touches of fortune brushed off the light, uncertain, selfish spirits. They made it a grave, solemn, self-denying expedition, and required of those who engaged in it to be so too. They cast a broad shadow of thought and seriousness over the cause; and if this sometimes deepened into melancholy and bitterness, can we find no apology for such a human weakness?

3. Their trials of wandering and exile, of the ocean, the winter, the wilderness, and the savage foe, were the final assurances of success. It was these that put far away from our fathers' cause, all patrician" softness, all hereditary claims to preëminence. No effeminate nobility crowded into the dark and austere ranks of the pilgrims.

4. Methinks I see one solitary, adventurous vessel, the Mayflower, of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future state, and bound across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished for shore. I see them now scantily supplied with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison; delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route; and now driven in fury before the raging tempest, on the high and giddy waves. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging.

5. The 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 ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening, shivering weight, against the staggering 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 ship-master for a draught of beer on board, drinking nothing but water on shore, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes.

a Patri'cian; noble, of noble family or state. b Nobility; persons of rank in a monarchy. c Plymouth; a town in Massachusetts, where the Pilgrims first settled.

6. 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 a 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.

7. 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, an expansion so ample, a reality so important, a promise, yet to be fulfilled, so glorious?

1. How slow yon tiny vessel plows the main!
Amid the heavy billows now she seems
A toiling atom; then from wave to wave
Leaps madly, by the tempests lashed, or reels,
Half wrecked, through gulfs profound.

2.

Moons wax and wane,

But still that lonely traveler treads the deep;

a Tomahawk; an Indian hatchet.

3.

4.

I see an ice-bound coast, toward which she steers
With such a tardy movement, that it seems
Stern Winter's hand hath turned her keel to stone,
And sealed his victory on her slippery shrouds."
They land! — They land!

Forth they come

From their long prison, hardy forms, that brave
The world's unkindness, men of hoary hair,
And virgins of firm heart, and matrons grave.
Bleak Nature's desolation wraps them round,
Eternal forests, and unyielding earth,

And savage men who through the thickets peer
With vengeful arrow.

To this drear desert?

What could lure their steps

Ask of him who left

His father's home to roam through Haran's wilds,
Distrusting not the Guide who called him forth,
Nor doubting, though a stranger, that his seed
Should be as Ocean's sands.

5.

But yon lone bark

6.

Hath spread her parting sail. They crowd the strand,
Those few, lone pilgrims. Can ye scan the woe
That wrings their bosoms, as the last frail link
Binding to man, and habitable earth,

Is severed? Can ye tell what pangs were there,
What keen regrets, what sickness of the heart,
What yearnings o'er their forfeit land of birth,
Their distant dear ones?

Long, with straining eyes

They watch the lessening speck. Hear ye no shriek
Of anguish, when that bitter loneliness

Sank down into their bosoms? No! they turn
Back to their dreary, famished huts, and pray!

Pray, - and the ills that haunt this transient life

a Shrouds; ropes that support the masts of vessels. b Peer; to look narrowly. c Ha'-ran; the place in which Abraham and his father dwelt. 8

Fade into air. Up in each girded breast
There sprang a rooted and mysterious strength,
A loftiness, to face a world in arms,
To strip the pomp from scepter and to lay
Upon the sacred altar the warm blood
Of slain affections, when they rise between
The soul and God.

1.

And can ye deem it strange
That from their planting, such a branch should bloom
As nations envy? Would a germ, embalmed
With prayer's pure tear-drops, strike no deeper root
Than that which mad ambition's hand doth strew
Upon the winds, to reap the winds again?
Hid by its veil of waters from the hand
Of greedy Europe, their bold vine spread forth
In giant strength. Its early clusters, crushed
In England's wine-press, gave the tyrant host
A draught of deadly wine.

8.

O, ye who boast

In your free veins the blood of sires like these,
Lose not their lineaments. Should Mammon cling
Too close around your heart, or wealth beget
That bloated luxury which eats the core
From manly virtue, or the tempting world
Make faint the Christian purpose in your soul,
Turn ye to Plymouth's beach, and on that rock'
Kneel in their foot-prints, and renew the vow
They breathed to God.

LESSON VI.

WESTWARD MOVEMENT OF CIVILIZATION.

MORLEY.

1. DECIDEDLY one of the most interesting points in the past history of the United States, is the striking illustration it has afforded of the great law of civilization, its movement from east to west. It was a direct and startling demonstration of

a Mam'mon; the god of riches, riches. b Rock; the Plymouth rock where the pilgrims first landed.

the truth which history has long labored to indicate. The land upon which the sun of civilization first rose, we know not with certainty; but as far back as our vision can extend, we behold it shining upon the most eastern limits of the eastern hemisphere.

2. Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, we behold successively lighted up, as the majestic orb rolls over them; and as he advances still farther through his storied and mysterious zodiac, we behold the shadows of evening as surely stealing upon the lands, which he leaves behind him.

3. Rome falls before the adventurous and destructive Goth; and for a moment the world seems darkened; but vast causes, new materials, conflicting elements, are silently at work to produce order out of apparent chaos, through the long eclipse of the dark ages; and when light is again, restored, behold the radiance which we first worshiped on the shores of the Indian ocean, has at last reached and illumined the whole coast of the Atlantic, while the most western states of Europe are rejoicing in its beams.

4. Here, it would seem, the sun's course was finished. The law which has hitherto visibly governed his career, must be reversed; the world's western limit has been reached, and either his setting is at hand, or he must roll backward through his orbit. But it is not so. Just as we were about to doubt the universality of the law, which we believed indubitably and historically established, the world swings open upon its hinges, and reveals another world beyond the ocean, as vast and perfect as itself.

5. America starts into existence, the long forgotten dream of the ancients is revived and realized, and the world's history is rounded into as complete a circle as its physical conformation. We have said that the exemplification of the westward march of culture was the most striking feature in the history of America. Connected with this however, and hardly of less importance, is the illustration which it affords us of the man

a As-syr-i-a; an ancient country now a part of Turkey in Asia. b The Goths were an ancient people once occupying what is now Sweden.