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the world a greater confidence in its strength and permanence, but to shed the electric current of awakened chivalry and patriotism through every vein and artery of our nation.

And now that the conflict has come, let us hope that it will be waged until this great question between freedom and slavery is here settled forever. Jefferson pronounced our Constitution "a capitulation between conflicting opinions and interests." Now that the truce is broken, though no act or fault of ours, let there be no more capitulation till one party or the other has triumphed. We have faith to believe that this war is to prove "the beginning of the end " of slavery. God knows how to make the wrath of man to praise him. Every step the slave-power has taken to strengthen itself, for years past, has only weakened it and hastened the final crisis. The Fugitive Slave Law-the repeal of the Missouri Compromise-the wickednesses in Kansas-the Dred Scott dicta-the insolent demand that slavery shall be considered the pet of the Constitution, and be carried and protected wherever our flag floats, all designed to give the South power, have successively proved the providential means of alienating the sympathies of the North-goads to quicken the people to opposition, and to educate them to the purpose of saying to slavery, thus far, but no farther. With the infatuation of those doomed to destruction, the conspirators have now sought to overthrow the government for the purposes of their ambition. But designing to perpetuate slavery, they have only sealed its more speedy destruction. They have made it impossible that any party at the North shall dare to co-operate with them hereafter. They have taught those dependent upon them for cotton to emancipate themselves from their dependence by opening new fields for its cultivation. They have given the Unionist and non-slaveholders of their States the needed occasion to rid themselves of their domination. their piratical" letters of marque," they have compelled the merchants of the North to demand their overthrow. By their barbarities, treachery and repudiations, they have separated themselves from the moral fellowship of mankind. Like the dog in the fable, possessed of power, they have thrown it away in their greediness for more. Boasting that cotton is king, they have themselves broken its sceptre, and seeking to inaugurate a more complete despotism, they have

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solved the problem of our politics,and opened the door of emancipation. Let us hope that our authorities will do nothing to hinder or delay the work thus begun.

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The conflict, indeed, is to be no boy's play. Desperate men have staked their all on this last throw, and they will. fight as desperate men must. Moreover, though the leaders of the rebellion are unpardonably criminal, the masses of the people are honest. Deceived as to the purposes of the North, they think the contest one for "their homes and their firesides." They see in it, according to their ideas, the charms of romance, the appeals of patriotism, the sanctions of religion. All this will intensify the struggle. No matter. The time for compromise has past," said the late compromiser, General Butler, in a recent speech at Washington, and "the time for compromise has passed" echo men of all parties throughout the entire North; while from the slave States themselves comes up the answering cry, "Let the blow, as it must be terrible, be quick, hard, decisive. Let there be no halting at the Capital; no halting at Richmond; no halting at Charleston; no halting at Montgomery longer than to hang the traitors who have plotted treason there; and no halting even at the extremest southern coast of the Union, until freedom's troops shall have planted freedom's starry flag upon every battlement and every fort in the rebel domain. They have invited war, and war let it be." Let there be no more hesitation or irresolution. Offensive war now becomes defensive. Let there be no negotiation, no more patching up of truces or bargains. The blood of the slain cries from the ground-not for vengeance, but for justice. Compromise, mediation, adjustment become now complicity with treason. Let the South still hug to their breasts the curse of slavery, if they can and will; but let them understand that this talk of its extension, that these arrogant airs, that these insolent claims. for power are done with forever. The country is in earnest -without respect to former policy or opinions, in earnest. "Let us," says one of the extremest of the Northern sympathizers with the South hitherto, "let us settle this thing speedily and surely. It may ruin this generation; but we owe it to the next that they shall have no such troubles as

7 Delaware State Journal and Gazette.

we have had. Let us strike now in our might, and, if necessary, wipe the rebels from the face of the earth. Let us finish things while we are about it." 8 This is the voice of the people, and in this case the voice of the people is the voice of God. Woe to the man-woe to the administration or party, that dares to disregard this bidding.

