laboring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with engulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening weight against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all-but desperate undertaking, and landed at last, after a five months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth; weak and weary from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their shipmaster for a draught of beer on board, drinking nothing but water on shore, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes. Shut now the volume of history, and tell me, on any principle of human probability, what shall be the fate of this handful of adventurers? Tell me, man of military science, in how many months were they all swept off by the thirty savage tribes, enumerated within the early limits of New England? Tell me, politician, how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and treaties had not smiled, languish on the distant coast? Student of history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements, the abandoned adventures, of other times, and find the parallel of this! Was it the winter's storm, beating upon the houseless heads of women and children? Was it hard labor and spare meals? Was it disease? Was it the tomahawk? Was it the deep malady of a blighted hope, a ruined enterprise, and a broken heart, aching in its last moments at the recollection of the loved and left, beyond the sea? Was it some, or all of these united, that hurried this forsaken company to their melancholy fate? And is it possible that neither of these causes -that not all combined-were able to blast this bud of hope? Is it possible that, from a beginning so feeble, so frail, so worthy, (not so much of admiration as of pity,) there has gone forth a progress so steady, a growth so wonderful, a reality so important, a promise, yet to be fulfilled, so glorious? PAMPERING THE BODY AND STARVING THE SOUL." What, sir, feed a child's body, and let his soul hunger! pamper his limbs, and starve his faculties! Plant the earth, cover a thousand hills with your droves of cattle, pursue the fish to their hiding-places in the sea, and spread out your wheat-fields across the plain, in order to supply the wants of that body which will soon be as cold and as senseless as the poorest clod, and let the pure spiritual essence within you, with all its glorious capacities for improvement, languish and pine! What! build factories, turn in rivers upon the water-wheels, unchain the imprisoned spirits of steam, to weave a garment for the body, and let the soul remain unadorned and naked! What! send out your vessels to the furthest ocean, and make battle with the monsters of the deep, in order to obtain the means of lighting up your dwellings and workshops, and prolonging the hours of labor for the meat that perisheth, and permit that vital spark, which God has kindled, which he has intrusted to our care, to be fanned into a bright and heavenly flame,-permit it, I say, to languish and go out! What considerate man can enter a school, and not reflect, with awe, that it is a seminary where immortal minds are training for eternity? What parent but is, at times, weighed down with the thought, that there must be laid the foundations of a building which will stand, when not merely temple and palace, but the perpetual hills and adamantine rocks on which they rest, have melted away!—that a light may there be kindled which will shine, not merely when every artificial beam is extinguished, but when the affrighted sun has fled away from the heavens? THE ETERNAL CLOCKWORK OF THE SKIES. We derive from the observations of the heavenly bodies which are made at an observatory our only adequate measures of time, and our only means of comparing the time of one place with the time of another. Our artificial timekeepers,-clocks, watches, and chronometers, however ingeniously contrived and admirably fabricated, are but a transcript, so to say, of the celestial motions, and would be of no value without the means of regulating them by observation. It is impossible for them, under any circumstances, to escape the imperfection of all machinery, the work of human hands; and the moment we remove with our timekeeper east or west, it fails us. It will keep home-time alone, like the fond traveller who leaves his heart behind him. The artificial instrument is of incalculable utility, but must itself be regulated by the eternal clockwork of the skies. This single consideration is sufficient to show how completely the daily business of life is affected and controlled by the heavenly bodies. It is they and not our main-springs, our expansionbalances, and our compensation-pendulums, which give us our time. To reverse the line of Pope,— "Tis with our watches as our judgments: none But for all the kindreds and tribes and tongues of men,-each upon their own meridian,-from the Arctic pole to the equator, from the equator to the Antarctic pole, the eternal sun strikes twelve at noon, and the glorious constellations, far up in the ever lasting belfries of the skies, chime twelve at midnight-twelve for the pale student over his flickering lamp-twelve amid the flaming wonders of Orion's belt, if he crosses the meridian at that fated hour-twelve by the weary couch of languishing humanity, twelve in the star-paved courts of the Empyrean-twelve for the heaving tides of the ocean; twelve for the weary arm of labor; twelve for the toiling brain; twelve for the watching, waking, broken heart; twelve for the meteor which blazes for a moment and expires; twelve for the comet whose period is measured by centuries; twelve for every substantial, for every imaginary thing, which exists in the sense, the intellect, or the fancy, and which the speech or thought of man, at the given meridian, refers to the lapse of time. Discourse at Albany, 1856. THE HEAVENS BEFORE AND AFTER DAWN. I had occasion, a few weeks since, to take the early train from Providence to Boston, and for this purpose rose at two o'clock in the morning. Every thing around was wrapt in darkness and hushed in silence, broken only by what seemed at that hour the unearthly clank and rush of the train. It was a mild, serene midsummer's night: the sky was without a cloud, the winds were whist. The moon, then in the last quarter, had just risen, and the stars shone with a spectral