Fit woman to have been the "mother of the Gracchi," and like whom, had all Roman mothers been, Rome might to this day have boasted an unbroken progeny of heroes.

The stamina of a nation depends on the character of its women. If the mothers are intelligent and virtuous; if they teach nobly—the daughters modesty, industry, simplicity, and truth, and the sons, justice, honor, and patriotism-poverty,` bondage, and shame, can never come upon the land of which the children of such mothers are the most enduring basis and bulwark.

Thank God, the generation that planted the wilderness of the New World with the seeds of surpassing empire-an empire now radiant with light and liberty-had such mothers. Their sons and daughters were the precious freight of the "Speedwell" and the "Mayflower," and from the landing at Plymouth, through the centuries of peril and sacrifice, by which our fathers conquered the wilderness, the savage, and the bitter father-land oppressor-giving us wealth and fame when they had only poverty and obscurity-the race of noble' American mothers has been preserved. Mothers, and sisters, and wives, and daughters, unsurpassed! Mothers who taught their sons to worship God, to love their country, and to honor manhood; who led them to the altars of religion, and cheered them with brave hearts to the battle-fieid, buckling the shield to each young hero's arm, bidding him return victoriously with, or honorably dead upon it.

Are we grateful enough, and proud enough of the memory of such mothers? Do we realize how much we owe of our

national greatness and glory to them? Do we ask ourselves if their virtues are emulated and perpetuated in all the land? It were well if we did; for if it be not so, the sap begins to dry at the nation's root, and the most vital element of our endurance and strength will gradually pass away, leaving the tree of Freedom, under which the world has promise of shelter, rotten in the trunk and withered in all its branches.

God forbid that American women should degenerate from what their noble mothers were, in the young days of the New World and of the Republic. Better there never were a luxury or refinement-save the luxury of virtuous intelligence, and honest, independent industry, and the refinement that scorns every corrupting guilt-never a "princely" equipage, drawing-room, or boudoir, than that the land should cease to boast a race of women, who could dare the severest trials and sacrifices, were the nation's liberty imperilled, or furnish matrons and maidens, ready to turn their petticoats into cartridges, or, like "Moll Pitcher," at Trenton, "stand to the gun," when husband, brother, son, or lover had fallen, leaving no comrades to fill their places.

A noble race are American women- -God forbid that they should cease to be such. Nor will they, so long as they are taught that the truest beauty, grace, and glory of woman, lie in her intelligence, simplicity, and virtue. Teach her to love home and country, to honor parents and old age, to practise industry, and to respect sacred things; in short, educate her as a daughter fitly to become the wife of a freeman and the

mother of freemen, and ages hence, as now, she will eclipse her sex in all the world. God bless American women, and preserve to them for ever the virtues and graces of their glorious mothers.

WERT thou all that I wish thee, great, glorious and free,
First flower of the earth, and first gem
of the sea,
I might hail the with prouder, with happier brow,
But oh! could I love thee more deeply than now?

LANDING OF THE PILGRIMS.

THE breaking waves dashed high

On a stern and rock-bound coast, And the woods against a stormy sky, Their giant branches tossed;

And the heavy night hung dark

The hills and waters o'er,

When a band of exiles moored their bark
On the wild New England shore.

Not as the conqueror comes,

They, the true-hearted, came,

Not with the roll of the stirring drums,
And the trumpet that sings of fame.

Not as the flying come,

In silence, and in fear ;

They shook the depths of the desert's gloom

With their hymns of lofty cheer.

Amidst the storm they sang,

And the stars heard, and the sea;

And the sounding aisles of the dim woods rang

To the anthem of the free.

The ocean eagle soared

From his nest by the white wave's foam, And the rocking pines of the forest roared; This was their welcome home.

There were men with hoary hair,
Amid that pilgrim band,

Why had they come to wither there,
Away from their childhood's land?

There was woman's fearless eye,
Lit by her deep love's truth;
There was manhood's brow, serenely high,
And the fiery heart of youth.

What sought they thus afar?

Bright jewels of the mine?

The wealth of seas, the spoils of war?
They sought a faith's pure shrine !

Aye, call it holy ground,

The soil where first they trod!

They have left unstained what there they found

Freedom to worship God!