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Bethink ye what the whaler said,
Think of the little Indian's sled!"
The crew laughed out in glee.

"Sir John, Sir John, 'tis bitter cold,

The scud drives on the breeze,

The ice comes looming from the north, The very sunbeams freeze."

Bright summer goes, dark winter comes-
We cannot rule the year;

But long ere summer's sun goes down,

On yonder sea we'll steer."

The dripping icebergs dipped and rose,

And floundered down the gale ;

The ships were stayed, and yards were manned, And furled the useless sail.

'The summer's gone, the winter's come,

We sail not on yonder sea;

Why sail we not, Sir John Franklin?"
A silent man was he.

"The summer goes, the winter comes-
We cannot rule the year;

I ween, we cannot rule the ways,
Sir John, wherein we'd steer."

The cruel ice came floating on,

And closed beneath the lee,

Till the thickening waters dashed no more—
'Twas ice around, behind, before-
My God! there is no sea!

"What think you of the whaler now?
What of the Esquimaux !

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A sled were better than a ship,

To cruise through ice and snow."
Down sank the baleful crimson sun,
The Northern Light came out,
And glared upon the ice-bound ships,
And shook its spears about.

The snow came down, storm breeding storm,
And on the decks was laid;

Till the weary sailor, sick at heart,
Sank down beside his spade.

Sir John, the night is black and long,
The hissing wind is bleak;

The hard, green ice is strong as death;
I prithee, Captain, speak!"

"The night is neither bright nor short,
The singing breeze is cold,
The ice is not so strong as hope--
The heart of man is bold."

*What hope can scale this icy wall,
High o'er the main flag-staff?
Above the ridges the wolf and bear
Look-down with a patient, settled stare,
Look down on us and laugh."

The summer went, the winter came—
We could not rule the year:
But summer will melt the ice again,
And open a path to the sunny main,
Whereon our ships shall steer.

The winter went, the summer went,
The winter came around;

But the hard, green ice was atrong as death
And the voice of hope sank to a breath,

Yet caught at every sound.

"Hark! heard you not the noise of guns?
And there, and there again?"
"Tis some uneasy iceberg's roar,

As he turns in the frozen main.”
"Hurrah! hurrah! the Esquimaux
Across the ice-fields steal."
"God give them grace for their charity!
Ye pray for the silly seal.”

'Sir John, where are the English fields?
And where are the English trees?
And where are the little English flowers
That open in the breeze?"

"Be still, be still, my brave sailors!

You shall see the fields again,

And smell the scent of the opening flowers,
The grass and the waving grain."

"Oh! when shall I see my orphan child?

My Mary waits for me." "Oh! when shall I see my old mother,

And pray at her trembling knee?" "Be still, be still, my brave sailors,

Think not such thoughts again!"' But a tear froze slowly on his cheek; He thought of Lady Jane.

Ah! bitter, bitter grows the cold,

The ice grows more and more; More settled stare the wolf and bear, More patient than before.

"Oh! think you, good Sir John Franklin, We'll ever see the land?

'Twas cruel to send us here to starve Without a helping hand.

"Twas cruel to send us here, Sir John,
So far from help or home,

To starve and freeze on this lonely sea:
I ween the Lords of the Admiralty
Had rather send than come."

"Oh! whether we starve to death alone,
Or sail to our own country,

We have done what man has never done-
The open ocean danced in the sun-
We passed the Northern Sea!"

GEORGE H. BOKER

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

'IS mind a maxim, plain, yet keenly shrewd,
A neart with large benevolence endued;
Now scanning cause with philosophic aim,
And now arresting the ethereal flame;
Great as a statesman, as a patriot true,
Courteous in manners, yet exalted too;
A stern republican-by kings caressed,
Modest-by nations is his memory blessed.
WILLIAM B. TAPPAN.

A TRIBUTE TO SAMUEL ADAMS.

