think they could pleasantly and profitably receive instruction of a public nature, and for this purpose spend an hour or two away from their homes, there is, happily, a plenty of instruction provided. Winter is the very season for public instruction, and it must be said to their honor, that our citizens have excellently improved it as such. Opportunities for gaining useful knowledge have been provided, and they have not been neglected by those for whom the provision has been made. The fountains of waters have been opened, and the thirsty have been refreshed. Though home instruction is to be placed at the head of all instruction, yet there are numbers who have not instruction at home, and numbers who have none at home to whom they may communicate instruction; and there are numbers who find it convenient and useful to mingle public and domestic instruction together, or alternate the one with the other. And when it is considered that the public lectures referred to are charged with little expense to the hearers; that they are delivered by the best and ablest men among us; that hundreds of youth resort to them, many of whom are in all probability saved from idleness, and some from vice and crime; and that to all who may attend them they afford a rational employment of time, we may look to the continuance of such means of knowledge and virtue as one of the most inestimable of benefits.

RUFUS CHOATE,

THE rapid and impetuous orator of New England, whose eloquence descends like the flood of a mountain river bearing along grand and minute objects in its course, was born at Ipswich, Essex County Massachusets, October 1, 1799. He was educated at Dartmouth, at the law school at Cambridge, and in the offices of Judge Cummings at Salem, and Attorney-General Wirt at Washington. He began the practice of the law at Danvers in 1824; passed some time at Salem, and removed to Boston in 1834, having previously occupied a seat in the state senate and in the house of representatives as a member of Congress. In 1842 he succeeded Daniel Webster in the United States Senate, resigning in 1845, and with these exceptions he has been exclusively engaged in his profession of the law.

His claims to literary notice rest upon his speeches in Congress and several addresses on public occasions. Of his speeches the most noted are those on the tariff, the Oregon question, and the annexation of Texas. Mr. Whipple, who has written an admirable analysis of their style,* in both its strength and weakness, celebrates their analogical power both of understanding and fancy, by which the most relevant and incongruous matters are alike made subservient to his argument; and gives some happy examples of the shrewd sense and humor which sometimes relieve his overburdened paragraphs. In one of these, in his speech on the Oregon question, he disposes of the old grudge against England:

No, sir, we are above all this. Let the Highland clansman, half-naked, half-civilized, half-blinded by the peat-smoke of his cavern, have his hereditary enemy and his hereditary enmity, and keep the keen, deep, and precious hatred, set on fire of hell, alive if he can; let the North American Indian have his, and hand it down from father to son, by Heaven knows what symbols of alligators, and rattlesnakes,

Article IIon. Rufus Choate. Whig Rev., Jan., 1947.

and war-clubs smeared with vermilion and entwined with scarlet; let such a country as Poland, cloven to the earth, the armed heel on the radiant forehead, her body dead, her soul incapable to die—let her remember the wrongs of days long past; let the lost and wandering tribes of Israel remeinber theirs-the manliness and the sympathy of the world may allow or pardon this to them: but shall America, young, free, and prosperous, just setting out on the highway of Heaven, "decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just begins to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and joy"-shall she be supposed to be polluting and corroding her noble and happy heart, by moping over old stories of stamp-act, and the tax, and the firing of the Leopard on the Chesapeake in time of peace? No, sir; no, sir; a thousand times, No! We are born to happier feelings. We look on England as we look on France. We look on them from our new world, not unrenowned, yet a new world still; and the blood mounts to our cheeks, our eyes swim, our voices are stifled with the consciousness of so much glory; their trophies will not let us sleep, but there is no hatred at all-no hatred; all for honor, nothing for hate. We have, we can have, no barbarian memory of wrongs, for which brave men have made the last expiation to the brave.

Another passage, illustrating his humorous turn, may be placed alongside of this-his famous description of the New England climate, introduced as an illustration in a speech on the tariff:

Take the New England climate in summer, you would think the world was coming to an end. Čertain recent heresies on that subject may have had a natural origin there. Cold to-day; hot to-morrow; mercury at 80° in the morning, with wind at southwest; and in three hours more a sea turn, wind at east, a thick fog from the very bottom of the ocean, and a fall of forty degrees of Fahrenheit; now so dry as to kill all the beans in New Hampshire; then floods carrying off the bridges of the Penobscot and Connecticut; snow in Portsmouth in July; and the next day a man and a yoke of oxen killed by lightning in Rhode Island. You would think the world was twenty times coming to an end. But I do not know how it is: we go along: the early and the latter rain falls, each in its season; and seedtime and harvest do not fail; the sixty days of hot corn weather are pretty sure to be measured out to us. The Indian summer, with its bland south-west and mitigated sunshine, brings all up; and on the twentyfifth of November, or thereabouts, being Thursday, three millions of grateful people, in meeting-houses, or around the family board, give thanks for a year of health, plenty, and happiness.

