foam and the sifting of the sea-sand;- even the white down of the cloud seeming to flutter up between the stronger plumes, seen, but too soft for touch.

And so the Spirit of the Air is put into, and upon, this created form; and it becomes, through twenty centuries, the symbol of divine help, descending, as the Fire, to speak, but as the Dove, to bless.

Ruskin.

The Veto Power.

Mr. President, I protest against the right of any chief to come into either House of Congress, and scrutinize the motives of its members; to examine whether a measure has been passed with promptitude or repugnance; and to pronounce upon the willingness or unwillingness with which it has been adopted or rejected. It is an interference in concerns which partakes of a domestic nature. The official and constitutional relations between the President and the two Houses of Congress subsist with them as organized bodies. His action is confined to their consummated proceedings, and does not extend to measures in their incipient stages, during their progress through the Houses, nor to the motives by which they are actuated.

There are some parts of this message that ought to excite deep alarm; and that especially in which the President announces that each public officer may interpret the constitution as he pleases. His language is, "Each public officer who takes an oath to support the constitution, swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others." "The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges; and on that point the President is independent of both." Now, Mr. President, I conceive, with great deference, that the President has mistaken the purport of the oath to support the constitution of the United States. No one swears to support it as he understands it, but to support it simply as it is in truth. All men are bound to obey the laws, of which the constitution is the supreme; but must they obey them as they are, or as they understand them?

If the obligation of obedience is limited and controlled by the measure of information; in other words, if the party is bound to obey the constitution only as he understands it, what will be the consequence? The judge of an inferior court will disobey the mandate of a superior tribunal, because it is not in conformity to the constitution as he understands it; a custom-house officer will disobey a circular from the treasury department, because contrary to the constitution as he understands it; an American minister will disregard an instruction from the President, communicated from the department of state, because not agreeable to the constitution as he understands it; and a subordinate officer in the army or navy will violate the orders of his superiors, because they are not in accordance with the constitution as he understands it.

We shall have nothing settled, nothing stable, nothing fixed. There will be general disorder and confusion throughout every branch of the administration, from the highest to the lowest officer -universal nullification. For, what is the doctrine of the President but that of South Carolina applied throughout the Union? The President independent both of Congress and the Supreme Court ! Only bound to execute the laws of the one and the decisions of the other as far as they conform to the constitution of the United States as he understands it! Then it should be the duty of every President, on his installation into office, carefully to examine all the acts in the statute book, approved by his predecessors, and mark out those which he is resolved not to execute, and to which he means to apply this new species of veto, because they are repugnant to the constitution as he understands it. And, after the expiration of every term of the Supreme Court, he should send for the record of its decisions, and discriminate between those which he will, and those which he will not, execute, because they are or are not agreeable to the constitution as he understands it.

Mr. President, we are about to close one of the longest and most arduous sessions of Congress under the present constitution; and when we return among our consutuents what account of the operations of their government shall we be bound to communicate? We shall be compelled to say that the Supreme Court is paralyzed, and the missionaries retained in prison in contempt of its authority and in defiance of numerous treaties and laws of the United States;

that the executive, through the secretary of the Treasury, sent to Congress a tariff bill which would have destroyed numerous branches of our domestic industry; and, to the final destruction of all, that the veto has been applied to the bank of the United States, our only reliance for a sound and uniform currency; that the Senate has been violently attacked for the exercise of a clear constitutional power; that the House of Representatives have been unnecessarily assailed; and that the President has promulgated a rule of action for those who have taken the oath to support the constitution of the United States, that must, if there be practical conformity to it, introduce general nullification and end in the absolute subversion of the government.

Henry Clay.

Marco Bozzaris.

At midnight, in his guarded tent,

The Turk was dreaming of the hour
When Greece, her knee in suppliance bent,
Should tremble at his power:

In dreams, through camp and court, he bore
The trophies of a conqueror;

In dreams his song of triumph heard;
Then wore his monarch's signet ring:
Then pressed that monarch's throne -
As wild his thoughts, and gay of wing,
As Eden's garden bird.

At midnight, in the forest shades,

Bozzaris ranged his Suliote band,

True as the steel of their tried blades,
Heroes in heart and hand.

a king;

There had the Persian's thousands stood,
There had the glad earth drunk their blood
On old Platea's day;

And now there breathed that haunted air
The sons of sires who conquered there,
With arm to strike and soul to dare,

As quick, as far as they.

"To arms! they come! the Greek! the Greek!" He woke to die midst flame, and smoke, And shout, and groan, and sabre-stroke,

And death shots falling thick and fast As lightnings from the mountain-cloud; And heard, with voice as trumpet loud, Bozzaris cheer his band:

"Strike-till the last armed foe expires; Strike for your altars and your fires; Strike

for the green graves of your sires,

God, and your native land!"

They fought-like brave men, long and well;
They piled that ground with Moslem slain,
They conquered-but Bozzaris fell,

Bleeding at every vein.

His few surviving comrades saw

His smile when rang their proud hurrah,
And the red field was won;

Then saw in death his eyelids close
Calmly, as to a night's repose,

Like flowers at set of sun.

Come to the bridal-chamber, Death!
Come to the mother's, when she feels,
For the first time, her first-born's breath:
Come when the blessed seals

That close the pestilence are broke,
And crowded cities wail its stroke;
Come in consumption's ghastly form,
The earthquake shock, the ocean-storm;
Come when the heart beats high and warm,

With banquet-song, and dance and wine:

And thou art terrible the tear,

The groan, the knell, the pall, the bier;
And all we know, or dream, or fear

Of agony, are thine.

But to the hero, when his sword

Has won the battle for the free,
Thy voice sounds like a prophet's word;
And in its hollow tones are heard

The thanks of millions yet to be.
Come, when his task of fame is wrought-
Come, with her laurel-leaf, blood bought-
Come in her crowning hour—and then
Thy sunken eye's unearthly light
To him is welcome as the sight

Of sky and stars to prisoned men:
Thy grasp is welcome as the hand
Of brother in a foreign land;
Thy summons welcome as the cry
That told the Indian isles were nigh
To the world-seeking Genoese.
When the land wind, from woods of palm,
And orange-groves, and fields of balm,
Blew o'er the Haytian seas.

Bozzaris! with the storied brave
Greece nurtured in her glory's time,
Rest thee-there is no prouder grave,
Even in her own proud clime.

She wore no funeral-weeds for thee,

Nor bade the dark hearse wave its plume Like torn branch from death's leafless tree In sorrow's pomp and pageantry,

The heartless luxury of the tomb: But she remembers thee as one Long loved and for a season gone; For thee her poet's lyre is wreathed, Her marble wrought, her music breathed; For thee she rings the birthday bells; Of thee her babes' first lisping tells; For thee her evening prayer is said At palace-couch and cottage-bed; Her soldier, closing with the foe, Gives for thy sake a deadlier blow: