ocean--it envelops more than half the globe. Our continents and islands, on the map of the world, look small in comparison with its sweep.

We can

3. And I need not say how feeble man is, and all his skill, before its willful fury. Say what we will, with all our famili arity and all our hardihood, our nature intuitively shudders at the thought of the sea. We cannot travel over it with the same quiet enjoyments that we feel upon the land. This is our birthplace and our home. That is naturally hostile to us. not till it and plant it, and make it wear our image as the earth does. It never softens with our civilization. It retains no impression of humanity; it is wild nature forever-savage even in its calmest moods. We travel upon it as through a barbarian dominion with a flag of truce. The old sailor, with all his recklessness, takes from his occupation a solemn vein, as though he felt always the presence of uncontrollable power, and sailed in sight of death.

4. And this train of thought especially occurs to us when we speak of "the dead that are in the sea"-the legions that it has summoned to a hasty end, and that have "sunk like lead in its mighty waters." And, as it seems to us, what an untimeliness in their dissolution! What ghastliness and horror in their taking away! Sometimes with one burst of waves, mingling time and eternity; sometimes with protracted suffering, expanding minutes into years, and with thoughts of hearts that are yearning for them, and expectant forms on which they would have gladly died, but which they shall press no more. Dying far away, too, in awful loneliness, with the black tempest lashing around them, or with grim, inevitable ice-walls shutting them in; nay, even in calm waters, with possible rescue at hand, but with selfishness and cowardice leaving them to their fate! Dying with their faces turned toward home, and the very air of its shores in their nostrils!

5. The dead that are in th sea! Because of them there

arises an agony of bereavement, as for none else. We Journ for those by whose death-beds we stand, in silent anguish taking a farewell look. But this does not pierce our hearts like the fate of those concerning whom there is only the vague record, "Lost at sea!". -gone down in a nameless death, perished in forms we know not how! gone down into the cold waters without a winding-sheet and without a kiss; nay, sometimes engendering a night-mare hope, worse than death or despair, that they may be still alive, lingering upon some obscure shore, carried off in some far-bound ship, or detained by some savage tribe, but yet to come back, even though many years have rolled away, and change our long sorrow into laughter.

6. The dead that are in the sea! The manly forms, the beautiful faces, the dear looks, the hands that still grasp their trust, the babes that still nestle in their mothers' bosoms, for which it has so often opened and closed the doors of its mighty sepulchre. We bide the chances where they lie with poetry, we surround them with the gorgeousness and "sinless trance" of the deep; or we adopt a higher strain, and say that, “in the metaphysics of the belief," it makes no difference where or what the grave is; but we cannot think peacefully of them, as we do of those who pass from us by disease or decay, and who sleep on the breast of their mother earth.

7. So we do not wonder, my friends, that there are thousands to whom the sea is only a terrible power, in whose ears it is chanting a perpetual requiem, and who think it a fitting symbol of those material forces which are so relentless and so cruel, and before which n an is so impotent.

LESSON CXIV.

THE PRICE OF ELOQUENCE.

C. COLTON.

1. MORE than twenty centuries ago, the orphan son of an Athenian sword-cutler, neglected by his guardians, and regarded as a youth of feeble promise, became, at the age of sixteen, enamored of eloquence. He resolved, with a strength of will and an ardor of enthusiasm to which nothing is insuperable, to be himself eloquent. This youth becomes successively the docile pupil of Callistratus, Isæus, Isocrates, and Plato. But his stud ies, though embracing a liberal and wide range of letters, philosophy, and science, are not confined to the academy or the public grove. We him daily ascending the Acropolis, and panting for breath as he gains the summit. Again he is seen laboriously climbing Olympus, the Hymettus, and every emi nence where genius or the muses have breathed their inspi ration.

2. His object, which he pursues with an ardor that never flags, and a diligence that never tires, is twofold, viz: to drink in the free and fresh inspirations of nature and art, and, by unremitting daily exercise, to give expansion to his chest, and strength and freedom of play to his lungs.

3. We see him again, when the tempest comes on, hurrying to the least frequented parts of the Piræus or Phalerus, and while the deafening thunders roar around him, and the deep and stirring eloquence of many waters expands and fills his soul, lifting his feeble and stammering voice, and essaying to give it compass, and flexibility, and power, while he "talks with the thunder as friend to friend, and weaves his garland of the light. ning's wing."

4. We see this ardent Athenian youth again, amidst the pro foundest solitudes of nature, holding communion with high and ennobling thoughts stirred within his bosom by the spirit of

the great and godlike, the sublime and beautiful, from every object of nature and of plastic art around him.

5. At length, day after day and night after night, for months, he is seen entering a solitary cave. How is he busied in that subterranean chamber? With his head half shaven, that he may not be tempted to appear too early in society or in public, we find him poring over the tomes of rhetoricians, historians, philosophers, and poets; with his pen, also, eight times transcribing Thucydides, that he may make his own, some portion of the terseness, energy, and fire of that historian.

6. After all this educational training of the greatest and best masters, living and dead-after all this self-imposed discipline of intellect and spirit, and when he has reached the age of ripe manhood, we go to witness his first effort in forensic eloquence.

7. The hisses of his fastidious auditory stifle and repress for a time the kindling energy and fervor of his soul, and his still embarrassed and stammering enunciation seems to jeopardize the cause he is pleading. At length he rises in a conscious mastery of his subject and of himself, and with the self-sustained dignity of the true orator, conciliates, convinces, moves, persuades, by the clearness, fitness, and force of his arguments, and the thrilling pathos and pungency of his appeals.

8. This is eloquence--the eloquence of the Athenian Demosthenes the triumph of educational skill and self-discipline, united, indeed, with great powers, and with a lofty and indomitable force of will.

9. The meed which the concurrent suffrages of more than two thousand years, in every civilized nation of the globe, have awarded to this great orator, we readily concede to him. But in our admiration of the power of his eloquence, we are toc willing to forget the laborious and pains-taking efforts of study and discipline by which he attained his unrivaled eminence in ratorical power.

LESSON CXV.

NEW ENGLAND AND THE UNION.

PRENTISS.

1. GLORIOUS New England! thou art still true to thy an cient fame, and worthy of thy ancestral honors. On thy pleasant valleys rest, like sweet dews of morning, the gentle recollections of our early life; around thy hills and mountains cling, like gathering mists, the mighty memories of the revolution; and far away in the horizon of thy past, gleam, like thy own bright northern lights, the awful virtues of our Pilgrim sires! But while we devote this day to the remembrance of our native land, we forget not that in which our happy lot is cast. We exult in the reflection, that though we count by thousands the miles which separate us from our birthplace, still our country is the same. We are no exiles meeting upon the banks of a foreign river, to swell its waters with our homesick tears. Here floats the same banner which rustled above our boyish heads, except that its mighty folds are wider, and its glittering stars increased in number.

2. The sons of New England are found in every state of the broad republic! In the east, the south, and the unbounded west, their blood mingles freely with every kindred current. We have but changed our chamber in the paternal mansion; in all its rooms we are at home, and all who inhabit it are our brothers. To us the Union has but one domestic hearth; its household gods are all the same. Upon us, then, peculiarly devolves the duty of feeding the fires upon that kindly hearth; of guarding with pious care those sacred household gods.

3. We cannot do with less than the whole Union! to us it admits of no division. In the veins of our children flows northern and southern blood: how shall it be separated? who shall put asunder the best affections of the heart, the noblest instincts