ET fame to the world sound America's voice; No intrigues can her sons from their government sever;

Her pride is her Adams; her laws are his
choice,

And shall flourish till liberty slumbers forever.
Then unite heart and hand,

Like Leonidas' band,

nd swear to the God of the ocean and land, That ne'er shall the sons of Columbia be slaves, While the earth bears a plant, or the sea rolls its

waves.

ROBERT TREAT PAINE.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW.

Oye dead poets, who are living still
Immortal in your verse.-Longfellow.

E mourn for those whose laurels fade,
Whose greatness in the grave is laid;
Whose memory few will care to keep,
Whose names, forgotten, soon shall sleep;
We mourn life's vainness, as we bow
O'er folded hands and icy brow.

Wan is the grief of those whose faith
Is bounded by the shores of death;
From out whose mists of doubt and gloom
No rainbow arches o'er the tomb
Where love's last tribute of a tear
Lies with dead flowers upon the bier.
O thou revered, beloved!—not yet,
With sob of bells, with eyes tear-wet,
With faltering pulses, do we lay
Thy greatness in the grave away;
Not Auburn's consecrated ground
Can hold the life that wraps thee round.

Still shall thy gentle presence prove
Its minstry of hope and love;
Thy tender tones be heard within
The story of Evangeline;
And by the fireside, midst the rest,
Thou oft shalt be a welcome guest.

Again the mystery will be clear;
The august Tuscan's shades appear;
Moved by thy impulse, we shall feel
New longings for thy high ideal;
And under all thy forms of art
Feel beatings of a human heart.

As in our dreams we follow thee
With longing eyes beyond the sea,
We see thee on some loftier height
Across whose trembling bridge of light
Our voices of the night are borne,
Clasp with white hand the stars of morn.

O happy poet! Thine is not
A portion of the common lot;
Thy works shall follow thee; thy verse
Shall still thy living thoughts rehearse ;
The ages shall to thee belong—
An immortality of song.

FRANCIS F. BROWNE.

THE WELCOME TO LAFAYETTE ON HIS RETURN TO AMERICA.

HE multitudes we see are not assembled to talk over their private griefs, to indulge in querulous complaints, to mingle their murmurs of discontent, to pour forth tales of real or imaginary wrongs, to give utterance to political recriminations. The effervescence of faction seems for the moment to be settled, the collision of discordant interests to subside, and hushed is the clamor of controversy. There is nothing portentous of danger to the commonwealth in this general awakening of the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the old and the young— this "impulsive ardor" which pervades the palace of wealth and the hovel of poverty, decrepit age and lisping fancy, virgin loveliness and vigorous manhood. No hereditary monarch graciously exhibits his august person to the gaze of vulgar subjects. No conquering tyrant comes in his triumphal car, decorated with the spoils of vanquished nations, and followed by captive princes, marching to the music of their chains. No proud and hypocritical hierarch, playing "fantastic airs before high Heaven," enacts his solemn mockeries to deceive the souls of men and secure for himself the honor of an apotheosis. The shouts which announce the approach of a chieftain are unmingled with any note of sorrow. No lovelorn maiden's sigh touches his ear; no groan from a childless father speaks reproach; no widow's curse is uttered, in bitterness of soul, upon the destroyer of her hope; no orphan's tear falls upon his shield to tarnish its brightness. The spectacle now exhibited to the world is of the purest and noblest character-a spectacle which man may admire and God approve an assembled nation offering the spontaneous homage of a nation's gratitude to a nation's benefactor.

JOSEPH T. BUCKINGHAM

WASHINGTON ALLSTON.

'HE element of beauty which in thee

Was a prevailing spirit, pure and high,
And from all guile had made thy being free,
Now seems to whisper thou canst never die!
For nature's priests we shed no idle tear:
Their mantles on a noble lineage fall:

Though thy white locks at length have pressed the bier
Death could not fold thee in oblivion's pall:
Majestic forms thy hand in grace arrayed

Eternal watch shall keep beside thy tomb,
And hues aërial, that thy pencil stayed,

Its shades with heaven's radiance illume:
Art's meek apostle, holy is thy sway,
From the heart's records ne'er to pass away.

HENRY THEodore TuckeRMAN.

WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING.

Burst from decorous quiet as he came.
Hot southern lips, with eloquence aflame,
Sounded his triumph. Texas, wild and grim,
Proffered its horny hand. The large-lunged West,
From out his giant breast,

Yelled its frank welcome. And from main to main,
Jubilant to the sky,

Thundered the mighty cry,

HONOR TO KANE!

In vain-in vain beneath his feet we flung
The reddening roses! All in vain we poured
The golden wine, and round the shining board
Sent the toast circling, till the rafters rung
With the thrice-tripled honors of the feast!
Scarce the buds wilted and the voices ceased
Ere the pure light that sparkled in his eyes,
Bright as auroral fires in southern skies,

Faded and faded! And the brave young heart
That the relentless Arctic winds had robbed
Of all its vital heat, in that long quest

HOU livest in the life of all good things;
What words thou spakest for freedom shall For the lost captain, now within his breast

not die ;

Thou sleepest not, for now thy love hath wings To soar where hence thy hope could hardly fly.

Farewell, good man, good angel now! this hand

Soon, like thine own, shall lose its cunning too;
Soon shall this soul, like thine, bewildered stand,
Then leap to thread the free unfathomed blue.
When that day comes, oh, may this hand grow cold,
Busy, like thine, for freedom and the right!

Oh, may this soul, like thine, be ever bold
To face dark knavery's encroaching blight!
JAMES RUSSELL Lowell.

a

HONOR TO KANE.

LOFT upon an old basaltic crag,

Which, scalped by keen winds that defend
the Pole,

Gazes with dead face on the seas that roll
Around the secret of the mystic zone,
A mighty nation's star-bespangled flag
Flutters alone,

And underneath, upon the lifeless front

Of that drear cliff, a simple name is traced;
Fit type of him who, famishing and gaunt,
But with a rocky purpose in his soul,

Breasted the gathering snows,
Clung to the drifting floes,

By want beleaguered, and by winter chased,
Seeking the brother lost amid that frozen waste.

Not many months ago we greeted him,

Crowned with the icy honors of the North,
Across the land his hard-won fame went forth,
And Maine's deep woods were shaken limb by limb.
His own mild Keystone State, sedate and prim,

More and more faintly throbbed.
His was the victory; but as his grasp
Closed on the laurel crown with eager clasp,

Death launched a whistling dart;
And ere the thunders of applause were done
His bright eyes closed forever on the sun!
Too late-too late the splendid prize he won
In the Olympic race of science and of art!
Like to some shattered berg that, pale and lone,
Drifts from the white North to a tropic zone,
And in the burning day
Wastes peak by peak away,

Till on some rosy even

It dies with sunlight blessing it; so he
Tranquilly floated to a southern sea,

And melted into heaven.

He needs no tears, who lived a noble life!
We will not weep for him who died so well;
But we will gather round the hearth, and tell
The story of his strife,

Such homage suits him well;
Better than funeral pomp, or passing bell.

What tale of peril and self-sacrifice!
Poisoned amid the fastnesses of ice,

With hunger howling o'er the wastes of snow!
Night lengthening into months; the ravenous floo
Crunching the massive ships, as the white bear
Crunches his prey. The insufficient share
Of loathsome food;

The lethargy of famine: the despair

Urging to labor, nervously pursued;
Toil done with skin y arms, and faces hued
Like pallid masks, while dolefully behind
Glimmered the fading embers of a mind.
That awful hour, when through the prostrate band
Delirium stalked, laying his burning hand

Upon the ghastly foreheads of the crew;
The whispers of rebellion, faint and few
At first, but deepening ever till they grew
Into black thoughts of murder: such the throng
Of horrors bound the hero. High the song
Should be that hymns the noble part he played!
Sinking himself—yet ministering aid

To all around him. By a mighty will
Living defiant of the wants that kill,
Because his death would seal his comrades' fate;
Cheering with ceaseless and inventive skill
Those Polar waters, dark and desolate.
Equal to every trial, every fate,

He stands, until spring, tardy with relief,

Unlocks the icy gate,

And the pale prisoners thread the world once more,
To the steep cliffs of Greenland's pastoral shore
Bearing their dying chief.

