WORDS. WORDS are very important things. They are but breath, and yet what deep furrows of joy or sorrow do they plow in the human heart! How do harsh words rend the feelings, and fill the eyes with tears;-how do approving and kind words thrill like music, and often influence a whole life! Words have hurried men to vice,―words have bound men to virtue. As well might we sport with fire-brands, as be careless and inaccurate in the use of our words. Form, in early life, the habit of severe accuracy in the use of language,-words planed and chiseled by the law of truth; see that they express what you mean, and only what you mean; the slightest voluntary deviation is a lie, and every lie dishonors, and begrims, and bemires the soul. A PRAYER. O THOU that holdest in thy spacious hands The destinies of men! whose eye surveys Their various actions! Thou whose temple stands Tranquillity, and health, and length of days; The knowledge, and the power to conquer all Malice, hate, envy,—all that ill we call. To me a blameless life, Great Spirit, grant, Nor burdened with much care, nor narrowed by much want. FLOWERS. MARY HOWITT. GOD might have bade the earth bring forth, Enough for great and small, The oak-tree and the cedar-tree, Without a flower at all. He might have made enough, enough And yet have made no flowers. To beautify the earth;- For whoso careth for the flowers, ANCESTRY. BOAST not these titles of your ancestors, BEN JONSON. Brave youth; they're their possessions, none of yours; When your own virtues, equaled have their names, "Twill be but fair to lean upon their fames; For they are strong supporters; but, till then, It is a wretched thing to trust to reeds; Which all men do, that urge not their own deeds By which you're planted, shows your fruit shall bide; 'Tis virtue alone is true nobility; Which virtue from your father, ripe, will fall; Study illustrious him, and you have all. THE SCHOOL READER. FIFTH BOOK. PART THIRD. LESSON I. EXPLANATORY NOTES AND DEFINITIONS. ·1. DE MOS' THE NES, the prince of orators, rather than to fall into the hands of his enemies, destroyed himself by taking poison. 2. TUL' LY, or CICE RO, (Marcus Tullius Cicero), the great Roman orator, was murdered by Popilius, whose life had once been saved by his eloquence. His head and hands were affixed to the same rostrum, from which he had poured forth eloquence, surpassed by no human voice. 3. HY PER BOʻRE AN, (hyper, beyond or far; borean, northern), belonging to a region very far north; most northern. 4. AT LAN' TIS, a famous island, which, according to the ancients, once stood in the Atlantic ocean, but which was subsequently submerged. Some modern writers identify America with the lost Atlantis of the ancients. 5. SEN'E CA, a Roman philosopher and orator, who was tutor to NERO; but the sound precepts which he taught, were unheeded, and, after that cruel emperor had ascended the throne, he ordered Seneca to destroy himself, which he did. 6. THULE, an island far to the northwest of Europe, which was called by the ancients, ultima, the farthest, on account of its being regarded as the utmost limit of geographical knowledge in that quarter. THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE PEOPLE, THE SECURITY OF THE NATION. EDWARD EVERETT. 1. THE most powerful motives call on us, as scholars, for those efforts which our common country demands of all her children. Most of us are of that class, who owe whatever of knowledge has shone into our minds, to the free and popular institutions of our native land. There are few of us, who may not be permitted to boast that we have been reared in an honest poverty or a frugal competence, and owe every thing to those means of education, which are equally open to all. 2. We are summoned to new energy and zeal by the high nature of the experiment we are appointed in Providence to make, and the grandeur of the theater, on which it is to be performed. When the old world afforded no longer any hope, it pleased Heaven to open this last refuge to humanity. The attempt has begun, and is going on, far from foreign corruption, on the broadest scale, and under the most benignant auspices; and it certainly rests with us to solve the great problem in human society-to settle, and that forever, the momentous question—whether mankind can be trusted with a purely popular system of government? 3. One might almost think, without extravagance, that the departed wise and good, of all places and times, are looking down from their happy seats to witness what shall now be done by us; that they who lavished their treasures and their blood of old, who labored and suffered, who spake and wrote, who fought and perished, in the one great cause of freedom and truth, are now hanging, from their orbs on high, over the last solemn experiment of humanity. 4. As I have wandered over the spots, once the scenes of their labors, and mused among the prostrate columns of their senate-houses and forums, I have seemed almost to hear a voice from the tombs of departed ages, from the sepulchers of the nations which died before the sight. 5. They exhort us, they adjure us, to be faithful to our trust. They implore us, by the long trials of struggling humanity-by the blessed memory of the departed-by the dear faith which has been plighted, by pure hands, to the holy cause of truth and man-by the awful secrets of the prisonhouses, where the sons of freedom have been immured-by the noble heads which have been brought to the block-by the wrecks of time-by the eloquent ruins of nations, they conjure us not to quench the light which is rising on the world. Greece cries to us, by the convulsed lips of her poisoned, dying Demosthenes'; and Rome pleads with us in the mute persuasion of her mangled Tully.' 6. When we engage in that solemn study, the history of our race, when we survey the progress of man, from his cradle in the east to these last limits of his wandering,—when we behold him forever flying westward from civil and religious thralldom, bearing his household gods over mountains and seas, seeking rest and finding none, but still pursuing the flying bow of promise to the glittering hills which it spans in Hesperian climes, we can not but exclaim, "Westward the star of empire takes its way; The fifth shall close the drama with the day; 7. In this high romance, if romance it be, in which the great minds of antiquity sketched the fortunes of the ages to come, they pictured to themselves a favored region beyond the ocean, a land of equal laws and happy men. The primitive poets beheld it in the islands of the blest; the Doric bards fancied it in the Hyperborean3 regions; the sage of the academy placed it in the lost Atlantis*; and even the sterner spirit of Seneca could discern a fairer abode of humanity in distant regions then unknown. 8.. We look back upon these uninspired predictions, and almost recoil from the obligation they imply. By us must these fair visions be realized; by us must be fulfilled these high promises which burst in trying hours from the longing hearts of the champions of truth. There are no more continents or worlds to be revealed. Atlantis hath arisen from the ocean. The farthest Thule is reached; there are no more retreats beyond the sea, no more discoveries, no more hopes. 9. Here, then, a mighty work is to be fulfilled, or never, by the race of mortals. The man who looks with tenderness on the sufferings of good men in other times; the descendant of the Pilgrims, who cherishes the memory of his fathers; the patriot who feels an honest glow at the majesty of the system, of which he is a member; the scholar who beholds with rapture the long-sealed book of unprejudiced truth, opened for all to read;—these are they, by whom these auspices are to be accomplished. Yes; it is by the intellect of the country, that |