in one more at Philadelphia; the next it lighted a watchfire at Baltimore; thence it waked an answer at Annapolis. Crossing the Potomac near Mount Vernon, it was sent forward without a halt to Williamsburg. It traversed the Dismal Swamp to Nansemond, along the route of the first emigrants to North Carolina. It moved onwards and still onwards, through boundless groves of evergreen, to Newbern and to Wilmington. "For God's sake, forward it by night and by day," wrote Cornelius Harnett by the express which sped for Brunswick. Patriots of South Carolina caught up its tones at the border, and despatched it to Charleston, and through pines and palmettoes and moss-clad live-oaks, still further to the south, till it resounded among the New England settlements beyond the Savannah. Hillsborough and the Mecklenburg district of North Carolina rose in triumph, now that their wearisome uncertainty had its end. The Blue Ridge took up the voice and made it heard from one end to the other of the valley of Virginia. The Alleghanies, as they listened, opened their barriers that the "loud call" might pass through to the hardy riflemen on the Holston, the Watauga, and the French Broad. Ever renewing its strength, powerful enough even to create a commonwealth, it breathed its inspiring word to the first settlers of Kentucky; so that hunters who made their halt in the matchless valley of the Elkhorn, commemorated the nineteenth day of April by naming their encampment "LEXINGTON." From "History of the United States."

ALLEN'S CAPTURE OF TICONDEROGA.

GEORGE BANCROF

THE men were at once drawn up in three ranks, and as the first beams of morning broke upon the mountain peaks, Allen addressed them: "Friends and fellow-soldiers: We must this morning quit our pretensions to valor, or possess ourselves of this fortress; and inasmuch as it is a desperate attempt, I do not urge it on, contrary to will. You that will undertake voluntarily, poise your firelock."

At the word every firelock was poised. "Face to the right," cried Allen; and placing himself at the head of the centre file, Arnold keeping emulously at his side, he marched to the gate. It was shut, but the wicket was open. The sentry snapped a fuzee at him. The Americans rushed into the fort, darted upon the guards, and raising the Indian war whoop, such as had not been heard there since the days of Montcalm, formed on the parade in hollow square, to face each of the barracks. One of the sentries, after wounding an officer, and being slightly wounded himself, cried out for quarter, and showed the way to

the apartment of the commanding officer. "Come forth instantly, or I will sacrifice the whole garrison," cried Ethan Allen, as he reached the door. At this, Delaplace, the commander, came out undressed, with his breeches in his hand. "Deliver to me the fort instantly," said Allen. "By what authority?" asked Delaplace. "In the name of the great Jehovah, and the Continental Congress!" answered Allen Delaplace began to speak again, but was peremptorily interrupted, and at sight of Allen's drawn sword near his head, he gave up the garrison ordering his men to be paraded without arms.

Thus was Ticonderoga taken in the gray of the morning of the tenth of May. What cost the British nation eight millions sterling, a succession of campaigns and many lives, was won in ten minutes by a few undisciplined men, without the loss of life or limb.

From "History of the United States."

THE DOWNFALL OF NAPOLEON.

THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D.

IN 1792 there broke out by far the most alarming danger of universal dominion, which had ever threatened Europe. The most military people in Europe became engaged in a war for their very existence. Invasion on the frontiers, civil war and all imaginable horrors raging within, the ordinary relations of life went to wrack, and every Frenchman became a soldier. It was a multitude numerous as the host of Persia, but animated by the courage and skill and energy of the old Romans. One thing alone was wanting, that which Pyrrhus said the Romans wanted, to enable them to conquer the world, a general and a ruler like himself. There was wanted a master hand to restore and maintain peace at home, and to concentrate and direct the immense military resources of France against her foreign enemies. And such a one appeared in Napoleon. Pacifying La Vendée, receiving back the emigrants, restoring the church, remodelling the law, personally absolute, yet carefully preserving and maintaining all the great points which the nation had won at the revolution, Napoleon united in himself not only the power but the whole will of France, and that power and will were guided by a genius for war such as Europe had never seen since Cæsar. The effect was absolutely magical. In November, 1799, he was made First Consul; he found France humbled by defeats, his Italian conquests lost, his allies invaded, his own frontier threatened. He took the field in May, 1800, and in June the whole fortune of the war was changed, and Austria driven out of Lombardy by the victory of Marengo. Still the flood of the tide rose higher and higher, and every successive wave of its advance swept away a kingdom.

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Earthly state has never reached a prouder pinnacle, than when Napoleon in June, 1812, gathered his army at Dresden, that mighty host, unequalled in all time, of 450,000, not men merely, but effective soldiers, and there received the homage of subject kings. And now what was the principal adversary of this tremendous power? by whom was it checked, and resisted, and put down? By none, and by nothing, but the direct and manifest interposition of God. I know of no language so well fitted to describe that victorious advance to Moscow, and the utter humiliation of the retreat, as the language of the prophet with respect to the advance and subsequent destruction of the host of Sennacherib. "When they arose early in the morning, behold they were all dead corpses," applies almost literally to that memorable night of frost in which twenty thousand horses perished, and the strength of the French army was utterly broken. Human instruments no doubt were employed in the remainder of the work, nor would I deny to Germany and to Prussia the glories of that great year 1813, nor to England the honor of her victories in Spain, or of the crowning victory of Waterloo. But at the distance of thirty years, those who lived in the time of danger, and remember its magnitude, and now calmly review what there was in human strength to avert it, must acknowledge, I think, beyond all controversy, that the deliverance of Europe from the dominion of Napoleon was effected neither by Russia, nor by Germany, nor by England, but by the hand of God alone.