Of his mots, which pass current, one is this sentiment:-"What! banish the Bible from schools! Never, while there is a piece of Plymouth Rock left large enough to make a gun-flint of."*

The autograph of Mr. Choate is a celebrity. "It resembles," says Mr. Loring in his Boston Orators, "somewhat the map of Ohio, and looks like a piece of crayon sketching done in the dark with a three-pronged fork. His handwriting cannot be deciphered without the aid of a pair of compasses and a quadrant."

He possesses thought and feeling in the midst of his boldest extravagance. Mr. Loring relates an anecdote of his calm sensibility of the impression made upon him by a great idea in simple language, which is very impressive :—

We will relate an instance of the excitable powers of our orator. In an argument on a case of .mpeachment, before a legislative committee, Mr. Choate remarked that he never read, without a thrill of sublimity, the concluding article in the Bill of Rights, the language of which is borrowed directly from Harrington, who says he owes it to Livy,-that in the government of this commonwealth, the legislative department shall never exercise the executive and judicial powers, or either of them; the executive shall never exercise the legislative and judicial powers, or either of them; the judicial shall never exercise the legislative and executive powers, or either of them;-to the end that it may be a government of laws, and not of men;" thus providing that the three great departments shall be entirely independent of each other, and he remembered a story of a person who said that he could read Paradise Lost without affecting him at all, but that there was a passage at the end of Newton's Optics which made his flesh creep and his hair stand on end. I confess, said Mr. Choate, that I never read that article of the constitution without feeling the same,-" to the end that it may be a government of laws, and not of men."

April 21, 1841, Mr. Choate delivered a Eulogy in Boston on President Harrison, in which he characterized him as emphatically the Good President, in a noble passage in which his eloquence was tempered by the solemnity of the

occasion.

In New York, on the Anniversary of the Landing of the Pilgrims in 1843, at the Tabernacle, he delivered the address in which he described a body of the Puritans flying from the Marian persecution to Geneva, where they foun 1a commonwealth without a king, and a church without a bishop." The sentiment was complimented at the dinner which followed at the Astor House, where Dr. Wainwright (since bishop) was present and replied. In 1852 he was one of the speakers at the meeting of the Circuit Court of Boston upon the decease of Webster, and afterwards, in July of the next year, delivered an elaborate eulogy on his illustrious friend at their common college at Dartmouth. It has been said that the art of constructing a long sentence has been lost by the feeble wits of the men of modern days; if so, the secret has been regained by Mr. Choate. One of the sentences in the Dartmouth oration on Webster, a summary of the statesman's career, occupied nearly five pages of printed matter in octavo.

THE STATESMANSHIP OF DANIEL WEBSTER.

It was while Mr. Webster was ascending through the long gradations of the legal profession to its highest rank, that by a parallel series of display on a stage, and in parts totally distinct, by other studies, thoughts, and actions, he rose also to be at his death the first of American Statesmen. The last of the mighty rivals was dead before, and he stood alone. Give this aspect also of his greatness a passing glance. His public life began in May, 1813, in

the House of Representatives in Congress, to which this state had elected him. It ended when he diel. If you except the interval between his removal from New Hampshire and his election in Massachusetts, it was a public life of forty years. By what political morality, and by what enlarged patriotism, embracing the whole country, that life was guided, I shall consider hereafter. Let me now fix your attention rather on the inagnitude and variety and actual value of the service. Consider that from the day he went upon the Committee of Foreign Relations, in 1813, in time of war, and more and more, the longer he lived and the higher he rose, he was a man whose great talents and devotion to public duty placed and kept him in a position of associated or sole command; command in the political connexion to which he belonged, command in opposition, command in power; and appreciate the responsibilities which that implies, what care, what prudence, what mastery of the whole ground-exacting for the conduct of a party, as Gibbon says of Fox, abilities and civil discretion equal to the conduct of an empire. Consider the work he did in that life of forty years -the range of subjects investigated and discussed; composing the whole theory and practice of our organic and administrative politics, foreign and domestic: the vast body of instructive thought he procured and put in possession of the country; how much he achieved in Congress as well as at the bar; to fix the true interpretation, as well as to impress the transcendent value of the constitution itself, as much altogether as any jurist or statesman since its adoption; how much to establish in the general mind the great doctrine that the government of the United States is a government proper, established by the people of the States, not a compact between sovereign communities,-that within its limits it is supreme, and that whether it is within its limits or not, in any given exertion of itself, it is to be determined by the Supreme Court of the United States -the ultimate arbiter in the last resort-from which there is no appeal but to revolution; how much he did in the course of the discussions which grew out of the proposed mission to Panama, and, at a later day, out of the removal of the deposits, to place the executive department of the government on its true basis, and under its true limitations; to secure to that department all its just powers on the one hand, and on the other to vindicate to the legislative department, and especially to the senate, all that belonged to them; to arrest the tendencies which he thought at one time threatened to substitute the government of a single will, of a single person of great force of character and boundless popularity, and of a numerical majority of the people, told by the head, without intermediate institutions of any kind, judicial or senatorial, in place of the elaborate system of checks and balances, by which the constitution aimed at a government of laws, and not of men; how much, attracting less popular attention, but scarcely less important, to complete the great work which experience had shown to be left unfinished by the judiciary act of 1789, by providing for the punishment of all crimes against the United States; how much for securing a safe currency and a true financial system, not only by the promulgation of sound opinions, but by good specific measures adopted, or bad ones defeated; how much to develope the vast material resources of the country, and push forward the planting of the West-not troubled by any fear of exhausting old states-by a liberal policy of public lands, by vindicating the constitutional power of Congress to make or aid in making large classes of internal improvements, and by acting on that doctrine uniformly from 1813,

whenever a road was to be built, or a rápid suppressed, or a canal to be opened, or a breakwater or a lighthouse set up above or below the flow of the tide, if so far beyond the ability of a single state, or of so wide utility to commerce or labor as to rise to the rank of a work general in its influencesanother tie of union because another proof of the beneficence of union; how much to protect the vast mechanical and manufacturing interests of the country, a value of many hundreds of millions-after having been lured into existence against his counsels, against his science of political economy, by a policy of artificial encouragement-from being sacrificed, and the pursuits and plans of large regions and communities broken up, and the acquired skill of the country squandered by a sudden and capricious withdrawal of the promise of the government; how much for the right performance of the most delicate and difficult of all fasks, the ordering of the foreign affairs of a nation, free, sensitive, self-conscious, recognising, it is true, public law and a morality of the state, binding on the conscience of the state, yet aspiring to power, eminence, and command, its whole frame filled full and all on fire with American feeling, sympathetic with liberty everywhere-how much for the right ordering of the foreign affairs of such a state-aiming in all its policy, from his speech on the Greek question in 1823, to his letters to M. Hulsemann in 1850, to occupy the high, plain, yet dizzy ground which separates influence from intervention, to avow and promulgate warm good will to humanity, wherever striving to be free, to Inquire authentically into the history of its struggles, to take official and avowed pains to ascertain the moment when its success may be recognised, consistently, ever, with the great code that keeps the peace of the world, abstaining from everything which shall give any nation a right under the law of nations to utter one word of complaint, still less to retaliate by war-the sympathy, but also the neutrality, of Washington-how much to compose with honor a concurrence of difficulties with the first power in the world, which anything less than the highest degree of discretion, firmness, ability, and means of commanding respect and confidence at home and abroad would inevitably have conducted to the last calamity-a disputed boundary line of many hundred miles, from St. Croix to the Rocky Mountains, which divided an exasperated and impracticable border population, enlisted the pride and affected the interests and controlled the politics of particular states, as well as pressed on the peace and honor of the nation, which the most popular administrations of the era of the quietest and best public feelings, the times of Monroe and of Jackson, could not adjust; which had grown so complicated with other topics of excitement that one false step, right or left, would have been a step down a precipice--this line settled for ever-the claim of England to search our ships for the suppression of the slave-trade silenced for ever, and a new engagement entered into by treaty, binding the national faith to contribute a specific naval force for putting an end to the great erime of man-the long practice of England to enter an American ship and impress from its crew, terminated for ever; the deck henceforth guarded sacredly and completely by the flag-how much, by profound discernment, by eloquent speech, by devoted life to strengthen the ties of Union, and breathe the fine and strong spirit of nationality through all our numbers-how much most of all, last of all, after the war with Mexico, needless if his counsels had governed, had ended in so vast an acquisition of territory, in presenting to the two great antagonist sections of our country so vast an area to

