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of a people, it is a life that lasts. When He touches the human harp with His own mighty, but tender hand, the sound remains in the strings for an age, and for ages.

Long after this war shall have closed, and its distresses passed away, its moral and intellectual compensations will remain. Every village will have its war-worn veterans to tell the story of Antietam, and Gettysburg, and Port Hudson, and many another field of daring achievement. Almost every farm-house in the land will have its sacred and inspiring memories of a father, son, or brother, who fought for his country, whom they, and their posterity after them, must henceforth love and take thought for as their very mother.

And every village graveyard will have its green mounds, that shall need no storied monuments to clothe them with a peculiar consecration, graves that hold the dust of heroes, graves that all men approach with reverent steps, graves out of whose solemn silence shall whisper inspiring voices, telling the young from generation to generation, how great is their country's worth and cost, and how beautiful and noble it was to die for it.

G. Putnam

CCLXXV.

WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY, FEBRUARY 22, 1864.

EANWHILE, the military signs of the hour are auspi

cious. Already we seem to see the dawn breaking in the horizon. In these latter months, we have heard it from all loyal tongues, and seen it in all loyal faces the confident hope that the day of triumph and peace is ready to break and shine on into noonday fulness.

The nation's banner, torn and soiled in battle, but with every star and stripe kept whole and radiant in its fair expanse, shall be brought back to the Capitol; and it may well be that he, he illustrious civic leader, who first flung it to the breeze in the nation's necessity, should be the man whose hands shall be privileged to furl it again in Peace, he, who sits worthily in the chair that once held Washington; he, so honest and pure in his great function, so wise and prudent, so faithful and firm; - God

bless and preserve Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States!

Therefore, if it be in our hearts this day, bending at the shrine of Washington, to renew our vow to preserve the country which he gave us for a sacred inheritance, we can do it with good hope. And verily we must vow, and keep the vow, cost what it may of time or wealth or blood, for his sake, and our own, and our children's, and humanity's sake, we must.

It is true, there is no perpetuity for national existence, or for individual influence or renown. Earthly empires must decay at last, and with them the vital presence, the living influence of their founders and fathers.

This magnificent polity—his, ours must, doubtless, one day, share the common fate, and when it goes down, the star of Washington must set with it, and his name pass, an unheeded word, into the dead annals of the obsolete ages. But O! not yetsay it, Americans! — not now!

The laurel chaplet must not be torn from his brow while it is still so fresh and green, and not yet fully wreathed. His statues must not be pushed from their pedestals to be crumbled into common earth, until the centuries have had time to hallow them with their venerable stains.

This fair palace of national freedom, of which he was the master-builder, must not crumble into ruin, till it shall have given a shelter and a home, security, glory, and peace, to the children's children, and the remote posterity of those for whom he reared it with the loving ardor of his great soul and the strength of his mighty arm.

It must not, need not, shall not be. To think of it for a moment is base recreancy and intolerable shame. Forbid it, thou God of nations, and our father's God! Forbid it, ye, my countrymen, as ye have the power - ay, ten times the power that is requisite. Only rise up again, and yet again, in your strength, and by all that is dear and sacred in the name and fame of your country's Father, swear that it shall not be, and then it cannot be. Give anew your heart and soul and faith, unswerving fidelity, whole-hearted loyalty - your voice, your strength, your wealth all that you are or possess, to this great cause, give these unitedly, fervently, with one shout, one blow, and in per

fect accord, and then it will not be. Then the mad enterprise of rebellion is crushed, and the fiend goes howling back, baffled, to his place. Then your birthright is rescued from the destroyer. And when this anniversary shall return, next year, or the next, yonder marble form in our Capitol shall exchange the look of majestic sorrow which seems to have gathered over it, for a smile of grateful joy; and those lips of stone shall move and grow fervid with words of exultant and benedictory congratulation.

Forth, then, friends and compatriots, to the work that shall save the storm-tossed ark of our liberties and our hopes.

G. Putnam

THERE

CCLXXVI.

OUR HEROIC DEAD.

HERE is a history in almost every home of Massachusetts, which will never be written; but the memory of kindred has it embalmed forever. The representatives of the pride and hope of uncounted households, departing, will return no more. The shaft of the archer, attracted by the shining mark, numbers them among his fallen. In the battles of Big Bethel, of Bull Run, of Ball's Bluff, of Roanoke Island, of Newbern, of Winchester, of Yorktown, of Williamsburg, of West Point, of Fair Oaks, the battles before Richmond from Mechanicsville to Malvern Hill, of James Island, of Baton Rouge, of Cedar Mountain, of Bull Run again, of Chantilly, of Washington in North Carolina, of South Mountain, of Antietam, of Fredericksburg, of Goldsborough,- through all the capricious fortunes of the war, the regiments of Massachusetts have borne her flag by the side of the banner of the Union. And, beyond the Atlantic slope, every battle-field has drunk the blood of her sons, nurtured among her hills and sands, from which in adventurous manhood they turned their footsteps to the West. Officers and enlisted men have vied with each other in deeds of valor. This flag, whose standard-bearer, shot down in battle, tossed it from his dying hand nerved by undying patriotism, has been caught by the comrade, who in his turn has closed his eyes for the last time upon its starry folds as another hero-martyr clasped the

splintered staff and rescued the symbol at once of country and of their blood-bought fame.

How can fleeting words of human praise gild the record of their glory? Our eyes suffused with tears, and blood retreating to the heart, stirred with unwonted thrill, speak with the eloquence of nature, uttered but unexpressed. From the din of the battle, they have passed to the peace of eternity. Farewell! warrior, citizen, patriot, lover, friend, whether in the humbler ranks or bearing the sword of official power, whether private, captain, surgeon, or chaplain, for all these in the heady fight have passed away,- Hail! and Farewell! Each hero must sleep serenely on the field where he fell in a cause "sacred to liberty and the rights of mankind."

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"Worn by no wasting, lingering pain,

No cold gradations of decay,

Death broke at once the vital chain,
And freed his soul the nearest way."

J. A. Andrew.

CCLXXVII.

HONOR TO OUR HEROES.

THE heart swells with unwonted emotion when we remember

our sons and brothers, whose constant valor has sustained on the field, during nearly three years of war, the cause of our country, of civilization, and liberty. Our volunteers have represented Massachusetts, during the year just ended, on almost every field and in every department of the army where our flag has been unfurled. At Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Port Hudson, and Fort Wagner, at Chickamauga, Knoxville, and Chattanooga, under Hooker, and Meade, and Banks, and Gillmore, and Rosecrans, Burnside, and Grant; in every scene of danger and of duty, along the Atlantic and the Gulf, on the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the Mississippi and the Rio Grande, -under Dupont and Dahlgren, and Foote, and Farragut and Porter, - the sons of Massachusetts have borne their part, and paid the debt of patriotism and valor. Ubiquitous as the stock they descend from, national in their opinions and universal in their sympathies, they have fought shoulder to shoulder with men of all sections and of every extraction. On the ocean, on

the rivers, on the land, on the heights where they thundered down from the clouds of Lookout Mountain the defiance of the skies, they have graven with their swords a record imperishable.

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The Muse herself demands the lapse of silent years to soften, by the influences of Time, her too keen and poignant realization of the scenes of War the pathos, the heroism, the fierce joy, the grief, of battle. But, during the ages to come, she will brood over their memory. Into the hearts of her consecrated priests will breathe the inspirations of lofty and undying Beauty, Sublimity and Truth, in all the glowing forms of speech, of literature and plastic art. By the homely traditions of the fireside by the head-stones in the church-yard consecrated to those whose forms repose far off in rude graves by the Rappahannock, or sleep beneath the sea, embalmed in the memories of succeeding generations of parents and children, the heroic dead will live on in immortal youth. By their names, their character, their service, their fate, their glory, they cannot fail:

"They never fail who die

In a great cause; the block may soak their gore;
Their heads may sodden in the sun, their limbs

Be strung to city gates and castle walls;

But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years
Elapse and others share as dark a doom,

They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts
Which overpower all others, and conduct

The world at last to FREEDOM."

The edict of Nantes maintaining the religious liberty of the Huguenots gave lustre to the fame of Henry the Great, whose name will gild the pages of philosophic history after mankind may have forgotten the martial prowess and the white plume of Navarre. THE GREAT PROCLAMATION OF LIBERTY will lift the Ruler who uttered it, our Nation and our Age, above al vulgar destiny.

The bell which rang out the Declaration of Independence, has found at last a voice articulate, to "Proclaim Liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof." It has been heard across oceans, and has modified the sentiments of cabinets and kings. The people of the Old World have heard it, and their

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