laboring classes, and throw them back into the distance beyond the light of hope, and the reach of successful competition. If you wish to be free indeed, you must be virtuous, temperate, well instructed, with the door of honor and profit open to you and to your children. As the sun draws up the whole body of the ocean it passes over, raising the tide in the career of his glorious way, so will the sun of righteous ness take hold of you and your families and raise them up, and bring them within the constant attraction of hope and virtue. Those who wish for the preservation of the sabbath, are not bigots; they do not seek a union of church and state; they seek the unextinguished lustre of that moral sun for your sake, who with it will rise and without it will go down to where all the laboring classes of the world have been, and now are-whom the bible and the sabbath have not emancipated and elevated.

It is the agriculturists, merchants, manufacturers and day laborers, of the nation, who must decide its destiny. It is your hearts that must be the sanctuary of liberty; and your conscience that must stand sentinel, to prevent her perversion, and your bodies that must constitute a rampart around those holy and blessed institutions of heaven, which God has given to man in the bible-whose blessings our fathers with toil and blood put in motion, and which with augmenting prosperity, at every step, have come down and are now rolling around us like the waves of the sea; blessings which urge themselves upon us, and from which we cannot flee, and whose blest intrusion we cannot resist, but by taking counsel once more to break the bands of Christ, and cast away his cords from us. We need not petition congress to spare the sabbath ; if they do, the people can desecrate the sacred day—the people must decide, each man for himself and his family, whether he will live under the government of God, and enjoy its sunshine, and breathe its liberty, and be elevated by its power and sanctified by its purity, and blessed by its exuberant, unnumbered and inexhaustible blessings; or, go back to the midnight of ignorance, and the bondage of corruption.

EXTRACT FROM A DISCOURSE,

DELIVERED ON THE DEDICATION OF THE CEMETERY AT MOUNT AUBURN.

BY JOSEPH STORY.

OUR Cemeteries rightly selected, and properly arranged, may be made subservient to some of the highest purposes of religion and human duty. They may preach lessons, to which none may refuse to listen, and which all, that live, must hear. Truths may be there felt and taught in the silence of our own meditations, more persuasive, and more enduring than ever flowed from human lips. The grave hath a voice of eloquence, nay, of superhuman eloquence, which speaks at once to the thoughtlessness of the rash, and the devotion of the good; which addresses all times, and all ages, and all sexes; which tells of wisdom to the wise, and of comfort to the afflicted; which warns us of our follies and our dangers; which whispers to us in accents of peace, and alarms us in tones of terror; which steals with a healing balm into the stricken heart, and lifts up and supports the broken spirit; which awakens a new enthusiasm for virtue, and disciplines us for its severer trials and duties; which calls up the images of the illustrious dead, with an animating presence for our example and glory; and which demands of us, as men, as patriots, as christians, as immortals, that the powers given by God should be devoted to his service, and the minds created by his love, should return to him with larger capacities for virtuous enjoyment, and with more spiritual and intellectual brightness.

It should not be for the poor purpose of gratifying our vanity or pride, that we should erect columns, and obelisks, and monuments to the dead; but that we may read thereon much of our own destiny and duty. We know, that man is the creature of associations and excitements. Experience may instruct, but habit, and appetite, and passion, and imagination, will exercise a strong dominion over him. These are the Fates, which weave the thread of his character, and unravel the mysteries of his conduct. The truth which strikes home, must not only have the approbation of his reason, but it must be embodied in a visible, tangible, practical form. It must be felt, as well as seen. It must warm, as well as convince.

