to enjoy their fame, sometimes to catch but a glimpse of the extent of

It is therefore by no means to be inferred, because the human mind has seemed to linger for a long time around certain results-as ultimate principles-that they and the principles closely connected with them are not likely to be pushed much farther; nor, on the other hand, does the intellect always require much time to bring its noblest truths to seeming perfection. It was, I suppose, two thousand years from the time when the peculiar properties of the magnet were first observed, be

jected and heart-broken to the grave, unconscious of the importance of their own discoveries, and not merely undervalued by their contemporaries, but by themselves. It is plain that Copernicus, like his great contemporary, Columbus, though fully conscious of the boldness and the novelty of his doctrine, saw but a part of the changes it was to effect in science. After harbouring in his bosom for long, long years that pernicious heresy-the solar system-he died on the day of the appearance of his book from the press. The closing scene of his life, with a little help from the imagination, would furnish a noble subject for an artist. For thirty-five years he has revolved and matured in his mind his system of the heavens. A natural mildness of disposition, bordering on timidity, a reluctance to encounter controversy, and a dread

excitement.

The voice, which, in the morning of life, shall awaken the patriotic sympathy of the land, will be echoed back by a community, incalculably swelled in all its proportions, before that voice shall be hushed in death. The writer, by whom the noble features of our scenery shall be sketched with a glowing pencil, the traits of our romantic

fourth of May, 1543. On that day-the effect, no doubt, of the intense excitement of his mind, operating upon an exhausted frame-an effusion of blood brings him to the gates of the grave. His last hour has come; he lies stretched upon the couch from which he will never rise, in his apartment at the Canonry at Frauenberg, East Prussia. The beams of the setting sun glance through the Gothic windows of his chamber; near his bedside is the armillary sphere, which he has contrived to represent his theory of the heavens; his picture, painted by himself, the amusement of his earlier years, hangs before him; beneath it are his astrolabe and other imperfect astronomical instruments; and around him are gathered his sorrowing disciples. The door of the apartment opens;-the eye of the departing sage is turned to see who enters: it is a friend, who brings him the first printed copy of his immortal treatise. He knows that in that book he contradicts all that had ever been distinctly taught, by former philosophers; he knows that he has rebelled against the sway of Ptolemy, which the scientific world had acknowledged for a thousand years; he knows that the popular mind will be shocked by his innovations; he knows that the attempt will be made to press even religion into the service against him; but he knows that his book is true. He is dying, but he leaves a glorious truth, as his dying bequest to the world. He bids the friend who has brought it place himself between the window and his bedside, that the sun's rays may fall upon the precious volume, and he may behold it once more, before his eye grows dim. He looks upon it, takes it in his hands, presses it to his breast, and expires. But no, he is not wholly gone. A smile lights up his dying countenance; a beam of returning intelligence kindles in his eye; his lips move; and the friend, who leans over him, can hear him faintly murmur the beautiful sentiments which the Christian lyrist of a later age has so finely expressed in verse:

Ye golden lamps of heaven, farewell, with all your feeble light:

Farewell, thou ever-changing moon, pale empress of the night;

And thou refulgent orb of day, in brighter flames array'd, My soul which springs beyond thy sphere, no more demands thy aid.

Ye stars are but the shining dust of my divine abode, The pavement of those heavenly courts, where I shall reign with God.

So died the great Columbus of the heavens.

EXTENSION OF THE REPUBLIC.

FROM AN ORATION BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY.

Is the grand and steady progress of our country, the career of duty and usefulness will be run by all its children, under a constantly increasing

peculiarities of our character seized with delicate perception, cannot mount so entirely and rapidly to success, but that ten years will add new millions to the numbers of his readers. The American statesman, the orator, whose voice is already heard in its supremacy, from Florida to Maine, whose intellectual empire already extends beyond the limits of Alexander's, has yet new states and new nations starting into being, the willing tributaries to his sway.

This march of our population westward has been attended with consequences in some degree novel in the history of the human mind. It is a fact somewhat difficult of explanation, that the refinement of the ancient nations seemed almost wholly devoid of an elastic and expansive principle. The arts of Greece were enchained to her islands and her coasts; they did not penetrate the interior, at least not in every direction. The language and literature of Athens were as much unknown to the north of Pindus, at a distance of two hundred miles from the capital of Grecian refinement, as they were in Scythia. Thrace, whose mountain tops may almost be seen from the porch of the temple of Minerva at Sunium, was the proverbial abode of barbarism. Though the colonies of Greece were scattered on the coasts of Italy, of France, of Spain, and of Africa, no extension of their population far into the interior took place, and the arts did not penetrate beyond the walls of the cities where they were cultivated. How different is the picture of the diffusion of the arts and improvements of civilization, from the coast to the interior of America! Population advances westward with a rapidity which numbers may describe indeed, but cannot represent, with any vivacity, to the mind. The wilderness, which one year is impassable, is traversed the next by the caravans of the industrious emigrants, who go to follow the setting sun, with the language, the institutions, and the arts of civilized life. It is not the irruption of wild barbarians, sent to visit the wrath of God on a degenerate empire; it is not the inroad of disciplined banditti, marshalled by the intrigues of ministers and kings. It is the human family, led out to possess its broad patrimony. The states and nations, which are springing up in the valley of the Missouri, are bound to us, by the dearest ties of a common language, a common government, and a common descent. Before New England can look with coldness on their rising myriads, she must forget that some of the best of her own blood is beating in their veins; that her hardy children, with their axes on their shoulders, have been literally among the pioneers in this march of humani ty; that young as she is, she has become the mother of populous states. What generous mind