lustre but little affected by her presence. Jupiter, two hours high, was the herald of the day; the Pleiades just above the horizon shed their sweet influence in the east; Lyra sparkled near the zenith; Andromeda veiled her newly-discovered glories from the naked eye in the south; the steady pointers far beneath the pole looked meekly up from the depths of the north to their sovereign. Such was the glorious spectacle as I entered the train. As we proceeded, the timid approach of twilight became more perceptible; the intense blue of the sky began to soften; the smaller stars, like little children, went first to rest; the sister-beams of the Pleiades soon melted together; but the bright constellations of the west and north remained unchanged. Steadily the wondrous transfiguration went on. Hands of angels hidden from mortal eyes shifted the scenery of the heavens; the glories of night dissolved into the glories of the dawn. The blue sky now turned more softly gray; the great watch-stars shut up their holy eyes; the east began to kindle. Faint streaks of purple soon blushed along the sky; the whole celestial concave was filled with the inflowing tides of the morning light, which came pouring down from above in one great ocean of radiance; till at length, as we reached the Blue Hills, a flash of purple fire blazed out from above the horizon, and turned the dewy tear-drops of flower and leaf into rubies and diamonds. In a few seconds, the everlasting gates of the morning were thrown wide open, and the lord of day, arrayed in glories too severe for the gaze of man, began his state. Ibid. THE UNIVERSAL BOUNTIES OF PROVIDENCE. A celebrated skeptical philosopher of the last century-the historian, Hume-thought to demolish the credibility of the Christian revelation, by the concise argument,-"It is contrary to experience that a miracle should be true, but not contrary to experience that testimony should be false." Contrary to experience that phenomena should exist which we cannot trace to causes perceptible to the human sense, or conceivable by human thought! It would be much nearer the truth to say that within the husbandman's experience there are no phenomena which can be rationally traced to any thing but the instant energy of creative power. Did this philosopher ever contemplate the landscape at the close of the year, when seeds, and grains, and fruits have ripened, and stalks have withered, and leaves have fallen, and winter has forced her icy curb even into the roaring jaws of Niagara, and sheeted half a continent in her glittering shroud, and all this teeming vegetation and organized life are locked in cold and marble obstructions, and after week upon week, and month upon month, have swept, with sleet, and chilly rain, and howling storm, over the earth, and riveted their crystal bolts upon the door of nature's sepulchre,-when the sun at length begins to wheel in higher circles through the sky, and softer winds to breathe over melting snows,-did he ever behold the long-hidden earth at length appear, and soon the timid grass peep forth; and anon the autumnal wheat begin to paint the field, and velvet leaflets to burst from purple buds, throughout the reviving forest, and then the mellow soil to open its fruitful bosom to every grain and seed dropped from the planter's hand,-buried, but to spring up again, clothed with a new, mysterious being; and then, as more fervid suns inflame the air, and softer showers distil from the clouds, and gentler dews string their pearls on twig and dril, did he ever watch the ripening grain and fruit, pendent m stalk, and vine, and tree; the meadow, the field, the pasure, the grove, each after his kind, arrayed in myriad-tinted garments, instinct with circulating life; seven millions of counted leaves on a single trec, each of which is a system whose exquisite complication puts to shame the shrewdest cunning of the human hand; every planted seed and grain, which had been loaned to the earth, compounding its pious usury thirty, sixty, a hundred fold, all harmoniously adapted to the sustenance of living nature, the bread of a hungry world; here, a tilled corn-field, whose yellow blades are nodding with the food of man; there, an unplanted wilderness, the great Father's farm,-where He "who hears the raven's cry" has cultivated, with his own hand, his merciful crop of berries, and nuts, and acorns, and seeds, for the humbler families of animated nature; the solemn elephant, the browsing deer, the wild pigeon whose fluttering caravan darkens the sky, the merry squirrel, who bounds from branch to branch, in the joy of his little life, has he seen all this? Does he see it every year, and month, and day? Does he live, and move, and breathe, and think, in this atmosphere of wonder,-himself the greatest wonder of all, whose smallest fibre and faintest pulsation is as much a mystery as the blazing glories of Orion's belt? And does he still maintain that a miracle is contrary to experience? If he has, and if he does, then let him go, in the name of Heaven, and say that it is contrary to experience that the august Power which turns the clods of the earth into the daily bread of a thousand million souls could feed five thousand in the wilderness. Address before the New York Agricultural Society, October 9, 1857. JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE, 1795-1820. Green be the turf above thee, There should a wreath be woven, And I, who woke each morrow To clasp thy hand in mine, And feel I cannot now. While memory bids me weep thee, JOSEPH RODMAN DRAKE was born in the city of New York, August 7, 1795. After a suitable preparatory education, he entered upon the study of medicine, obtained his degree in October, 1816, and soon after was married to a daughter of Henry Eckford, a wealthy merchant, and was thus placed above the necessity of laboring in his profession. It was well that it was so; for his health, always delicate, began to decline, and, in the winter of 1819, he went to New Orleans, in the hope that its milder climate would be of service to him. But he returned in the spring of 1820, not in the least improved, lingered through the summer, and died on the 21st of September, 1820. Drake began to write verses when he was very young, and, before he was sixteen, contributed, anonymously, to two or three newspapers. Some humorous |