From "Lectures on Modern History."

ISABELLA OF SPAIN AND ELIZABETH OF ENGLAND.

PRESCOTT.

THE feature of bigotry, which has thrown a shade over Isabella's otherwise beautiful character, might lead to a disparagement of her intellectual power compared with that of the English queen. To esti mate this aright, we must contemplate the results of their respective reigns. Elizabeth found all the materials of prosperity at hand, and availed herself of them most ably to build up a solid fabric of national grandeur. Isabella created these materials. She saw the faculties of her people locked up in a death-like lethargy, and she breathed into them the breath of life for those great and heroic enterprises which terminated in such glorious consequences to the monarchy. It is when viewed from the depressed position of her early days, that the achievements of her reign seem scarcely less than miraculous. The masculine genius of the English queen stands out relieved beyond its natural dimensions by its separation from the softer qualities of her sex. While her rival's, like some vast, but symmetrical edifice, loses in

appearance somewhat of its actual grandeur from the perfect harmony of its proportions.

The circumstances of their deaths, which were somewhat similar, displayed the great dissimilarity of their characters. Both pined amidst their royal state, a prey to incurable despondency rather than any marked bodily distemper. In Elizabeth it sprung from wounded vanity, a sullen conviction that she had outlived the admiration on which she had so long fed,—and even the solace of friendship and the attachment of her subjects. Nor did she seek consolation, where alone it was to be found, in that sad hour. Isabella, on the other hand, sunk under a too acute sensibility to the sufferings of others. But, amidst the gloom which gathered around her, she looked with the eye of faith to the brighter prospects which unfolded of the future; and when she resigned her last breath, it was amidst the tears and universal lamentations of her people.

From "Ferdinand and Isabella.”

VENICE.

G. S. HILLARD.

IN external Venice there are but three things to be seen; the sea, the sky, and architecture. There are no gardens, no wide spaces over which the eye may range; no landscapes, properly so called. There are no slopes, no gradations, no blending of curved lines. What is not horizontal is perpendicular: where the plane of the sea ends, the plumb-line of the façade begins. It is only by climbing some tower or spire, and looking down, that we can see things massed and grouped together. The streets are such passages as would naturally be found in a city where there were no vehicles, and where every foot of earth is precious. They are like lateral shafts cut through a quarry of stone. In walking through them, the houses on either hand can be touched. The mode of life on the first floor is easily visible, and many agreeable domestic pictures may be observed by a not too fastidious eye. These streets, intersected by the smaller canals, are joined together by bridges of stone, and frequently expand into small courts, in the middle of which is generally found a well, with a parapet, or covering, of stone, often curiously carved. Here, at certain seasons of the day, the people of the neighborhood collect together to draw water, gossip, and make love; and here the manners and life which are peculiar to Venice may be studied to advantage. Goethe complains of the dirt which he found in the streets. Time and the Austrians have remedied that defect, and they are now quite clean. But nowhere else have I heard the human voice so loud. Whether this arises from the absence of all other sounds, or whether these high and narrow streets multiply and reverberate

every tone, I cannot say, but everybody seems to be putting forth the utmost capacity of his lungs. I recall a sturdy seller of vegetables in Shylock's Rialto-which is not the bridge so called, but a square near it-whose voice was like the voice of three, and who seemed to take as much pleasure in his explosive cries, as a boy in beating his first drum. From "Six Months in Italy."

SPRING.

HAWTHORNE.

THANK Providence for Spring! The earth-and man himself, by sympathy with his birth-place-would be far other than we find them, if life toiled wearily onward, without this periodical infusion of the primal spirit. Will the world ever be so decayed, that spring may not renew its greenness? Can man be so dismally age-stricken, that no faintest sunshine of his youth may revisit him once a year? It is impossible. The moss on our time-worn mansion brightens into beauty; the good old pastor, who once dwelt here, renewed his prime, regained his boyhood, in the genial breezes of his ninetieth spring. Alas for the worn and heavy soul, if, whether in youth or age, it have outlived its privilege of spring-time sprightliness! From such a soul the world must hope no reformation of its evil-no sympathy with the lofty faith and gallant struggles of those who contend in its behalf. Summer works in the present, and thinks not of the future; Autumn is a rich conservative; Winter has utterly lost its faith, and clings tremulously to the remembrance of what has been; but Spring, with its outgushing life, is the true type of the Movement!

From "Mosses from an Old Manse."

SCANDINAVIAN AMAZONS.

H. WHEATON.

SCANDINAVIAN women of illustrious birth sometimes became pirates and roved the seas. More frequently, however, they shared the toils and dangers of land-battles. These Amazons were called Skjöldmeyar, or virgins of the shield. The romantic Sagas are filled with the most striking traits of their heroic bearing. In the Völsungasaga we have the romantic tale of Alfhilda, daughter of Sigurdr, king of the Ostrogoths, who was chaste, brave, and fair. She was always veiled from the gaze of vulgar curiosity, and lived in a secluded bower, where she was guarded by two champions of prodigious strength and valor. Sigurdr had proclaimed that whoever aspired to his daughter's hand, must vanquish the two gigantic champions,-his own life to be the forfeit if he failed in the perilous enterprise. Alf, a young sea