4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

The softly warbled song

Comes through the pleasant woods, and coloured wings
Are glancing in the golden sun, along

The forest openings.

And when bright sunset fills

The silver woods with light, the green slope throws
Its shadows in the hollows of the hills,

And wide the upland glows.

And when the day is gone

In the blue lake, the sky, o'erreaching far,
Is hollowed out, and the moon dips her horn,
And twinkles many a star.

Inverted in the tide

Stand the gray rocks, and trembling shadows throw,
And the fair trees look over, side by side,
And see themselves below.

Sweet April, many a thought

Is wedded unto thee, as hearts are wed;
Nor shall they fail, till, to its autumn brought,
Life's golden fruit is shed.-LONGFELLOW.

LESSON LXVII.

General Washington to his Troops.

Delivered before the battle of Long Island, in 1776.

1. THE time is now near at hand, which must, probably, determine whether Americans are to be freemen or slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their houses and farms are to be pillaged and destroyed, and themselves consigned to a state of wretchedness, from which no human efforts will deliver them.

2. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only the choice of a brave resistance, or the most abject submission. We have therefore to resolve, to conquer or to die.

3. Our own, our country's honour, calls upon us for a vigorous and manly exertion; and if we now shamefully fail, we

shall become infamous to the whole world. Let us, then, rely on the goodness of our cause, and the aid of the Supreme Being, in whose hands victory is, to animate and encourage us to great and noble actions.

4. The eyes of all our countrymen are now upon us; and we shall have their blessings and praises, if happily we are the instruments of saving them from the tyranny meditated against them. Let us, therefore, animate and encourage each other; and show the whole world, that a freeman contending for liberty on his own ground, is superiour to any slavish mercenary on earth.

5. Liberty, property, life, and honour, are all at stake; upon your courage and conduct, rest the hopes of our bleeding and insulted country; our wives, children, and parents, expect safety from us only; and they have every reason to believe, that Heaven will crown with success so just a cause.

6. The enemy will endeavour to intimidate by show and appearance; but remember, they have been repulsed on various occasions by a few brave Americans. Their cause is bad; their men are conscious of it; and if opposed with firmness and coolness on their first onset, with our advantage of works and knowledge of the ground, the victory is most assuredly ours. Every good soldier will be silent and attentive; wait for orders; and reserve his fire until he is sure of doing execution.

LESSON LXVIII.

The Indians.

1. THERE are many traits of the Indian character highly interesting to the philosopher and Christian. Their unconquerable attachment to their pristine modes and habits of life, which counteracts every effort toward civilization, furnishes to the philosopher a problem too profound for solution.

2. Their simple and unadorned religion, the same in all ages, and free from the disguise of hypocrisy, which they have received, by tradition, from their ancestors, leads the mind to a conclusion, that they possess an unwritten revelation from God, intended for their benefit, which ought to induce us to pause before we undertake to convert them to a more refined and less explicit faith.

3. The religion of the Indian appears to be fitted for that state and condition in which his Maker has been pleased to

place him. He believes in one Supreme Being, with all the mighty attributes which we ascribe to God; whom he denominates the Great and Good Spirit, and worships in a devout manner, and from whom he invokes blessings on himself and friends, and curses on his enemies.

4. Our Maker has left none of his intelligent creatures without a witness of himself. Long before the human mind is capable of a course of metaphysical reasoning upon the connexion which exists between cause and effect, a sense of Deity is inscribed upon it. It is a revelation which the Deity has made of himself to man, and which becomes more clear and intelligible, according to the manner and degree in which it is improved. In the Indian, whose mind has never been illumined by the light of science, it appears weak and obscure.

5. Those moral and political improvements, which are the pride and boast of man in polished society, and which result from mental accomplishments, the savage views with a jealous sense of conscious inferiority. Neither his reason, nor his invention, appears to have been exercised for the high and noble purposes of human excellence; and, while he pertinaciously adheres to traditional prejudices and passions, he improves upon those ideas only which he has received through

the senses.