Time was when he should gain his spurs of gold
From royal hands, who wooed the knightly state;
The knell of old formalities is tolled,

And the world's knights are now self-consecrate
No grander episode doth chivalry hold

In all its annals, back to Charlemagne,
Than that lone vigil of unceasing pain,
Faithfully kept through hunger and through cold,
By the good Christian knight, Elisha Kane.
FITZ-JAMES O'BRIEN.

or triumphs of this world, on that quiet July morning James A. Garfield may well have been a happy man. No foreboding of evil haunted him; no slightest premonition of danger clouded his sky. His terrible fate was upon him in an instant. One moment he stood erect, strong, confident in the years stretching peacefully out before him; the next he lay wounded, bleeding, helpless, doomed to weary weeks of torture, to silence and the grave.

Great in life, he was surpassingly great in death. For no cause, in the very frenzy of wantonness and wickedness, by the red hand of murder, he was thru t from the full tide of this world's interest-from its hopes, its aspirations, its victories, into the visible presence of death, and he did not quail. Not alone for the one short moment in which, stunned and dazed, he could give up life hardly aware of its relinquishment, but through days of deadly languor, through weeks of agony that was not less agony because silently borne, with clear sight and calm courage he looked into his open grave. What blight and ruin met his anguished eyes whose lips may tell—what brilliant, broken plans, what baffled, high ambitions, what sundering of strong, warm, manhood's friendships, what bitter rending of sweet household ties! Behind him a proud, expectant nation; a great host of sustaining friends; a cherished and happy mother, wearing the full, rich honors of her early toil and tears: the wife of his youth, whose whole life lay in his; the little boys, not yet emerged from childhood's day of frolic; the fair young daughter; the sturdy sons just springing

EXTRACT FROM AN ORATION ON JAMES A. into closest companionship, claiming every day and

GARFIELD.

every day rewarding a father's love and care; and in his heart the eager, rejoicing power to meet all demands. Before him desolation and great darkness and his soul was not shaken. His countrymen were thrilled with instant, profound and universal sympathy. Masterful in his mortal weakness, he became the centre of a nation's love enshrined in the prayers of a world. But all the love and all the sympathy could not share with him his suffering. He trod the winepress alone. With unfaltering front he faced death. With unfailing tenderness he took leave of life. Above the demoniac hiss of the assassin's bullet he heard the voice of God. With simple resignation he bowed to the divine decree.

N the morning of Saturday, July 2d, the Presisident was a contented and happy man-not in an ordinary degree, but joyfully, almost boyishly happy. On his way to the railroad station, to which he drove slowly, in conscious enjoyment of the beautiful morning, with an unwonted sense of leisure and keen anticipation of pleasure, his talk was all in the grateful and gratulatory vein. He felt that after four months of trial his administration was strong in its grasp of affairs, strong in popular favor, and destined to grow stronger; that grave difficulties confronting him at his inauguration had been As the end drew near his early craving for the sea safely passed; that trouble lay behind him and not be- returned. The stately mansion of power had been to fore him; that he was soon to meet the wife whom he him the wearisome hospital of pain, and he begged to loved, now recovering from an illness which had but be taken from its prison walls, from its oppressive, lately disquieted and at times almost unnerved him; stifling air, from its homelessness and its hopelessness. that he was going to his Alma Mater to renew the Gently, silently, the love of a great people bore the most cheerful associations of his young manhood and pale sufferer to the longed-for healing of the sea to to exchange greetings with those whose deepening in- live or to die, as God should will, within sight of its terest had followed every step of his upward progress heaving billows, within sound of its manifold voices. from the day he entered upon his college course until With wan, fevered face tenderly lifted to the cooling he had attained the loftiest elevation in the gift of his breeze he looked out wistfully upon the ocean's changcountrymen. ing wonders; on its far sails, whitening the morning Surely if happiness can ever come from the honors light; on its restless waves, rolling shoreward to break