We have spoken confidently as to the result. If those who guide our affairs are faithful, and thus morally as well as intellectually equal to the occasion as we believe they are success is certain. To doubt this is atheism. Not only have we legal right and the whole spirit of the Constitution and all the material resources of a great government on one side, every principle that God approves is with us. Christianity is with us. The sympathies of all good men are with us. The pleadings of the slave and the prayers of the oppressed every where are with us. All the forces of civilization are with us. Events, too, are all on our side. Italy, in her restored unity, shakes herself from the dust and kindles a beacon for our encouragement. The growing liberalism of France tells of the tendency of history. The softening despotism of Austria and the crumbling dominion of the Pope proclaim the power of ideas. And autocratic Russia, hitherto so cold and stern in her absolutism, breaking the chains of her serfs and bidding twenty millions of slaves to stand up as men, sends across Europe and from her distant Asiatic shores the words of Christian cheer. If our rulers are men, we cannot fail. Let us believe that they are men, and that they will do their duty, and give them our confidence. While demanding that the war shall be short, let us guard against impatience. While exacting justice, let us watch against the spirit of retaliation and of vengeance. While sympathizing with those who go forth to fight the battles of liberty and of law, let us be careful of those they leave behind. And amidst all the rest, let us learn the lessons of principle, and nurture ourselves in sympathy with the ideas our flag is henceforth to represent. Thank God that that flag has been so flung out over mast and home, and that its colors are so worn above the hearts of our people and even of our childrenthe witness of the universal loyalty, and the proclamation of the purpose to stand by the government come what may. 8 Hon. D. S. Dickinson, of New York, in a recent speech.

Thank God for what that flag is and for what it has done. Hitherto, it has represented our nationality; to-day, it floats the type of law and of the sovereignty of constitutional forms; henceforth, let us be assured, when the clouds that now obscure our heavens and the dust of this conflict have passed, it shall wave the symbol not only of these, but of human equality and the inalienable rights of man.

It was an affecting sight, the other day, at the grand gathering of thousands in New York, to attest their devotion to the Union,-fitly appointed in Union Square-to see the smoked and tattered flag of Sumpter, pierced by traitors' balls, but not a star gone, waving above Washington's statue and held in his hand. Bearing that banner thus aloft with one hand, and pointing to God with the other, might we not well feel that, serene and massive, he symbolized the genius of our institutions? We will accept the omen. Out from this conflict, our republic shall emerge unharmed. However its flag may be assailed, or torn, or enveloped in the smoke of battle, it shall not be trampled or humbled, but still be borne aloft, not one star missing from its constellation, waving over a reunited and henceforth undivided people, while our government shall stand to cheer the nations, and our country go forward, pervaded by a common life and fulfilling its appointed destiny.

E. G. B.

ART. XXI.

Poetry in Prose.

POETRY is more in feeling than in thought. It is a plant that has its roots in our sensational rather than in our intellectual being. A thought that starts the blood and makes it tingle, that makes one leap out of his chair, as though startled by the touch of divine power, that drowns momentarily all distinctness of thought and sends a flood of passion pouring upon the brain, and makes a pigmy feel the forces

of a giant pulsation through his veins, that thought is poetry; that is the thought that creates a soul under the ribs of death, and gives to airy nothings a local habitation and a name. Nothing but the vision and the faculty divine can generate such a thought. It is not always found in the sounding brass and tinkling symbols of rhyme, but sometimes burns and leaps along the lines of sober prose. It is a something which we call genius that creates it, and genius is a singular combination of heart and brain, of thought and feeling, which will prolate this power, whether it speaks in prose or poetry. The world has long since, in her high court of literature, assigned definite places to her Milton, Dante, Shakespere, as among the greatest poets of the race. But we must put some others there beside them, as men possessed of the divine afflatus that can create something of nothing, that can startle thought and feeling into wonderfully strange and powerful movement. Hence, we refer to the poets who have written in prose, and who have possessed all the power of intellect that the great poets of the world have indicated.

The mountains are few that stand so high as to become the property of great regions, so the minds are few that loom up so as to become the property of mankind. Such minds appear to fall back into the glowing symbolisms of antiquity, and we invest them with mysteries and meanings that do not dwell in them. Great men fade into common mortals when we come near to them. It is seldom that their power looks out of their eyes or sits throned upon their brows. Their greater powers are never obtrusive; they are rather coy, and retreat into the distance from common observation; there they only glimmer upon the edge of the world, like the lightning upon the edge of the summer cloud. Still some men have a little of the material type of greatness in their faces-thunder is always marshalling its forces upon the brow of Napoleon, and the serenity of a great sea-calm forever sleeps upon the brow of Washington, and the weightiest gravity of greatness is throned upon Webster's features. But the mysterious burning power of the poet, that which, by the heat processes of intellect, crystallizes the spirituelle of a landscape, or the deductions from the conflicts of an age of action, never sits upon the countenance. This power is only intermittent, and when it leaves we see its

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