6. Unaided by any other light than that which he has received from the Father of lights, the Indian penetrates the dark curtain which separates time and eternity, and believes in the immortality of the soul, and the resurrection of the body, not only of all mankind, but of all animated nature, and a state of future existence, of endless duration. It is, therefore, their general custom to bury with the dead, their bows, arrows, and spears, that they may be prepared to commence their course in another state.

7. Man is seldom degraded so low, but that he hopes, and believes, that death will not prove the extinction of his being. Is this a sentiment resulting from our fears or our passions? Or, rather, is it not the inspiration of the Almighty, which gives us this understanding, and which has been imparted to all the children of men? A firm belief in the immortality of the soul, with a devout sense of a general superintending power, essentially supreme, constitutes the fundamental article of the Indian's faith.

8. His reason, though never employed in high intellectual attainments and exertions, is less corrupted and perverted while he roams in his native forests, than in an unrestricted intercourse with civilized man. He beholds, in the rising

sun, the manifestation of divine goodness, and pursues the chase with a fearless and unshaken confidence in the protection of that great and good Spirit, whose watchful care is over all his works.

9. Let us not, then, attribute his views of an omniscient and omnipresent Being to the effect of a sullen pride of independence, and his moral sense of right and wrong to a heartless insensibility. Deprived, by the peculiarities of his situation, of those offices of kindness and tenderness which soften the heart, and sweeten the intercourse of life in a civilized state; we should consider him a being doomed to suffer the evils of the strongest and most vigorous passions, without the consolation of those divine and human virtues which dissipate our cares, and alleviate our sorrows.

10. It is now two hundred years since attempts have been made, and unceasingly persevered in, by the pious and benevolent, to civilize, and Christianize, the North American savage, until millions of those unfortunate beings, including many entire tribes, have become extinct. The few who remain within the precincts of civilized society, stand as human monuments of Gothick grandeur, fearful and tremulous amid the revolutions of time.

11. Neither the pride of rank, the allurements of honours, nor the hopes of distinction, can afford to the Indian a ray of comfort, or the prospect of better days. He contemplates the past as the returnless seasons of happiness and joy, and rushes to the wilderness as a refuge from the blandishments of art, and the pomp and show of polished society, to seek, in his native solitudes, the cheerless gloom of ruin and desolation, NATIONAL (CINCINNATI) REPUBLICAN,

1.

LESSON LXIX.

Description of Winter.

[By the author of the Fall of the Indian.]

Hark to the voice of Winter! He hath laid
His grasp on the wilderness, and tossed
The shivering garments of the woods aloft,
Forth to the warring elements. He rends
The venerable oak, and moss green pine,
And strews their splintered fragments in the dust,

2. Lo! on the midnight tempest he hath flung
His flowing mantle, and at morn the hills
Are sprinkled with its snowy particles,
And field, and precipice, and cottage
roof.
He gives the frost its message, and the brook
That in the hollow valley runs its race,
Halts in its pebbly channel, and its face
Soon wears the fixed and stony gaze of death.

3.

4.

Then happy he who hath a cheerful home,
And blazing fire, and pillow for his head;
For long and loud the pitiless tempest blows,
And 'gainst the door and rattling casement knocks,
Or up the chimney lifts its ruffian voice.

Yet beautiful art thou, Winter, and thy reign
With many a merry frolick is made glad;

Fair are the woods, where bends the frozen bough,
With many a bright festoon and garland white,
And round the knotty trunk an icy crust
Of thick transparent ice is firmly clasped.

5. Then on the lake, beneath the winter moon,
The skaters sweep in many a mazy ring;
And many a loud tumultuous shout is raised
As skips the ball along the polished ice,
And down the neighbouring steep the boyish sled
Cleaves in white furrows the unspotted snow.

LESSON LXX.

Sketch of the History of Printing.

1. THE business of transcribing the remains of Grecian and Roman literature became a useful, an innocent, and a pleasing employ to many of those, who, in the dark ages, would else have pined in the listless languor of monastick retirement. Exempt from the avocations of civil life, incapable of literary exertion from the want of books and opportunities of improvement, they devoted the frequent intervals of religious duty to the transcription of authors whom they often little understood. 2. The servile office of a mere copyist was not disdained by those who knew not to invent; and the writers in the scriptorium were inspired with an emulation to excel in the beauty