and die beneath the noonday sun; on the red clouds of evening, arching low to the horizon; on the serene and shining pathway of the stars. Let us think that his dying eyes read a mystic meaning which only the rapt and parting soul may know. Let us believe that in the silence of the receding world he heard the great waves breaking on a farther shore, and felt already upon his wasted brow the breath of the eternal morning. JAMES G. BLAINE.

QUEEN ELIZABETH.

ER singular talents for government were founded equally on her temper and on her capacity. Endowed with a great command over herself, she soon obtained an uncontrolled ascendant over her people; and while she merited all their esteem by her real virtues, she also engaged their affections by her pretended ones. Few sovereigns of England succeeded to the throne in more difficult circumstances; and none ever conducted the government with such uniform success and felicity. Though unacquainted with the practice of tolerationthe true secret for managing religious factions-she preserved her people, by her superior prudence, from those confusions in which theological controversy had involved all the neighboring nations: and though her enemies were the most powerful princes of Europe, the most active, the most enterprising, the least scrupulous, she was able by her vigor to make deep impressions on their states; her own greatness meanwhile remained untouched and unimpaired.

The wise ministers and brave warriors who flourished under her reign, share the praise of her success; but instead of lessening the applause due to her, they make great addition to it. They owed, all of them, their advancement to her choice; they were supported by her constancy, and with all their abilities, they were never able to acquire any undue ascendant over her. In her family, in her court, in her kingdom, she remained equally mistress: the force of the ten der passions was great over her, but the force of her mind was still superior; and the combat which her victory visibly cost her, serves only to display the firmness of her resolution, and the loftiness of her ambitious sentiments.

The fame of this princess, though it has surmounted the prejudices both of faction and bigotry, yet lies still exposed to another prejudice, which is more durable because most natural, and which, according to the different views in which we survey her, is capable either of exalting beyond measure or diminishing the lustre of her character. This prejudice is founded on the consideration of her sex. When we contemplate her as a woman, we are apt to be struck with the highest admiration of her great qualities and extensive capacity; but we are also apt to require some more

softness of disposition, some greater lenity of temper, some of those amiable weaknesses by which her sex is distinguished. But the true method of estimating her merit is to lay aside all these considerations, and consider her merely as a rational being placed in authority, and intrusted with the government of mankind. We may find it difficult to reconcile our fancy to her as a wife or a mistress; but her qualities as a sovereign, though with some considerable exceptions, are the object of undisputed applause and approbation DAVID HUNT.

CŒUR DE LION AT THE BIER OF HIS FATHER.

The body of Henry the Second lay in state in the abbey-church of Fontevrault, where it was visited by Richard Cœur de Lion, who, on beholding it, was struck with horror and remorse, and been the means of bringing his father to an untimely grave. bitterly reproached himself for that rebellious conduct which had

ORCHES were blazing clear,

Hymns pealing deep and slow,
Where a king lay stately on his bier
In the church of Fontevrault.

Banners of battle o'er him hung,

And warriors slept beneath,
And light as noon's broad light was flung
On the settled face of death:

On the settled face of death
A strong and ruddy glare-
Though dimmed at times by the censer's breath,
Yet it fell still brightest there;
As if each deeply furrowed trace

Of earthly years to show-
Alas! that sceptred mortal's race
Had surely closed in woe!

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