It was a saying of Themistocles, that the trophies of Miltiades would not suffer him to sleep. The feeling, thus expressed, has a deep foundation in the human mind; and, as it is well or ill directed, it will cover us with shame, or exalt us to glory. The deeds of the great attract but a cold and listless admiration, when they pass in historical order before us like moving shadows. It is the trophy and the monument, which invest them with a substance of local reality. Who, that has stood by the tomb of Washington on the quiet Po tomac, has not felt his heart more pure, his wishes more aspi ing, his gratitude more warm, and his love of country touched by a holier flame? Who, that should see erected in shades like these, even a cenotaph to the memory of a man, like Buckminster, that prodigy of early genius, would not feel, that there is an excellence over which death hath no power, but which lives on through all time, still freshening with the lapse of ages.

But passing from those, who by their talents and virtues have shed lustre on the annals of mankind, to cases of mere private bereavement, who, that should deposit in shades, like these, the remains of a beloved friend, would not feel a secret pleasure in the thought, that the simple inscription to his worth would receive the passing tribute of a sigh from

thousands of kindred hearts? That the stranger and the traveller would linger on the spot with a feeling of reverence? That they, the very mourners themselves, when they should revisit it, would find there the verdant sod, and the fragrant flower, and the breezy shade? That they might there, unseen, except of God, offer up their prayers, or indulge the luxury of grief? That they might there realize, in its full force, the affecting beatitude of the scriptures; "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted ?"

Surely, surely, we have not done all our duty, if there yet remains a single incentive to human virtue, without its due play in the action of life, or a single stream of happiness, which has not been made to flow in upon the waters of affliction.

Considerations, like those, which have been suggested, have for a long time turned the thoughts of many distinguished citizens to the importance of some more appropriate places of sepulture. There is a growing sense in the community of the inconveniences, and painful associations, not to speak of the unhealthiness of interments, beneath our churches. The tide, which is flowing with such a steady and widening current into the narrow peninsula of our Metropolis, not only forbids the enlargement of the common limits, but admonishes us of the increasing dangers to the ashes of the dead from its disturbing movements. Already in other cities, the church-yards are closing against the admission of new incumbents, and begin to exhibit the sad spectacle of promiscuous ruins and intermingled graves.

We are, therefore, but anticipating at the present moment the desires, nay the necessities of the next generation. We are but exercising a decent anxiety to secure an inviolable home for ourselves and our posterity. We are but inviting our children and their descendants, to what the Moravian Brothers have, with such exquisite propriety, designated as "the Field of Peace."

A rural Cemetery seems to combine in itself all the ad

vantages, which can be proposed to gratify human feelings, or tranquillize human fears; to secure the best religious influences, and to cherish all those associations, which cast a cheerful light over the darkness of the grave.

And what spot can be more appropriate than this, for such a purpose? Nature seems to point it out with signi ficant energy, as the favorite retirement for the dead. There are around us all the varied features of her beauty and grandeur—the forest-crowned height; the abrupt acclivity; the sheltered valley; the deep glen; the grassy glade; and the silent grove. Here are the lofty oak, the beech, that "wreathes its old fantastic roots so high," the rustling pine, and the drooping willow;—the tree, that sheds its pale leaves į with every autumn, a fit emblem of our own transitory bloom; and the evergreen, with its perennial shoots, instructing us, that "the wintry blast of death kills not the buds of virtue." Here is the thick shrubbery to protect and conceal the newmade grave; and there is the wild-flower creeping along the narrow path, and planting its seeds in the upturned earth. All around us there breathes a solemn calm, as if we were in the bosom of a wilderness, broken only by the breeze as it murmurs through the tops of the forest, or by the notes of the warbler pouring forth his matin or his evening song.

Ascend but a few steps, and what a change of scenery to surprise and delight us. We seem, as it were in an instant, to pass from the confines of death, to the bright and balmy regions of life. Below us flows the winding Charles with its rippling current, like the stream of time hastening to the ocean of eternity. In the distance, the City,—at once the object of our admiration and our love,―rears its proud eminences, its glittering spires, its lofty towers, its graceful mansions, its curling smoke, its crowded haunts of business and pleasure, which speak to the eye, and yet leave a noiseless loneliness on the ear. Again we turn, and the walls of our venerable University rise before us, with many a rec