enter on, so imperial a prize to contend for, and the accursed fraternal strife had begun-how much then, when rising to the measure of a true, and diffi cult, and rare greatness, remembering that he had a country to save as well as a local constituency to gratify, laying all the wealth, all the hopes, of a. illustrious life on the altar of a hazardous patriotism, he sought and won the more exceeding glory which now attends-which in the next age shall more conspicuously attend-his name who composes an agi. tated and saves a sinking land-recall this series of conduct and influences, study them carefully in their facts and results-the reading of years-and you attain to a true appreciation of this aspect of his greatness-his public character and life.

THE CONSOLATIONS OF LITERATURE.*

I come to add the final reason why the working man-by whom I mean the whole brotherhood of industry-should set on mental culture and that knowledge which is wisdom, a value so high-only not supreme-subordinate alone to the exercises and hopes of religion itself. And that is, that therein he shall so surely find rest from labor; succor under its burdens; forgetfulness of its cares; composure in its annoyances. It is not always that the busy day is followed by the peaceful night. It is not always that fatigue wins sleep. Often some vexation outside of the toil that has exhausted the frame; some loss in a bargain; some loss by an insolvency: some unforeseen rise or fall of prices; some triumph of a mean or fraudulent competitor; "the law's delay, the proud man's contumely, the insolence of office, or some one of the spurns that patient merit from the unworthy takes"-some self-reproach, perhaps-follow you within the door; chill the fireside; sow the pillow with thorns; and the dark care is lost in the last waking thought, and haunts the vivid dream. Happy, then, is he who has inid up in youth, and has held fast in all fortune, a genuine and passionate love of reading. True balm of hurt minds; of surer and more healthful charm than "poppy or mandragora, or all the drowsy syrups of the world"-by that single taste, by that single capacity, he may bound in a moment into the still regions of delightful studies, and be at rest. recalls the annoyance that pursues him; reflects that he has done all that might become a man to avoid or bear it; he indulges in one good long, human sigh, picks up the volume where the mark kept his place, and in about the same time that it takes the Mohammedan in the Spectator to put his head in the bucket of water and raise it out, he finds himself exploring the arrow-marked ruins of Nineveh with Layard or worshipping at the spring-head of the stupendous Missouri with Clarke and Lewis; or watching with Columbus for the sublime moment of the rising of the curtain from before the great mys tery of the sea; or looking reverentially on while Socrates the discourse of immortality ended-refuses the offer of escape, and takes in his hand the poison, to die in obedience to the unrighteous sentence of the law; or, perhaps, it is in the contemplation of some vast spectacle or phenomenon of Nature that he has found his quick peace-the renewed exploration of one of her great laws-or some glimpse opened by the pencil of St. Pierre, or Humboldt, or Chateanbriand, or Wilson, of the "blessedress and glory of her own deep, calm, and mighty existence."

He

* From an address delivered at Danvers, Mass., September 29, 1854, at the dedication of the institute for purposes of literature, munificently founded by Mr. George Peabody, the eminent London banker, in his native town in Massachusetts.

cated in New York by the Rev. Edmund D. Barry, a classical instructor who taught three generations of pupils, and who died rector of the Episcopal church of St. Matthew in Jersey City, at the age of seventy-six, in 1852. Pursuing his studies at Geneva in Western New York, Mr. Doane entered Union College, where he was graduated in 1818. He was then for a short time a student of law in the city of New York, in the office of Richard Harrison. In 1821 he was ordained deacon in the Episcopal Church by Bishop Hobart, and was for four years an assistant minister in Trinity church, New York. In 1824 he was appointed Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the new Washington, now Trinity, College, Hartford, Ct. In 1828 he went to Boston as assistant minister of Trinity church, of which he became rector in 1830. In 1829 he was married to Eliza Greene Perkins. On the 31st of October, 1832, he was consecrated Bishop of New Jersey, and the next year became rector of St. Mary's Church at Burlington.

