plains; vastness and variety everywhere expand and elevate the soul. Who can ascend one of our lofty heights, and look out upon the panorama below and around him, without feelings of wonder and delight? Whether you gaze upon the extended shores of New England, the vast prairies of the West, the gardens of the South, the forests of the North, or the valleys and hills of the Pacific coast, you behold a wealth of beauty and grandeur utterly beyond the power of description.

The field of natural science is immense and inexhaustible. If God had designed, as he surely did, that the American people should be especially thoughtful and scholarly; that choice minds should here develop their best powers of observation, analysis, and generalization, he could not have more distinctly indicated his plan than by the endless variety in every department of natural history distributed through this large territory. The lover of flowers, the entomologist, the geologist, the mineralogist, indeed all students of Nature, find here their most intense interest gratified.

How benignly did God in his works of old adjust all this to the culture and development of a refined people! How evidently did he, moreover, design that our vast lakes and navigable rivers and extended coast should call out the commercial activity necessary to the highest civilization! Dr. Baird, in his "Religion in America," well says, "No continental country in the world, of equal extent, can compare with the United States in regard to advantages for commerce. On the north, the great lakes, and their outlet the St. Lawrence, drain portions of ten States and Territories, which include 112,649 square miles; on the east, fifteen States touch the Atlantic, and the portion of the country which slopes in that direction contains 514,416 square miles; the Pacific slope contains 766,000 square miles; while the four States and a half which border on the Gulf of Mexico contain 325,537 square miles. This leaves to the great Central Basin, drained by the Mississippi and its branches, no less

than 1,217,562 square miles, in which are already at least 10,000,000 inhabitants." Our shore line reaches 33,069 miles, and "the extent of our navigable rivers is more than 40,000 miles."

How clear also is the divine purpose that the mechanical exigencies of the coming ages here should be furnished with materials and inducements to render available the strongest propensities for invention and discovery, affording to the useful arts their highest development, and providing that the American mind should lead the world in the great departments of steam and electricity!

What resources of agriculture, what quantities of the precious metals, of coal, iron, and timber, were produced here long ages before they would be wanted, that when this goodly land should swarm with an industrious, enterprising population, there should be no want of bread, or valuable exchanges, .or materials for comfort and toil needed for the highest progress and destiny!

We mean not that any of the natural advantages enumerated in this chapter are restricted to this country: but they are here in a degree of perfection, in a richness of variety, and upon a scale so vast as to indicate the largest designs of a beneficent Creator with regard to the nation to be established here. The immigrants with Newport affirmed that "heaven and earth seemed never to have agreed better to frame a place for man's commodious and delightful habitation."

"Take four of the best kingdoms in Christendom," said Sir Thomas Dale twenty-six years later, "and put them all together, they may no way compare with this country, either for commodities, or goodness of soil."

Let two contrasts suffice to place our views upon this general subject in the strongest light. Russia, the most powerful despotic government on the globe, must forever suffer from the severity of her climate and her vast fields of ice. What but empire itself would her emperor not give for the

single harbor of New York or of San Francisco, with sea room for commanding the commerce and fighting the battles of the world? Is there no special Providence in shutting up the greatest rival power on earth within the frozen North, while the great oceans of the East and West, and finally of the globe, furnish sea room for the nation of freemen?

England, the great representative of the transition state, the power through which free principles are to pass out to the nations of Europe and the East, has extensive colonies and vast territory; but there is a wide difference between her remote and scattered provinces and the compact extended domain of American freedom.

Now, let it be remembered that all these ample provisions and adjustments were made in the remote past for a people, and order of civilization, known only to Omniscience, and how clear the evidence that the Infinite Mind has prepared this country for some notable progress in the history of the race, and the manifestation of his power and glory in the exercise of his own sovereignty!

CHAPTER III.

COLONIZATION OVERRULED.

How quick was the love of gain to assume that a new world was thrown open to its adventurers; that whether the discovered land were ancient India or Ophir, or a succession of islands or a continent, it must be seized as the rightful possession of craving selfishness to fill up the coffers of individuals, of companies, and of monarchs, with shining gold and precious gems! But how distinctly did Providence say. as colony after colony came to this virgin land, "I have not chosen you"! It reminds one of the scene in the house of Jesse, when the prophet of God was there to anoint a king. One after another, the sons of this Bethlehemite passed by; but the elect of Jehovah was not there. From the shepherd's field came up at last the ruddy boy who was the chosen monarch of Israel's hosts. Thus passed the greedy throngs who thought to claim this magnificent inheritance, only to be whelmed by the surges of disaster until "there was none of them."

FRANCE UNSUCCESSFUL.

Cartier, the gallant navigator of gallant France, could resolve to colonize New France in the region of the St. Lawrence, and in 1535 take his departure with absolution and the benediction of the bishop; but he must be defeated by influences against which no human foresight could provide. Roberval could feel the elevation of his commission from Francis I. as "lord of the unknown Norimbza, and viceroy,

with full regal authority "* over New France; but he must be thwarted by contentions with his predecessor and rival, Cartier. Fifty years later, the Marquis de la Roche would try it again, but entirely fail. Chauvin and Pontgravé would make the effort in 1600, but without success. Champlain could found a settlement, but no French nation. The French monarch could cede by patent the whole Atlantic coast, from the future Philadelphia to Montreal, to the noble Calvinist De Monts, with religious toleration for the persecuted Huguenots; but hostile savages, fierce winds, and shipwrecks, with successive discouragements to all future attempts of sovereign and adventurers, would deny to the French people the permanent occupancy of the future territory of freedom.

We mourn the tragic end of the colony of French Protestants in Carolina attempted under the auspices of the great Admiral Coligny, and we execrate the cruel Roman-Catholic bigotry which doomed them to indiscriminate slaughter; but it was not possible that they should establish French nationality here, nor that their murderers should ultimately profit by their enormous crime. The Huguenots would at length find a home in the bosom of the free Republic.

SPAIN MEETS WITH INSUPERABLE DIFFICULTIES.

Spain was heroic, and covetous of empire, and would defy all hardships to gain it in the New World. Look at this desperate struggle against the plans of Providence.

Columbus discovered America in 1492, for so God willed; but neither he nor his successors could make it a Spanish province, nor convert it into a continent of Romanists. The pope, as we have seen, commanded the division of "the undiscovered world" between Portugal and Spain; but the Power above would not suffer the order to be obeyed.

The valiant Ponce de Leon, from his discovery of Florida in 1513, dazzled with charms of wealth and power, struggled

*Bancroft, i. 22.