would sacrifice to a selfish preservation of local preponderance, the delight of beholding civilized nations rising up in the desert; and the language, the manners, the institutions, to which he has been reared, carried with his household gods to the foot of the Rocky Mountains? Who can forget that this extension of our territorial limits is the extension of the empire of all we hold dear; of our laws, of our character, of the memory of our ancestors, of the great achievements in our history? Whithersoever the sons of the thirteen states shall wander, to southern or western climes, they will send back their hearts to the rocky shores, the battle fields, and the intrepid councils of the Atlantic These are placed beyond the reach of vicissitude. They have become already matter of history, of poetry, of eloquence:

coast.

The love, where death has set his seal,
Nor age can chill, nor rival steal,
Nor falsehood disavow.

Divisions may spring up, ill blood may burn, parties be formed, and interests may seem to clash; but the great bonds of the nation are linked to what is passed. The deeds of the great men, to whom this country owes its origin and growth, are a patrimony, I know, of which its children will never deprive themselves. As long as the Mississippi and the Missouri shall flow, those men and those deeds will be remembered on their banks. The sceptre of government may go where it will; but that of patriotic feeling can never depart from Judah. In all that mighty region which is drained by the Missouri and its tributary streams—the valley co-extensive with the temperate zone-will there be, as long as the name of America shall last, a father, that will not take his children on his knee and recount to them the events of the twenty-second of December, the nineteenth of April, the seventeenth of June, and the fourth of July?

This then is the theatre on which the intellect of America is to appear, and such the motives to its exertion; such the mass to be influenced by its energies, such the crowd to witness its efforts, such the glory to crown its success. If I err in this happy vision of my country's fortunes, I thank God for an error so animating. If this be false, may I never know the truth. Never may you, my friends, be under any other feeling, than that a great, a growing, an immeasurably expanding country is calling upon you for your best services. The name and character of our Alma Mater have always been carried by some of our brethren thousands of miles from her venerable walls; and thousands of miles still farther westward, the communities of kindred men are fast gathering, whose minds and hearts will act in sympathy with yours. The most powerful motives call on us, as scholars, for those efforts, which our common country demands of all her children. Most of us are of that class, who owe whatever of knowledge has shone into our minds, to the free and popular institutions of our native land. There are few of us, who may not be permitted to boast, that we have been reared in an honest poverty or a frugal competence, and owe every thing to those means of education

which are equally open to all. We are summoned to new energy and zeal by the high nature of the experiment we are appointed in Providence to make, and the grandeur of the theatre on which it is to be performed. When the old world afforded no longer any hope, it pleased Heaven to open this last refuge of humanity. The attempt has begun, and is going on, far from foreign corruption, on the broadest scale, and under the most benignant prospects; and it certainly rests with us to solve the great problem in human society, to settle, and that for ever, that momentous question-whether mankind can be trusted with a purely popular system? One might almost think, without extravagance, that the departed wise and good of all places and times are looking down from their happy seats to witness what shall now be done by us; that they who lavished their treasures and their blood of old, who laboured and suffered, who spake and wrote, who fought and perished, in the one great cause of freedom and truth, are now hanging from their orbs on high, over the last solemn experiment of humanity. As I have wandered over the spots, once the scene of their labours, and mused among the prostrate columns of their se nate houses and forums, I have seemed almost to hear a voice from the tombs of departed ages; from the sepulchres of the nations, which died before the sight. They exhort us, they adjure us to be faithful to our trust. They implore us, by the long trials of struggling humanity, by the blessed memory of the departed; by the dear faith, which has been plighted by pure hands, to the holy cause of truth and man; by the awful secrets of the prison houses, where the sons of freedom have been immured; by the noble heads which have been brought to the block; by the wrecks of time, by the eloquent ruins of nations, they conjure us not to quench the light which is rising on the world. Greece cries to us, by the convulsed lips of her poisoned, dying Demosthenes; and Rome pleads with us, in the mute persuasion of her mangled Tully.

THREE PICTURES OF BOSTON.

FROM AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE MERC. LIB. ASSOCIATION,

To understand the character of the commerce of our own city, we must not look merely at one point, but at the whole circuit of country, of which it is the business centre. We must not contemplate it only at this present moment of time, but we must bring before our imaginations, as in the shifting scenes of a diorama, at least three successive historical and topographical pictures; and truly instructive I think it would be to see them delineated on canvas. We must survey the first of them in the company of the venerable John Winthrop, the founder of the state. Let us go up with him, on the day of his landing, the seventeenth of June, 1630, to the heights of yonder peninsula, as yet without a name. Landward stretches a dismal forest; seaward, a waste of waters,

unspotted with a sail, except that of his own ship. | At the foot of the hill you see the cabins of Walford and the Spragues, who—the latter a year before, the former still earlier-had adventured to this spot, untenanted else by any child of civilization. On the other side of the river lies Mr. Blackstone's farm. It comprises three goodly hills, converted by a spring-tide into three wood-crowned islets; and it is mainly valued for a noble spring of fresh water which gushes from the northern slope of one of these hills, and which furnished, in the course of the summer, the motive for transferring the seat of the infant settlement. This shall be the first picture.

The second shall be contemplated from the same spot-the heights of Charleston-on the same day, the eventful seventeenth of June, one hundred and forty-five years later, namely, in the year 1775. A terrific scene of war rages on the top of the hill. Wait for a favourable moment, when the volumes of fiery smoke roll away, and over the masts of that sixty-gun ship, whose batteries are blazing upon the hill, you behold Mr. Blackstone's farm changed to an ill-built town of about two thousand dwelling houses, mostly of wood, with scarce any public buildings, but eight or nine churches, the old State House, and Faneuil Hall; Roxbury beyond, an insignificant village; a vacant marsh in all the space now occupied by Cambridgeport and East Cambridge, by Chelsea and East Boston; and beneath your feet the town of Charlestown, consisting in the morning of a line of about three hundred houses, wrapped in a sheet of flames at noon, and reduced at eventide to a heap of ashes.

But those fires are kindled on the altar of Liberty. American independence is established. American commerce smiles on the spot; and now from the top of one of the triple hills of Mr. Blackstone's farm, a stately edifice arises, which seems to invite us as to an observatory. As we look down from this lofty structure, we behold the third picturea crowded, busy scene. We see beneath us a city containing eighty or ninety thousand inhabitants, and mainly built of brick and granite. Vessels of every description are moored at the wharves. Long lines of commodious and even stately houses cover a space which, within the memory of man, was in a state of nature. Substantial blocks of warehouses and stores have forced their way to the channel. Faneuil Hall itself, the consecrated and unchangeable, has swelled to twice its original dimensions. Athenæums, hopitals, asylums and infirmaries, adorn the streets. The school-house rears its modest front in every quarter of the city, and sixty or seventy churches attest that the children are content to walk in the good old ways of their fathers. Connected with the city by eight bridges, avenues, or ferries, you behold a range of towns, most of them municipally distinct, but all of them in reality forming, with Boston, one vast metropolis, animated by one commercial life. Shading off from these, you see that most lovely back-ground, a succession of happy settlements, spotted with villas, farm houses and cottages; united to Boston by a constant intercourse; sustaining the capital from

their fields and gardens, and prosperous in the reflux of the city's wealth. Of the social life included within this circuit, and of all that in times past has adorned and ennobled it, commercial industry has been an active element, and has exalted itself by its intimate association with every thing else we hold dear. Within this circuit what memorials strike the eye!-what recollections— what institutions-what patriotic treasures and names that cannot die! There lie the canonized precincts of Lexington and Concord; there rise the sacred heights of Dorchester and Charlestown; there is Harvard, the ancient and venerable, foster-child of public and private liberality in every part of the state; to whose existence Charlestown gave the first impulse, to whose growth and usefulness the opulence of Boston has at all times ministered with open hand. Still farther on than the eye can reach, four lines of communication by railroad and steam have within our own day united with the capital, by bands of iron, a still broader circuit of towns and villages. Hark to the voice of life and business which sounds along the lines! While we speak, one of them is shooting onward to the illimitable west, and all are uniting with the other kindred enterprises, to form one harmonious and prosperous whole, in which town and country, agriculture and manufactures, labour and capital, art and nature-wrought and compacted into one grand system-are constantly gathering and diffusing, concentrating and radiating the economical, the social, the moral blessings of a liberal and diffusive commerce.

EXAMPLES OF PATRIOTISM IN OUR OWN HISTORY.

sents.

THE national character, in some of its most important elements, must be formed, elevated, and strengthened from the materials which history preAre we to be eternally ringing the changes upon Marathon and Thermopylæ; and going back to find in obscure texts of Greek and Latin the great exemplars of patriotic virtue? I rejoice that we can find them nearer home, in our own country, on our own soil;-that strains of the noblest sentiment that ever swelled in the breast of man are breathing to us out of every page of our country's history, in the native eloquence of our mother tongue;— that the colonial and the provincial councils of America exhibit to us models of the spirit and character which gave Greece and Rome their name and their praise among the nations. Here we ought to go for our instruction; the lesson is plain, it is clear, it is applicable. When we go to ancient history, we are bewildered with the difference of manners and institutions. We are willing to pay our tribute of applause to the memory of Leonidas, who fell nobly for his country, in the face of the foe. But when we trace him to his home, we are confounded at the reflection, that the same Spartan heroism to which he sacrificed himself at Thermopyle, would have led him to tear his only child, if it happened to be a sickly babe,-