At this beautiful town on the banks of the Delaware Bishop Doane, in addition to the more immediate duties of his diocese, has devoted himself to the cause of education, in connexion with two institutions known as St. Mary's Hall and Burlington College. The former, commenced in 1837, is a female seminary: the latter is an incorporated institution for the usual purposes of education, and was commenced in 1846.

In 1841 Bishop Doane visited England at the request of the Rev. Dr. Hook to preach the sermon at the consecration of the new parish church at Leeds, the first instance of an American bishop preaching in an English pulpit under the new act authorizing the admission of the transatlantic clergy.

The literary productions of Dr. Doane have been numerous, though mostly confined to sermons and charges, and church periodical literature. He has edited the Missionary, a monthly religious newspaper and journal of his diocese. In 1842 a volume of his sermons was published by the Rivingtons in London.

He is the author of numerous short poems chiefly of a lyrical or simple devotional character, which have appeared from time to time in the journals. In 1824 he published a volume of his early poetical writings entitled Songs by the Way, chiefly devotional; with Translations and Imitations. Several of them have been included in the collection of hymns in use in the Protestant Episcopal Church. The translations are of Latin hymns, from the Italian of Metastasio, and from the odes of Horace. Hs has also edited Keble's Christian Year, introducing additions from Croswell and others, and a Selection from the Sermons and Poetical Remains of the Rev. Benjamin Davis Winslow, his assistant in St. Mary's Church.

In all these, and in the prose writings of Bishop Doane, there is an elegant taste, evidence of good English scholarship, and spirited expression. His pulpit style is marked by brevity and energy; witnessing to an activity of mind which has characterized his numerous labors in his diocese and in the cause of education. The latter have not been without financial difficulties, through which Bishop Doane has struggled, with success to the cause in which he has been

engaged, though with no improvement to his pecuniary fortunes.

ON A VERY OLD WEDDING-RING.

The Device-Two hearts united.

The Motto-Dear love of mine, my heart is thine.

I like that ring-that ancient ring,
Of massive form, and virgin gold,
As firm, as free from base alloy,
As were the sterling hearts of old.
I like it--for it wafts me back,

Far, far along the stream of time,
To other men, and other days,
The men and days of deeds sublime.
But most I like it, as it tells

The tale of well-requited love;
How youthful fondness persevered,
And youthful faith disdained to rove-
How warmly he his suit preferred,

Though she, unpitying, long denied,
Till, softened and subdued, at last,
He won his fair and blooming bride.--
How, till the appointed day arrived,

They blamed the lazy-footed hours-
How then, the white-robed maiden train,
Strewed their glad way with freshest flowers
And how, before the holy man,

They stood, in all their youthful pride,
And spoke those words, and vowed those rows,
Which bind the husband to his bride:
All this it tells;-the plighted troth-
The gift of every earthly thing-
The hand in hand--the heart in heart-
For this I like that ancient ring.

I like its old and quaint device;

"Two blended hearts"-though time may wear them,

No mortal change, no mortal chance,
"Till death," shall e'er in sunder tear them.
Year after year, 'neath sun and storm,

Their hopes in heav'n, their trust in God,
In changeless, heartfelt, holy love,

These two the world's rough pathways trod. Age might impair their youthful fires, Their strength might fail, 'mid life's bleak weather, Still, hand in hand, they travelled on—

Kind souls! they slumber now together. I like its simple poesy too:

Mine own dear love, this heart is thine!"
Thine, when the dark storm howls along,

As when the cloudless sunbeams shine.
"This heart is thine, mine own dear love!"
Thine, and thine only, and for ever;
Thine, till the springs of life shall fail,
Thine, till the cords of life shall sever.
Remnant of days departed long,
Emblem of plighted troth unbroken,
Pledge of devoted faithfulness,

Of heartfelt, holy love, the token:
What varied feelings round it cling!-
For these I like that ancient ring.

EVENING.

"Let my prayer be as the evening sacrifice."
Softly now the light of day
Fades upon my sight away;
Free from care, from labor free,
LORD, I would commune with Thee!
THOU, whose all-pervading eye

Naught escapes, without, within,
Pardon each infirmity,

Open fault, and secret sin.